Chappell Roan’s Debut Album is Queer Midwest

Kayleigh Amstutz’s musical persona—Chappell Roan—wraps the singer’s Midwest Missouri background and queer identity into one neat, semi-auto-biographical package. It’s a slightly conflicting narrative, but that makes it potent—so many LGBTQ+ people can relate to the dichotomy of growing up in a small, conservative, religious Midwest town. The intoxicating combination of queer love, self-acceptance, and Midwest roots is at the forefront of Roan’s debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.

As the album’s name suggests, Roan has had a tumultuous start in the music industry. As a teenager, she grew a fan base via YouTube before signing with Atlantic Records at 17—but the label dropped her in 2020 after the song “Pink Pony Club” didn’t hit the desired numbers. In 2022, she released a couple of singles as an independent artist before signing with Amusement Records, the label that released “Midwest Princess.” Roan has revealed that the album’s title is also a nod to her “princess” tramp stamp.

The entire album is as cheeky and alluring as its title. The track “Pink Pony Club” encapsulates a dream-like longing for big-city life over an addictive melody and thrumming beat. It’s the story of a small-town girl who finds her place at a West Hollywood go-go club and touches on the motherly anguish that accompanies this realization. “I heard there’s a special place where boys and girls can be queens every single day,” Roan sings. “I’m having wicked dreams of leaving Tennessee.”

Her music is an exciting blend of catchy pop tunes and out-of-the-box sound effects laced with seductive, honest, and sex-positive lyrics. Somehow, this combination creates a vibe that’s campy, glitzy, and almost… vintage.

It’s more than just Roan’s colorful eyeshadow that harkens back to the 80s and 90s. Everything about her debut album is drenched in the stylistic influence of the 1995 movie Showgirls, burlesque, and drag. The cover features Roan with long, bouncing red curls in a pageant-style updo and heavy, drag-inspired makeup. The singer even has local drag queens open each performance, and Roan enthusiastically encourages the crowd to tip, sending money back into the local LGBTQ+ community.

“I feel like it’s my duty to support the queer community, but it’s most important to do it locally because we know where those dollars are going, and you can literally see it right in front of me—a local drag queen feeling supported and having fun,” Roan says. “I think it’s most important to give back to the community that supports you the most. So it feels like the right thing to do and that it’s my purpose.”

Drag is even rooted deep within the singer’s musical persona. She views ‘Roan’ as a drag version of herself—a character that allows the shy Midwesterner to step into the go-go boots of a bold, colorful, and outspoken performer.

Several of the songs revel in queer love, but Roan explains that when she wrote the album she wasn’t dating a woman—The music lands somewhere between a melodramatic fairytale and reality. “I was not in a queer relationship,” Roan says. “A lot of it was just me daydreaming about it and hoping that it would be like “Naked in Manhattan,” or “Red Wine Supernova,” or even “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl.” These are all moments I wish would happen in a queer relationship.”

The song “Red Wine Supernova” is about as obviously queer as you can get—She even slips in a reference to sex toys with the line, “I heard you like magic, I’ve got a wand and a rabbit.” Watch out, Girl in Red. Roan might be coming for that sapphic throne.

Although Roan isn’t sure what the album means to her yet (she says she’ll probably figure it out by the end of the tour), she does know that her goal is to make music that would piss her younger self off.

“Within my Christian community, it was like, oh, modest is hottest. I had a purity ring; you go to church at least once a week. I went three days a week,” Roan says. “But as far as it inspires me now, the pendulum swung so far to the other side—It inspires me in the opposite direction, which is like, how do I piss that (high school) version of myself off… how do I piss off the community I was raised in?”

Roan plays at Denver’s Ogden Theatre, 935 East Colfax Avenue, at 7:30 p.m. on September 29. Tickets range from $47-$175.