A Master Class With Chappell Roan and Dan Nigro, Conducted by Brandi Carlile, Reveals Secrets of a Brilliant Debut at the Grammy Museum
With the “Midwest Princess” still being on the rise, and no end to that ascent being anywhere in sight, the story behind Chappell Roan’s star-making debut album got a deeper dive in downtown L.A. Thursday night. For 66 minutes, in front of about 200 fans, celebrity moderator Brandi Carlile put questions to Roan and her co-writer/producer, Dan Nigro, in effect turning the Grammy Museum into the Pink Pony Classroom.
Subjects raised with Roan and Nigro, just hours before they picked up a slew of Grammy nominations, included why the “Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” album took five years to come together, what flipped the switch to create the Chappell Roan persona the public knows and loves midway through that process, and what her second album might be like. Spoiler alert: the singer and producer were not giving any spoilers away about Album No. 2. (“We’re still in the very early stages of making a record, so it’s hard to say what’s different,” said Nigro.) But nothing about the first one was off-limits, including some of the relationship difficulties that ended up being explored in song, as the trio plumbed the depths of what already has come to feel like a classic pop record.
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“I’m not taking it lightly at all to note that there are so many fans of Chappell Roan that would love to get the chance to sit here and ask her anything that they want to know,” said now-veteran Grammy queen Carlile at the outset, establishing fangirl credentials. “And, predictably, if you know anything about me, I fell in love with Chappell’s music when my wife showed me a video of ‘Your Song’ by Elton John.” (The mutual friendships Carlile and Roan share with John came up later in the conversation.) “And Chappell’s collision with Dan Nigro is a gift to the whole world and to all of us in this room. … You two have changed pop music forever.”
Whether or not anyone might count that as premature, Roan does at the very least have the best debut album since, well, Olivia Rodrigo’s (also produced by Nigro, coincidentally or otherwise), with an extra fix of social impact that remains to be fully measured. And when Roan ended the night by mesmerizingly singing two ballads, “Picture You” and “Casual,” with acoustic guitar and violin accompaniment, whatever Recording Academy members were in attendance might’ve been tempted to give the singer all the Grammys, on the spot, including the ones she’s not up for.
Early in the conversation, Carlile asked about any opposites-attract aspects of the musical relationship between Missourian Roan and New Jerseyite Nigro, who was previously known as Olivia Rodrigo’s go-to guy. Said Roan to Nigro, “It is so cool to look back and be like, damn, I didn’t know the Cocteau Twins until you literally introduced them to me. And (now) that is one of the tentpoles in who I am.” Meanwhile, she brought some of the rootsier influences in. “With the country, we just wrote a song called ‘The Giver’ — it’s country and we played it on ‘SNL.’” (The audience was aware.) “It’ll come out, don’t worry. But that was so fun to write that and bring what I knew to the table, because I’m a country girl. So I got to be like, ‘No, no, no, let me show you some country songs.”
“I was given a lot of homework. Oh my God,” said Nigro.
Noted Carlile, “I’m sitting here looking at this track listing, and I’ve got little cowboy hats written next to the songs where I can sort of hear the country and it actually makes sense to me. I can hear it in the melody of ‘Red Wine Supernova.’ I can really hear it in the melody of ‘Picture You.’ I can hear it in all your yelps — your little Patsy Cline swoops that are a little Cranberries but also a little Patsy. And I can really hear it in my favorite song on the album, which is ‘Kaleidoscope.’ So country is not farfetched, even without the ‘SNL’ performance. So tell me: Will you be kicking the O out of country?”
After the audience laughter died down, Roan didn’t take that bait. “I feel like the O’s not going anywhere,” she said.
Much of the 66 minutes was devoted to Roan’s artist development, first as it was happening — or not — during her previous label deal, during which she only released a preliminary EP, and then as “Midwest Princess” began to take shape over a period of years. Some frustration was expressed over the inability of execs to “get” Roan from the outset, not least of all from Carlile. But for all that, the rising star was also candid in admitting that her persona wasn’t yet in place for anyone to fully grasp until they had found it through some eureka-style songwriting breakthroughs working on this album.
Said Nigro, “One of our biggest frustrations when we started making music was that we made ‘California’ and then we made ‘Pink Pony Club,’ and then Chappell wrote the majority of ‘Naked in Manhattan’ with an incredible writer named Skyler (Stonestreet), before they brought it to me and I did my thing on it. And the kind of pushback that we were getting in the very beginning was like, ‘Well, it’s either gotta be the ballads and the slow, organic stuff, or it has to be the pop thing. It can’t be both.’ And I would get so angry — I’d be like, ‘It literally has to be both! It can’t be anything else. If you don’t do both, you’re missing the essence of her.’”
But, Roan said, “I had no money (coming in). I had an EP that did not do well… I had toured, but I’d never done a headline show. I had no numbers backing me up. And also, ‘Pink Pony Club’ released in April 2020. It was the worst time for a club anthem to come out. … It took like a lot of writing mostly bad songs on my part to get to all these good songs… I feel like also we had time, because we didn’t have a label on my ass to get something out. It’s not like I was a cash cow that everyone was waiting for me to put new music out so they could make another buck.”
“Yeah,” said Carlile, “but how did (people in the industry) hear ‘California’ and ‘Pink Pony Club’ and not go, ‘Holy shit’?”
“I hadn’t built the world yet (around them),” Roan said. Even with “Pink Pony Club” out as a single years ago, she described herself as “an artist that has no other songs that sound like that, and doesn’t even have an aesthetic at that time that matched it at all, really. I did a complete 180. (Previously) I wore only black on stage and everything was serious. And the second that I took myself not seriously is when things started working. … The world only exists in context of the other songs, and I didn’t have the other songs yet. That’s why people didn’t understand why ‘Pink Pony Club’ and ‘California’ belonged in the same world.”
Roan spoke repeatedly to how she had been afraid first of all to write more light-hearted fare, and then, most of all, to put it into the world. “I walked away from ‘My Kink Is Karma.’ I literally remember walking out of the studio being like, ‘That is stupid.’”
And not just that one. “Genuinely,” she admitted, “I was stressing when ‘Hot to Go’ came out because I was like, ‘People are not going to take me seriously as a writer.’ Because that song — there’s not a song of depth. I think that it’s hard for me to let go of what other artists or writers” might have as a reaction to anything with an edge of silliness. “I think I’m better at it now. But it took practice. Like ‘Femininnomenon’ — I just remember kicking myself, being like, ‘That is such a stupid song.’” But, Roan noted, “I think that’s actually where where camp comes in, and that is where the magic of drag inserts herself. And because it works in tandem with not taking yourself seriously, writing songs that are about just literally having fun…”
“And, like, laughing at sex,” Carlile interjected. “Which is really great. Nobody does that, ever, in songs, and you do it throughout this record, so many times — I’m just cracking up and identifying with so much of it.”
Carlile also spoke in the broader sense of how Roan and Nigro “go into the studio and you create fantastical sounds, melody lines and moments in a song” that “don’t stare at their shoes. They’re meant to be played for other people and draw people into big joy-bomb moments.”
Said Roan, “I think that we write from the pyramid, and the top of the pyramid is the live show. So that is why I wanted to write my version of ‘YMCA’ [with ‘Hot to Go’], because I wanted something I could look out to the audience with and do with them. I mean, it makes me think of actually why I even really switched so hardcore into pop, because I watched the Queen movie with Rami Malek [“Bohemian Rhapsody”]… . That scene whenever they’re performing at Live Aid and they’re performing ‘Radio Gaga’” and doing the audience participation part — “that changed my career!” she exulted. “It pivoted, and I was like: I will do whatever it takes.”
“Did it make you feel so proud to be queer, too, and understand how much joy is in that?” Carlile asked.
“I wasn’t there yet,” Roan responded.
“You weren’t there yet? Wow. Maybe it was subconscious,” Carlile said.
“I think it was like, I just would do anything to feel that way in a crowd. I just thought to myself: How do I do something where I can look out and have everyone do the same thing… It’s so powerful to all do the same movement, and I don’t know why that is.”
Said Nigro, “The seed was planted when we made ‘Femininnomenon,’ with the bridge’s call and response — and then you started playing shows, and then you were seeing how people were responding to that. I think that was also a moment of ‘Oh, we can push it even further.’”
“I just wanted to write songs that would be amazing live, to interact with the audience,” Roan said. “And I genuinely think that’s why this project has caught fire this year, because it’s been my year of performing live, at every festival, (or) on so many tours. We’ve done 83 shows this year. It’s no joke — I think that’s why. These songs were never meant to only be hidden on an album somewhere. … Then you’re not just trying to write like a good song so that other songwriters think you are a good songwriter. It’s like, no, I’m writing ‘Hot to Go’ because I want every person in the crowd to be able to do something with me, and with each other.”
“Man, when you put it that way, the amount of time I have spent agonizing over the seriousness of the songs just feels a bit like wasted life,” Carlile quipped.
Another light-bulb part of this realization was recounted by Roan when she was asked whether she ever felt jealous watching other performers rock a crowd. She told of going out on tour opening for the U.K. singer Declan McKenna, on a 43-show road trip in a van in the dog days of January and Feburary. “The biggest cap room on the tour was 400,” she pointed out. But the venues weren’t too small to literally kick up some celebratory spirit. “For his final song, he would throw balloons out into the audience, and I would sit there, seething, because I was like: Why the fuck did I not write music that I can throw balloons out to people? At this time, I had no answers. I was mad at myself for not writing music (like that), because at that time, it was the first EP, which was really dark and just not who I am anymore. But that is exactly what you’re talking about —oh my God, I so badly wish that I could throw balloons out in the audience. Which is such a specific dream! And it was a domino effect.”
Said Carlile: “I think everyone thinks now that you, like, invented balloons.”
On a more serious note, Carlile admitted some envy of her own, albeit on the songwriting front. “Let me tell you what makes me feel unsettled and jealous and a little bit upset with you when I don’t really want to be,” Carlile said — “it is that I didn’t write the song ‘Kaleidoscope.’ When I hear that song, it’s upsetting to me, as one of those jealousy moments that I have. When those come along, I really pay attention. It helps me create something great. I think it’s really different in a way that it stands out in some unique way I haven’t figured out yet on this album.”
“Well,” said Nigro, “what you’re noticing is there’s actually the one song on the record that’s 100% written by Chappell.” But he noted that there were some sonic wrinkles that make “Kaleidoscope” stand out as richly colored. He rented out a “fancy” studio with a grand piano in it that, Roan noted, Adele was said to have recorded “Someone Like You” on. “Could not nail it. I couldn’t do it.” And so, added Nigro, “I literally bought a piano for the song, so I have two pianos in my house/studio now… I used to have one piano and Chappell was like, ‘This piano’s not right for this song.’ And so I went to the store and I literally played about 40 pianos because I was like, ‘What piano has the feel for “Kaleidoscope”?’” He took his MIDI track, added a Roan vocal with the microphone placed in the vicinity of 5-10 feet away, and then “I tried to play to her vocal as delicate as possible… We still didn’t like it, and then we forgot about it for three months.” Coming back to it after a break, they realized they’d nailed it.
Carlile was not done obsessing, for inspiration: “On my next album, I’m gonna have a song as good as ‘Kaleidoscope.’ You watch.”
Roan began to go deeper into what inspired her to write the track in the first place. “I think that’s the last song I’ve finished by myself. It took everything from me to write that. And I think that it’s specific to queer relationships, because it is about falling in love with a friend, which (happens) a lot of times in queer relationships where you are friends and maybe you’re not out yet, but then you realize that one of you is like ‘Oh, wait, I am gay.’ It’s so complicated. And that song is exactly about falling in love with your friend. And then I literally wrote it right after I told my friend that I was in love with her. And she was like, ‘Can you just give me a day to think about this?’”
“Was she surprised?” Carlile wondered.
“Yeah. But we were best friends. … We hung out every day. But she said, ‘Can you just give me a day?’ And in that day, that’s when I wrote that. Because I was like, ‘I’m gonna fucking kill myself. I need to fucking get something together or I’m going to explode.’ And I just wrote that — and then the next day she was like, ‘I do not feel the same.’”
“And when you fell in love with her, did you know you were gay prior to that? Or did it slowly happen over the course of your friendship…?”
“I think it confirmed it,” Roan said. “I think that’s why it was so heavy. Because I had been calling myself (that in the casual manner of) ‘Oh yes, I’m queer — whatever.’ But that was like, no, no, no — I was in love with her. And it was so amazing. Even though she didn’t feel the same back. I’m so grateful that that happened because, one, for the first time I got confirmation that ‘Yeah, I am not a fraud for saying I’m gay.’ And two, what an incredible person to fall in love with for the first time — your best friend, that you think is awesome and hilarious. It was just perfect, looking back.”
“A really human coming-out realization story,” said Carlile. “I think that’s absolutely gorgeous. Did you guys stay friends? Did it get weird?”
“We had to take a year off. … And in the song, it’s like: Whatever you decide, I will understand, and it’ll just take time to go back to being friends. And it fucking did. Like, it took a year and a half of not speaking. But I think that’s the beautiful relationships of women, that you can grow up, and that’s why lesbians are living with their exes, with their new girlfriend…”
Carlile lit up, having her own story to relate about this — noting that she has an ex who is “my best friend, and my kids call Aunt Kim.”
Even Roan seemed a little shocked by this: “Your ex-girlfriend is your kids’ Aunt Kim?”
“She literally lives next door to me because I helped her move into the house. And furthermore, when we go anywhere, she sits in the passenger seat next to me — I drive and my wife sits in the back seat and fucking laughs at how we fight. Everywhere we go, we just fight, fight, fight, fight.”
“Only lesbians…,” said Roan.
“It’s very lesbian. You know, you could take that ‘Kaleidoscope’ song, and you could put it in reverse and write about how women that fall in love with each other sometimes do slowly become friends again over time. It’s this really crazy cycle, you know? And sometimes that’s not what happens. But anyway, I just think it’s absolutely brilliant and so far beyond your years.”
The discussion turned to one of a couple of songs on the album that Nigro and Roan said they spent years trying to get right, “Red Wine Supernova.” The producer said that finding a way to “get the camp in it” was a process. “I think in our minds when we made it, the chorus was always a downtempo chorus — and we kept on going back to the song and being like, ‘It just gets boring.’ … Thank God she was really persistent: ‘This song is on the album; you just gotta figure it out, Dan.’ I was just like, fine. … And literally I think I did (the chorus arrangement) as a joke. We were in the studio thinking, what the fuck are we gonna do with this song?” Then, as a lark, he said, “we’ll just go double time on the drums and it’ll be yee-haw” — and we did it like that and (realized), ‘That’s actually kind of cool.’ … So we finally cracked the code to the chorus. And then when we wrote the bridge to ‘Red Wine,’ I was like, ‘We are lyrical geniuses. We are the greatest geniuses in the world.’”
“Well, it’s part of the shedding of taking yourself seriously,” Carlile said to Nigro. “Why are you so well versed in camp? I mean, that’s a great suit, but you don’t strike me as gay.”
“Every day I was like, to Chappell, ‘Can we just write “Bohemian Rhapsody” today?’ Chappell was like, ‘No, we’re not writing “Bohemian Rhapsody”.” Anyway, he explained, “I used to sit in my room and listen to Queen’s ‘Greatest Hits’ record every day.” Carlile concurred, singing a snippet of “Bicycle Race,” her sole vocal contribution of the night.
A near-miss for the final album title was revealed. Speaking of “Femininomenon,” Roan admitted, “I can’t even say ‘femininity’ anymore” — and she stumbled over the word to prove it. “I can only say ‘femininomenon.’” Though she resisted the mirth of the title at first, “It was another classic case of ‘Let go, Kayleigh. Just let go — just say ‘femininomenon.’ … I was gonna call the album ‘Femininomenon,’ but I was too annoyed that people couldn’t say it.”
One of the evening’s final submitted audience questions was whether Roan has a song “you once felt deeply connected to but don’t relate to as much now,” which led to a thoughtful reply Roan was able to connect to more than just one tune.
“Maybe ‘Casual,’ actually. I used to actually almost cry when I was singing it, at the beginning, just because I was so upset,” she said. “I was so angry about so much of what is within that song, but now as I perform it, it feels like a conversation with the audience. It’s almost to me like it’s me riling them up to see like how upset can we get together right now — not me baring my soul in the writing anymore. What it has become is he audience is actually singing, and I’m just reflecting it back to them. And I think that it’s the same for ‘My Kink Is Karma.’ That’s another one that is just so fun now,” where, she indicated, it used to carry too much baggage from its real-life origins.
“What makes that acidity solvent now?” Carlile asked.
“I think that I am an artist who proves myself through what I actually do, not what I say,” Roan said. “That’s why the live show means so much to me… It’s the most important thing because it is the realest part, to me. I think everything else is just online. Besides (being) in the studio, and this is real,” meaning the conversation.
“I don’t know what else is left to want for me in music, besides performing live… That is why we slave away in the studio for years and years and years, to bring something that an audience can bring to life, actually. I don’t think it’s me anymore. I actually think it’s everyone else that creates the rest of the world. Like, we have created a puxzle piece — a big puzzle piece — but what it has become is not because of us. It has become what it has become because it’s a story that wanted to be told, so she told herself. It wasn’t me, if that makes any sense.”
“Why are you 57 years old?” replied Carlile, as the crowd laughed.
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