No. 52 - So you've discovered Chappell Roan edition
Breaking down the influences and musical forebears of the summer's breakout superstar
It might be a brat summer, but 2024 belongs to Chappell Roan.
Since dropping her debut album last fall (which I wrote about over at Exclaim!) Roan’s slowly built steam, first as an opener on Olivia Rodrigo’s Guts tour, and then on the festival circuit. While leaning into the increasingly anachronistic role as “your favourite artist’s favourite artist,” her stage outfits have helped garner viral attention. Riding that wave, she dropped the loosie single “Good Luck, Babe!” which has been climbing the Billboard Hot 100 since April. It’s currently at number eight after peaking at number six. Meanwhile, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess peaked at number two almost a year after it was released.
If Roan’s ascent has caught you by surprise you’re not alone. But the Midwest Princess has been flopping around the music industry for a while now. As I wrote in my review:
“Plucked from YouTube obscurity at 17 by Atlantic Records, she released the School Nights EP back in 2017 followed by a few singles. But the music wasn't clicking with audiences or Amstutz herself, who had moved on from its middle-of-the-road Lorde-and-Lana-biting sound. 2020's "Pink Pony Club," showed a new way forward, and was lauded by critics. But apparently the numbers weren't adding up business-wise — Amstutz's musical coming out ended with Atlantic dropping her.”
Yet she stuck with songwriter Dan Nigro, with whom she wrote “Pink Pony Club,” who signed her to his imprint and set to work on The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.
Big stars usually don’t have their breakthrough with a new sound. From Fall Out Boy blowing up pop-punk to Garth Brooks stadium-sizing country, they’re more likely to find success figuring out how to push existing ones to new heights. Roan is no different. Her sound is rooted in a mix of DIY pop, R&B, cabaret, and musical theatre, a strand of music that’s been percolating at various levels, in various combinations for over a decade. What stands out with Roan is how much of her own personality she’s managed to embed into this sound. It’s almost impossible to imagine the songs on her debut coming from anyone else.
Below is an incomplete look at artists who directly or indirectly helped shape the sound that Roan has successfully turned into a full-fledged cultural moment.
You can draw a direct line from Ron to Olivia Rodrigo and it goes straight through Nigro. The songwriter and producer helped shape both Roan’s debut and Rodrigo’s two massive LPs, Guts and Sour, and Rodrigo even took Roan on tour this spring. But there’s a big gap between the post-Avril pop-punk of Rodrigo’s more spritely hits and Roan’s theatre-kid pop. But it’s the high-drama of both artist’s ballads where the light between their aesthetics starts to disappear. I dig Rodrigo’s melodrama, but she lacks Roan’s knack for camp; check out awkward attempt at the “Hot to Go” dance when Rodrigo brought Roan on stage at a recent tour stop.
Probably the least-well-known artist on this list, in retrospect Sir Babygirl’s 2019 album Crush on Me feels like a proto DIY version of Roan’s blockbuster sound. Kelsie Hogue had spent time in a “bubblegum hardcore band” and as a standup comedian before turning to “outsider top 40.” She dropped Mixtape in 2021, but seems to have fallen off the musical map since. Thankfully, I’m not the only one who has recognized the Sir BabyGirl DNA currently packing festival grounds.
Grace Ives was the other artist who came to mind when I wrote my review of The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. Like Sir Babygirl, Ives makes DIY queer-pop, with a bit more of an indie rock edge, though big-time pop producer Justin Raisen produced her debut, Janky Star. There’s a lot of lived-in detail to her songs, which Pitchfork once called “hot mess anthems,” similar tothe way Roan details her own romantic encounters.
LA musician Miya Folick has been releasing indie-leaning pop-music for almost a decade, finding high drama in her personal life and setting those stories to incredibly catchy tunes. Sounds familiar! Roan is clearly the superior vocalist, but Folick contorts her voice to heighten the spectacle of her tales much like on Roan’s “My Kink is Karma” or “Naked in Manhattan.” Her two albums are idiosyncratic gems that in retrospect sound like rough roadmaps to Roan’s artistic breakthrough.
There was a brief moment back in 2012 when I was convinced that Alex Winston was on the cusp of a big mainstream breakthrough. I was wrong, but as Dan Ozzi recently noted in a new interview with Winston, her debut King Con was a bit ahead of its time. She was, to the best of my knowledge, the first artist to harness the early 2010s Brooklyn indie-rock sound and give it a pop reframe. You can hear a lot of the manic energy of a song like “Choice Notes” in Roan’s more playful moments, like the bridge of “Red Wine Supernova.”
Kate Nash emerged in the wake of Lily Allen who ushered in a (brief) wave of female artists providing a female riposte to laddish Arctic Monkeys clones. To be honest, I’ve never really listened to much of her work beyond “Foundations,” but the single, though the album it was part of went to number one on the UK charts. I don’t know that Roan has ever heard of Nash; after all Midwest Princess dropped more than a decade and a half after Made of Bricks. But the toy-instrument indie backing track, the frantic way words tumble out of her mouth, and the specificity of her imagery are reflected in a lot of Roan’s energy if not her aesthetics.
The OG theatre kid at the pop star table, Carly Rae Jepsen catches flack for her relative lack of cool compared to other main pop girls. But it was her goofy charm that, in part, helped her right size her career after the massive success of “Call Me Maybe.” If you’ve dug into her albums — or better yet, seen her live — you’ll know that Jepsen’s theatre-kid energy runs straight through the Mission, BC native’s music. Roan has embraced drag shows, burlesque, and cabaret than Jepsen, who’s impulses lean closer to down-the-middle musical theatre, but they share a spirit animal in Baz Luhrmann.
Kool Kids Self-promotion Club
Illuminati Hotties returned with their fourth album, Power, this month. In my review, I called it a record “about finding new strength in confronting those emotions, albeit over summery guitar tunes.”
Pop-R&B singer Kehlani returned with Crash at the end of June. I said that it “all hangs together like clothes on a clothesline, dirty laundry getting aired out in the warm sun. This is ‘Live, Laugh, Love’ Kehlani style.”
Since the review ran, Kehlani’s since dropped a surprise follow-up, While We Wait 2, a follow-up to her 2019 album of the same name.
Finally, I spoke with modern classical composer Alexandra Stréliski about always being the odd pianist out at the rock festival for Exclaim!’s annual summer festival guide. “I have this hat of the underdog,” she says. “Weird pianist. But it's super powerful to have that hat on, because it's unexpected.”
Kool Kids Music Recommendation Club
Future-pop weirdos Magdalena Bay have been bubbling under for a couple of years now, but their second album, Imaginal Disk, seems like it’s finally going to push them overground. Mica Tenenbaum and Matthew Lewin have made music together since meeting in high school in Miami. Citing Grimes, Charli XCX, and Caroline Polachek— the holy trifecta of modern outsider pop — as influences, they built their own musical world to play in; Imaginal Disk’s overarching narrative is about an alien and explores the nature of our existence, or something like that. But they don’t let the conceptual heft get in the way of the individual songs. You can dig into the alien love affair at the centre of “Death and Romance,” but taken as a piece it reads more a relationship where one person is giving more than the other.
Many years ago, I had the esteemed privilege of joining the long line of music journalists who have asked Death Cab For Cutie frontman Ben Gibbard if there would ever be another Postal Service record. Spoiler alert: he said no. So far he has proven himself right. Nevertheless, Gibbard’s recent tour playing Transatlanticism and Gave Up in full might have put him back in the emo-IDM state of mind because he’s just teamed up with chillwave OG Toro Y Moi (aka Chaz Bear) for “Hollywood.” A dig at the exclusive left-coast neighbourhood, the song’s themes are in keeping with Gibbard’s well-documented feelings about Los Angeles. The track comes from Bear’s latest, Hole Earth which came out last week.
Kentucky pop-R&B singer Tinashe’s “Nasty” was one of the contenders for “Song of the Summer” but don’t let that amorphous designation make you sleep on her seventh LP Quantum Baby. It’s short — just eight tracks in 22 minutes — but it’s all rippers. “No Broke Boys” is a personal favourite, where Tinashe draws a redline on employment in her dating life. I particularly love the sing-chant chorus: “No broke boys, no new friends…”
While I remain mostly hostile towards mainstream country music - a blindspot that I’m sure causes me to miss some great music - I occasionally stumble across artists I quite like. Case in point: Charley Crockett, a 38-year-old singer-songwriter originally from Dallas, TX. But like a character from one of his down-on-his-luck “Gulf and Western”-style tunes, has moved around the country, at times homeless, hitch-hiking, train-hopping, and generally living the “hobo lifestyle” as a recent Pitchfork review put it. He’s released nine albums since 2020, playing with different styles but always adhering to an old-school, outsider aesthetic that I find quite endearing. It reminds me of some of Daniel Romano’s early solo albums. His $10 Cowboy series of records — Chapter 2: Visions of Dallas just dropped — are as good a starting place as any to jump into his vast catalogue.
Ian Gormely is a freelance music journalist based in Toronto.
Hit up koolkidsmusicclub@gmail.com for questions, criticisms, and submissions.