Chappell Roan’s “Femininomenon” begins as a ballad. The lead track to Roan’s debut LP, 2023’s “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” opens with strings, a gentle melody, wounded lyrics. Then the song crashes down and disappears with Roan cheekily saying, “Um, can you play a song with a (expletive) beat?”
The beat drops. The pride of Willard, Missouri sings, “Hit it like rom-pom-pom-pom/Get it hot like Papa John/Make a bitch go on and on/It’s a femininomenon.” The song is Top 40 and arty, Gaga and “Leader of the Pack,” dark and bright, authentic and calculated from the cooing to club thump. It’s pop at its most expansive.
“Pop music is the most freeing sound I can think of,” Roan told the Herald ahead of her shows with Olivia Rodrigo at the TD Garden April 1 & 2. “It’s spiritual. The connection I have to pop, I don’t know, it feels like a best friend who is always down to go out and get crazy.”
On occasion, Roan has ignored this bestie. Atlantic Records signed the singer-songwriter when she was just a teenager and released a 2017 EP with a few stunning ballads on it. But the EP wasn’t her. Or it wasn’t her completely — “I’ve done tours where I’ve just sang a lot of sad songs and it wasn’t sustainable.”
Atlantic dropped her. She embraced pop, and camp, and her queerness. She embraced her whole self — “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” still has stunning torch songs, but it also booms with bangers, boogies, and weirdo jams. She signed to Island Records (after years of hustling like crazy to build a following).
“I do a lot of things that are campy,” she said. “A lot of people don’t know what camp means, they think it’s automatically garbage, which is fine, they’re allowed to think that. But the campy aspect of pop has to be there for me… Pop doesn’t have to be serious. Jesus, it’s not an emergency room. It’s a song.”
Again, some of those slow tunes are serious. And some of the topics she writes on upbeat cuts are serious. Her breakout hit “Pink Pony Club” captures her attitude. Another Roan tune that begins as a ballad, this one explodes into a disco rock epic when the narrator escapes a repressive Ozark life through the freedom offered at an LA gay club. It’s not not serious, but it’s fun as hell.
“Pink Pony Club” reintroduced Roan to the music world in 2020 and set the template for so much of what makes her unique. But it took a while to catch fire — one magazine called the Song of the Summer in 2021, a full year after it came out. While the blaze around the song was starting, Roan and producer Dan Nigro, who also works closely with Rodridgo, spent years crafting the debut LP.
“I just took time, and I really believed in it, and good art rises,” she said. “It was the catalyst for a new era of my artistry. It really opened a lot of doors for me. It just took like three years to settle in.”
So, to sum up, yes, she still does brooding, piano-driven slow songs. But, dude, can she ever play a song with a (expletive) beat.
For tickets and tour dates, visit iamchappellroan.com
