Chappell Roan

Kayleigh Rose Amstutz (born February 19, 1998), known professionally as Chappell Roan ( CHAP-əl ROHN), is an American singer and songwriter. She is known for her camp and drag queen-influenced style. Her debut EP, School Nights (2017), was released by Atlantic Records. After years without success, she was dropped from the label in 2020.

After signing to Island Records in 2023, Roan released her debut studio album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess (2023), garnering a cult following. The next year, Roan achieved global recognition with the single "Good Luck, Babe!", which reached number four on the US Billboard Hot 100 and became an international top-five single. It led to a resurgence of her debut album, which became a sleeper hit, peaking at number two on the US Billboard 200 and yielding the multi-platinum singles "Hot to Go!" and "Pink Pony Club". In 2025, Roan won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist and released the US top-five singles "The Giver" and "The Subway".

Early life

Roan was born as Kayleigh Rose Amstutz in Willard, Missouri, on February 19, 1998, the oldest of four children. Her mother, Kara (née Chappell), is a veterinarian; her father, Dwight Amstutz, is a now-retired Naval Reservist who also managed the family's veterinary practice in Springfield, Missouri, and earlier trained as a registered nurse, working in neurological and burn intensive care units. Her uncle is Darin Chappell, a Republican member of the Missouri House of Representatives.

Roan has described her hometown and her upbringing as conservative and Christian. During her childhood, she attended church three times a week and spent some summers at Christian camps. In a 2023 Variety interview, she said that she struggled with her upbringing and snuck out often: "I just wanted to feel like a good person, but I had this part of me that wanted to escape so bad."

Roan began playing the piano when she was 10 or 11 years old and began taking lessons at the age of 12. She performed publicly for the first time at age 13, singing "The Christmas Song" at her school's talent show, which she won. When she was about 14 years old, she auditioned for America's Got Talent without success. At 14 or 15 years old, she began uploading covers to YouTube, drawing attention from various record labels. She began songwriting as she entered her teen years, also uploading these to YouTube. Along with her online presence, she performed around her hometown and Springfield, Missouri, from 2012 to 2015. She graduated a year early from Willard High School. Roan described missing many childhood experiences in the "messy" beginning of her music career, including her prom and high school graduation.

Career

2014–2022: Career beginnings

In November 2014, Roan uploaded her original song "Die Young" to YouTube under the name Kayleigh Rose. She wrote the song while attending summer camp at Interlochen Center for the Arts, which she said "changed my trajectory forever". She subsequently traveled to New York for several musical showcases, leading to her signing with music label Atlantic Records in May 2015. In 2016, she adopted the stage name Chappell Roan in honor of her grandfather Dennis K. Chappell, who died of brain cancer that same year. The name is a combination of her grandfather's last name and a word taken from his favorite song, "The Strawberry Roan" by Curley Fletcher. She has also expressed dislike for her birth name.

On August 3, 2017, Roan released her first single, "Good Hurt". The song was reviewed favorably in Interview, which praised her "striking maturity and surprisingly deep vocals". On September 22, 2017, she released an extended play (EP) titled School Nights through Atlantic Records. Also in 2017, she supported Vance Joy on his Lay It On Me Tour. During this time, Roan lived with her parents in Springfield, Missouri, flying with them to Los Angeles or New York City when necessary. In 2018, Roan moved to Los Angeles. She has since stated this was the first time she felt able to live openly as a queer woman, and she felt "overwhelmed with complete love and acceptance", allowing her to begin "writing songs as the real [her]". From January to March 2018, she toured the United States with Declan McKenna.

Roan began working with songwriter and producer Dan Nigro in late 2018. In April 2020, Roan released "Pink Pony Club", which she has described as a "hard left turn" from School Nights. The single was produced by Nigro, and its music video was directed by Griffin Stoddard. Roan has cited a visit to The Abbey, a gay bar in West Hollywood, as the inspiration for the song. She said the song expressed her desire to become a go-go dancer in Los Angeles, stating, "truthfully, I'm not confident enough to do that, so I wrote a song about it."

Roan released two more singles, "Love Me Anyway" and "California", in May 2020. However, her releases were not profitable enough for Atlantic, who dropped Roan from the label in August 2020. Shortly after, Roan returned to Los Angeles in October 2020 to continue working on her music independently while working a series of odd jobs, including as a production assistant and in a donut shop. That December, USA Today ranked "Pink Pony Club" third on a list of the "10 best songs of 2020"; an accompanying description characterized it as dance-pop that "earnestly [celebrates] queer culture, acceptance and chasing your dreams". A year after its release, Vulture described "Pink Pony Club" as "the Song of Summer 2021", calling it a "synthy infectious bangarang". By August 2022, the song had been streamed more than 10 million times on Spotify. In early 2021, the success of Olivia Rodrigo's "Drivers License" shifted Nigro's focus from Roan as he worked on Sour with Rodrigo. Roan was unable to find a collaborator whom she liked as much. She briefly moved back to Missouri and worked at a drive-through while continuing to work on her music independently.

By March 2022, Roan had earned a publishing deal with Sony and reunited with Nigro to create and release "Naked in Manhattan", her first release as an independent artist. It was described by NPR as a "queer girl bop" with lyrics that are "tender, nostalgic" and "flirty yet uncertain". While working with Nigro in an adjacent studio to Olivia Rodrigo, Roan recorded backing vocals on three of Rodrigo's songs, including "Can't Catch Me Now". Roan was selected as one of the opening acts on Rodrigo's Sour Tour and for Fletcher on her Girl of My Dreams Tour.

In August 2022, she released a third independent single, "Femininomenon". Earmilk described the song as "so fun and loud but so intricate" and noted it was different from Roan's past releases. Roan stated that the song, which was produced by Nigro, was an attempt to "get away with being as ridiculous as I possibly can". An accompanying self-directed music video featured Roan riding a dirt bike.

2023–present: Breakthrough with The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess

In February 2023, Roan embarked on the Naked in North America Tour, her debut headlining tour. Each stop on the tour had a theme, with Roan suggesting outfits for fans while making her own camp costumes herself. Inspired by Orville Peck, Roan chose to book drag queens as openers for the tour. Concerts from the tour received positive reviews in The Harvard Crimson and Variety, with Jem Aswad describing it as a concert where "you recognize when a new-ish artist's career is about to blast off" similar to Lorde in 2013 and Billie Eilish in 2019.

In March 2023, Roan released "Casual", which she had begun working on with Nigro in 2020. The song, produced by Nigro, criticizes a romantic partner who refuses to commit and was inspired by Roan's brief relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic that ended with her partner saying they had met someone else. That same month, Roan signed with Amusement Records, an imprint of Island Records and owned by her producer, Nigro, after meeting with nine labels. Later that year, she released the singles "Kaleidoscope", "Red Wine Supernova" and "Hot to Go!".

On September 22, 2023, Roan released her debut full-length album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, and began her second headlining tour, the Midwest Princess Tour. The tour, ending in the spring of 2024, traveled across North America and had shows in London, Paris, Berlin, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and Amsterdam. Roan donated $1 per ticket sold to the nonprofit For the Gworls and opened each show with drag performers. The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess was included in various best-albums-of-2023 year-end lists, such as those by The A.V. Club, Time, Nylon, Dork, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Vogue. It was also listed as one of Pitchfork's 22 Best Pop Albums of 2023 and was named PopBuzz's Number One Album of 2023.