During the second of four sold-out shows at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, the 27-year-old pop supernova Chappell Roan confided to the crowd of more than 13,000, “I didn’t ever think I’d get this big.”
This was a somewhat surprising confession from a star who, onstage and on record, vamps with an imperial confidence, as though the planet and perhaps the entire galaxy is hers for the taking.
But it was also a characteristically honest admission from a musician who has intentionally built intimacy and trust with her fan base, largely through speaking her mind. “When you get bigger,” Roan continued, people have expectations: “Oh, you’re at this level now, so you should be this way. I think I just like, settled into that reality, but I don’t have to believe it, I guess.” The responsive roar of the crowd — full of heavily made-up fans in pink cowboy hats, satin pageant sashes and all other winking Chappell Roan in-jokes — suggested she’d guessed right.
Roan’s four performances in Queens over the past week kicked off her Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things Tour, a brief, unconventional outing that demonstrates how she continues to deviate from the rising pop star’s expected playbook.
Riding the aerodynamic momentum of her breakout year, Roan easily could have leveled her show up to huge arenas. The Damsels tour is something smaller and more considered: eight “pop-up shows” in medium-sized stadium venues across just three cities (New York, Kansas City and outside of Los Angeles) that she has described as a “chance to do something special before going away to write the next album.”
The two shows I attended were electric: Not so much a preview of what comes next for Roan as a kind of post-credits victory lap to close out the triumphantly drawn-out album cycle of her 2023 sleeper hit “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” which chronicles a young, queer woman’s romantic self-discovery. Though the album revels in bubble gum synth-pop, live, Roan and her all-female band dialed the material’s latent rock ’n’ roll impulses up to 11.
Prowling the stage in cascading curls, new-wave makeup and a leopard-print two-piece, Roan often gave the impression of an ’80s video vixen who had defiantly snatched the mic from a cheesy hair-metal frontman and found her own thundering voice. (The set and frequently switched-up costumes, meanwhile, drew equal inspiration from harlequin romances and “Game of Thrones,” as an energetic Roan hopped around a moodily lit gothic castle.) The choice to cover Heart’s “Barracuda” — for one night with Heart’s Nancy Wilson herself on guitar — drove home a similar point: Chappell Roan is a rock star.
Many of Roan’s songs are constructed in a way that translates especially well live: They revel in gradually escalating tension and eruptions of catharsis. Consider the frenzied “Hot to Go,” in which an anticipatory pre-chorus builds to an explosive hook with an invitingly simple dance — an even more proudly gay “Y.M.C.A.” The fiery grudge-holder’s anthem “My Kink Is Karma” — one of the set’s highlights — sounded more commanding onstage, the pummeling percussion and howling guitars of Roan’s band giving it added edge. Roan barely had to belt a note of “Pink Pony Club,” the set’s obvious finale, because of how loudly the audience sang along. The song is an ode to the freedom one can feel onstage, and the performance itself was a reminder how crucial Roan’s prowess as a live act has been to her meteoric rise.
Though “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” failed to make much of an impression during the first six months of its release (it sold just 7,000 copies in its first week), in 2024 Roan gradually began to command attention on the strength of her live performances: opening for Olivia Rodrigo that February, wowing the many people who watched her NPR Tiny Desk Concert in March, and stealing the show during a widely streamed, star-making Coachella set in April. Her performance of “Pink Pony Club,” a slow-burning single first released in 2020, at this year’s Grammys had the air of a coronation, as an audience full of music industry VIPs — most of whom had likely not heard of her a year prior — stood up and sang along.
The set list at Forest Hills was an assertion of Roan’s continued confidence in the strength of her debut album — and that she is in no particular rush to craft its follow-up. It’s refreshing. In an age of endlessly repackaged deluxe editions padded with tepid bonus tracks, many artists would have hurried out an LP — or at least an extended version of her relatively concise (14-track) hit album. How easy (and lucrative!) it would have been to tack her one-off single “Good Luck, Babe!” and a few other B-sides onto, say, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess: The She Is Risen Edition.”
But when it comes to her release strategy, Roan has shown remarkable restraint and quality control. In the two years since “Midwest Princess,” she has put out just three tracks: “Good Luck, Babe!,” the frisky pop-country tune “The Giver” and the dreamily wistful breakup ballad “The Subway,” which sounds less like anything else on the radio right now than it does Alanis Morissette covering a Cocteau Twins song. “The Subway” was a live favorite (she debuted it during a commanding performance at last year’s Governors Ball in New York, while dressed as a taxi) that Roan was not even sure she wanted to record in the studio.
Some of this pacing is a survival strategy for an artist who has often vocally sought to protect her mental health. Forest Hills was a poignant place to kick off the Damsels tour: It was the site of the All Things Go Festival, which Roan abruptly backed out of last year for personal reasons. She received both admiration and backlash for the decision, but time and again she has established herself as an artist who is not interested in catering to fame’s supposed demands. Her latest moves seem to be less about unchecked, exponential growth as they are about learning how to scale up slowly and strategically.
The other newly minted pop queen, Sabrina Carpenter, has opted for an entirely different strategy that comes with its own risks and rewards. Last month, she released her latest collection of sonic petit fours, “Man’s Best Friend,” a saucy sequel to her Grammy-winning hit album “Short n’ Sweet,” which came out almost exactly a year prior. “Man’s Best Friend” has some inspired moments, and it’s spawned another irreverently catchy hit in “Manchild,” but on the whole it lacks the magic of its predecessor and pushes Carpenter’s persona dangerously close to the realm of self-parodic shtick.
On the flip side, “Man’s Best Friend” exists. Carpenter has already dispensed with the pressure of chasing a beloved album with what comes next, and is about to begin a fresh run of arena shows on her Short n’ Sweet Tour. The longer Roan takes, the higher the expectations will be.
Those concerns felt miles away at Forest Hills, though, where her two latest songs hit especially hard. “The Giver” had the punch of a rollicking call-and-response showstopper, and “The Subway” was a dazzling showcase for the emotive beauty of Roan’s voice. Another song that took on a sharper meaning onstage was the ballad “California,” the penultimate track on “Midwest Princess,” a wrenching outpouring from an artist still waiting for her big break.
“People always say, ‘If it hasn’t happened yet, then maybe you should go,’” Roan sang, the line taking on a new irony in a rapt, sold-out venue. She’d waited long enough for her moment, she seemed to be saying. Now, it was time for her to grow at her own pace.
Lindsay Zoladz is a pop music critic for The Times and writes the subscriber-only music newsletter The Amplifier.
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