A Grammy Award for Best New Artist. Four top 10 hits since September 2024. Sold out concerts filled with fans in pink cowgirl hats everywhere you go.
At 27 years old, Chappell Roan has undoubtedly become one of the new queens of pop. But never let it be said that this powerful singer and songwriter rules without mercy.
As his band moved into the introduction of their song “Hot to Go!” On Friday night, Roan surveyed the tens of thousands spread across the lush grounds surrounding the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.
“We're going to teach you a dance,” he said, although few in the audience probably needed the lesson at this point in Roan's rise. For over a year, social media has been flooded with video clips of Roan fans doing a “YMCA”-type routine to the frenetic chorus of “Hot to Go!”
But wait a minute: “There's a father in the crowd who isn't doing it,” Roan reported with practiced disbelief. The band stopped playing. “There is a father who is not doing it,” she repeated, now less incredulous than disapproving.
“But it looks very, very nice, so I'm not going to do anything about it.”
Roan's show on Friday was the first of two in Pasadena to conclude a brief US tour.
(Brian Feinzimer/for The Times)
Friday's show, which Roan said was the biggest headline event she's ever performed, was the first of two at Brookside at the Rose Bowl to conclude a short series of U.S. concerts she calls Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things. The performances in New York, Kansas City and Pasadena can be seen as something of a victory lap after the slow success of her 2023 debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” which beyond “Hot to Go!” has produced many other hits, including “My Kink Is Karma” and the inescapable “Pink Pony Club.”
That last song, which has more than a billion streams on Spotify and YouTube, documents the sexual awakening of a young queer girl in a West Hollywood gay club; Roan's music sets thoughts of pleasure, pain and self-discovery against a gloriously theatrical mix of synth-pop, disco, glam rock and old-fashioned torch ballads.
Having spent last summer on the European festival circuit, he said Visions of Damsels represents “the opportunity to do something special before heading off to write the next album”; The mini-tour also keeps her in the conversation as nominations are decided for next year's Grammys, where she will likely compete for record and song of the year with “The Subway,” one of the few singles she has released since “Midwest Princess.”
However, as clearly as it showed off her natural star quality (the stage was designed like a Gothic castle with several staircases for Roan to dramatically descend), this was actually a demonstration of the intimate bond she has forged with her fans, many of whom attended the show dressed in one of the singer's signature looks: harlequin, majorette, prom queen, construction worker.
About an hour into his 90-minute set, Roan sat on a giant throne with a toy creature he called his tour mascot and recalled his move to Los Angeles nearly a decade ago from a small town in Missouri.
“I had a really tough time the first five years,” he said, adding that he had lived in Altadena when he first arrived. (In a bit of now-infamous Chappell Roan tradition, she was dropped by Atlantic Records in 2020 after the label decided “Pink Pony Club” wasn't a hit.) He talked about how much he loves this city — “F— ICE forever,” he said at one point to huge applause — but he lamented the “strange professionalism” he can feel when he's on stage in Los Angeles.
“I know there are a lot of people in the music and film industry here, and I don't want you to think about that,” he said. “Don't talk about it. Don't talk about work here. I just want you to feel like when you were a kid, when you were 13 and free.” She laughed.
“I'm going to shut up, I'm so stupid,” she said. Then he sang the loving “Coffee” as if someone were confessing their greatest fear.
Roan said that Friday's show was the biggest headline date he had ever performed at.
(Brian Feinzimer/for The Times)
Although the castle set was impressively detailed, Roan's production was relatively low-key by modern pop standards; She had no dancers or special guests and she wore a single costume from which she removed pieces to end up with a kind of two-piece bikini with dragon skin.
But that's because at a Chappell Roan show, Chappell Roan is the show: a fearsomely talented purveyor of sentiment and attitude whose cheesy sense of humor only enhances the exquisite melancholy of her music.
Their singing was immaculate but passionate, bolstered by a killer band that remade songs like “Good Luck, Babe!” and “Red Wine Supernova” as 80s-style radical rock; Roan covered Heart’s “Barracuda” with enough imperiousness to rival Nancy Wilson’s iconic guitar riff.
“The Giver” was a brilliant country music fest, “Naked in Manhattan” a naughty electro-pop romp. For “Picture You,” which is about longing to know a lover’s secrets, Roan serenaded a blonde wig draped over a microphone stand, a bit of absurdist theater that he fully performed.
The heart of the concert was the impressive double of “Casual” in “The Subway”, Roan's greatest and most emotional ballads, in which his voice soared with what seemed total naturalness.
After that, the singer noticed that kind father shirking his duties in “Hot to Go!” Maybe the poor guy was too dazzled to participate.
