Time feels evermore like a ludicrous concept in 2025, but it especially collapses when considering the career of Chappell Roan. The Missouri-born pop artist languished in up-and-coming mode for years – I first learned of her prismatic gay club anthem Pink Pony Club via a friend’s recommendation in 2020 – only to experience one of the swiftest ascents into the mainstream I’ve ever witnessed. Just 18 months ago, she was still playing 2,000-cap amphitheaters in mid-sized cities; by summer’s end, she drew the largest crowd (more than 100,000) that Chicago’s Lollapalooza festival has ever seen. Her rise was so vertiginous – viral Tiny Desk, Grammys best new artist, festival undercard to headliner, international chart takeover – that she feels lifetimes away from the artist I saw, stunned by her own zeitgeist earthquake at New York’s Governors Ball in June of last year.
Her return to New York at Forest Hills stadium this weekend, her first live shows in the US in a year, thus represents a homecoming of sorts, and a victory lap for the occasionally rocky journey into the stratosphere. Her eight “pop-up” shows this fall, billed as the Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things tour, span the geographical linchpins of her music: four shows in New York, site of sexual awakenings (Naked in Manhattan) and devastating breakups (new single The Subway, the night’s pre-eminent vehicle for Roan’s torrential belt); two in Kansas City, Missouri, a few hours from her hometown of Willard; and two in Los Angeles, where Roan forged the joyously queer and infectiously cheeky pop of her debut and still only studio album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.
It’s a testament to the potency of Roan’s maximalist sound, chock-full of sexually frank asides, baroque feelings and lavish camp, that a 93-minute set containing almost every song she’s recorded had the feeling of a greatest hits show. Roan was allegedly not “feeling 100” on Sunday night – “I have a migraine, so I can’t bang my head super hard, but that’s kinda my thing, so pretend I bang my head a lot tonight,” she said before nominally teaching the YMCA-style Hot To Go! dance to 13,000 devotees, ranging from young girls to queer twentysomethings to a middle-aged man in front of me texting his mom “I love her!!!!” mid-show. But whatever felt off to her did not translate in a show that felt as triumphant as it did laidback – an artist gone through the wringer, finally relaxing into superstardom. You know from the second she appears in a whimsically gothic castle, styled as both musketeer and princess and bemoaning a boring man’s “fugly jeans”, that Roan has finally hit her big-tent stride.
Chappell Roan is joined by Heart’s Nancy Wilson. Photograph: Ragan Henderson/Foundations Music
A chameleon explicitly indebted to drag – several queens opened Sunday’s show, as on most other dates – Roan, born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, played every other royal role in a loosely fairytale-themed show: damsel, knight, jester, queen of the castle high-kicking the point of out every line; supplicant to the guitar heroes of her all-female, 70s rock-styled band; heir to the lineage of bombastic, unapologetic female showmanship when introducing Heart’s Nancy Wilson for a deafening, and transcendent, rendition of Barracuda. Roan is easily one of the strongest vocalists of her pop generation, though she was occasionally overwhelmed by the joyous din – whether for illness or celebration, she often let the audience take over. I lost her voice entirely in the pop-rock deluge that is The Subway, her hearty belt subsumed in a cascade of devotion from fans to singer to subject.
That’s befitting a show that, while exuberant and celebratory, still managed to feel casual and intimate, more relaxed than the last time she performed on US soil. “I’m like really hard on myself, I’m really really hard on myself, for performing … I can’t do 100% today. I guess that’s OK, I’ll have fun,” she said while seated on a throne for Coffee, evincing a hard-earned and endearing looseness after white-knuckling into the stratosphere with the attendant stalkers and social media controversies. (Vocally, her “less than 100%” is another’s 10,000%.)
But for all the pop bombast – and I prefer Roan’s more-is-more, unleashed inner child performance style – it was on the slow-burn California, the night’s penultimate song, that she got me. A homesick ballad written and released in 2020, as her first foray into pop music faltered and before she returned to Missouri, the track is now at extreme odds with the supernova Roan has become. And yet, in a brief moment of stirring a cappella – “I stretched myself across four states / New lands, west coast, where my dreams lay” – her voice held all that once was: big dreams and disillusionment, conflicted yearning for a dying place, a distinctly midwestern sense of obligation and humility that does not go away. It was an emotional jolt in an otherwise effervescent show – a hymn and a reminder that she, and many others in the crowd, had come a long, long way.
