On TikTok, a fan of Chappell Roan’s shared a video of the singer performing “Pink Pony Club” in 2021 at a Los Angeles fundraiser. Roan is by herself, playing the keyboard in front of small audience and not as glammed up as she is nowadays on stage.
Roan’s rapidly growing fanbase has been stitching this video with their own footage of the 26-year-old playing the song three years later, this time either while opening for friend Olivia Rodrigo in arenas or for one of her own sold out headlining shows.
“I’m just really proud of everyone who stuck with it. I’m proud of myself for sticking with it,” she tells Rolling Stone, not long before her final show on the Guts World Tour. At the time the viral video was shot, Roan was working at a donut shop and had been dropped from her first recording contract. “I couldn’t tell how I was gonna make it work, but I did. So being on the Olivia tour feels natural and right. It doesn’t feel out of reach. I’m so grateful for everyone who stuck around.”
Now, Roan has released the first song of her “next chapter,” as she calls it. “Good Luck Babe” was written with Daniel Nigro and Justin Tranter and is “about wishing good luck to someone who is denying fate.” On the song, Roan is dating a girl who is trying to deny her own feelings for Roan, and likely for women altogether. “You can kiss a hundred boys in bars/Shoot another shot, try to stop the feelings,” she belts in falsetto on the chorus.
“I was just wanting to write a big anthemic pop song,” she says. “The song was a bitch to write.” The trio worked on the tracks for months before finally working on the raging bridge, a big Nineties pop moment from Roan that predicts the regret her negligent partner will face one day.
“I knew exactly what I wanted. I wrote it in three minutes,” she recalls. “I felt so much anger. I was so upset. It all came out and I didn’t add anything when I wrote it all done. It was a perfect storm.”
As for whether “Good Luck Babe” kicks off a new album cycle for Roan, she’s still not sure yet. She did know that she wanted to avoid making an expanded version of The Rise and Fall of the Midwest Princess, especially since she had been living with some of the songs on that album since 2020.
“I did not want to make a deluxe of the album. I only want one! I don’t want to deal with [two versions]. I was like ‘Let’s just move on. We’ll just put out a song that I love.’ That’s how I did it last time.”
Over the past few months, it seems like Roan and Midwest Princess are both just really getting started. Rodrigo’s tour has been one major part of that, with Roan playing the biggest venues of her career so far. “It’s different but not that different,” she says of the Guts Tour. “There’s a lot more younger girls than at my shows but the best audience ever is teenage girls.”
Roan’s own captivating style of live performance is what’s been getting her the most traction online lately. Her NPR Tiny Desk set, where she belted out a few of her best-known numbers in full midwestern pageant princess drag, was a major viral moment for Roan.
“I felt like a big girl pop star,” she says of the appearance. “I don’t read comments, so all I really know is that my mom is really excited. I read maybe three comments and one was ‘Why did she let a drag queen do her make-up?’ And I was like ‘Oh, they’re new here.’”
Though Roan is chipping away in the studio with Nigro whenever inspiration strikes, she still has a lot more touring coming up. A mix of headline shows and festival dates have packed her schedule through the summer, and she’s finding it hard to consume or think about more music outside of when she’s working enough as it is. (The most she’s been consuming these days, she says, is Japanese Electone player Sekitō Shigeo, Drag Race and whatever the YouTube algorithm recommends to her.) She hasn’t even had time yet to work on a video for “Good Luck Babe,” though she is considering filming one in June.
“I’m not forcing anything and don’t feel pressure from myself to get an album done as fast as possible,” she adds, just her debut album made its Billboard 200 debut six months after its release. “If we get to an album that is great.”
