A few songs into her Webster Hall show in New York, rising pop star Chappell Roan removed her Hannah Montana wig. An iconic scene from the Disney Channel show played over the speakers, where Miley Stewart removes her blonde pop girl getup to reveal her true self to her best friend Lily. “I’m Hannah Montana,” she admits, the illusion shattered, the voice behind the curtain revealed. And underneath: the real girl, the person behind the persona.
Underneath this Hannah wig, however, was another persona: Chappell Roan, the stage moniker for 24-year-old Kayleigh Rose Amstutz from Willard, Missouri. Chappell is a star who refuses to be tamped down, curly red hair flying, raised on drag and generations of pop divas. Confident, bombastic, sensual, with the kind of energy to turn a room into a disco dance party where everyone can feel like the most fun, the most free version of themselves.
Chappell Roan is the outlet for Kayleigh’s fantasies, the fantasies of a queer girl who grew up in the kind of Christian conservatism that shapes a whole town. The kind that leaves a mark years later. At one point in our interview, she catches herself referring to the sexual language she uses in songs as “weird shit.” She straightens up from where she’d been slouching on the couch at Island Records in midtown Manhattan. “It’s not weird. It’s, like, fine.” So much of religious trauma around sex has to be unlearned slowly over time. “It's so ingrained. My music is the outlet for that. But as a person, as Kayleigh, I don't know when that's going to go away. I'm not the character of Chappell Roan in real life.”
Chappell has been working her way across the United States on a sold-out tour of themed concerts: In Houston, rhinestones and rainbows. Seattle was goth, grunge, and glitter. In Nashville, a campy slumber party. New York and Los Angeles earned the tag, “So You Wanna Be a POP STAR,” and Chappell and her band dressed accordingly as Hannah, Avril Lavigne, Lana Del Rey, and David Bowie. The nightly concepts may differ, but the underlying theme of these shows is the same: this is a place for queer joy, for feeling yourself, for the cathartic release of fear and anxiety in one shining dancefloor moment.
On a Monday evening in March, Chappell played to a crowd in Missouri; Kayleigh had never been around so many queer people in her hometown before. Growing up, gay boys were bullied at school, and no girls were out. There was no Gay-Straight Alliance, much less a pink pony club. The realization she might be queer came when she was in seventh grade, wondering why boys didn’t have crushes on her. She had the idle thought: “Maybe I like girls.” She thought about it more. “I was like, girls are so much prettier,” she says. “Girls are nicer. I like hanging out with girls more. That was in the back of my head for all of high school. I think I like girls. I didn't know how to deal with that part of myself except to make fun of it. Haha. It's so funny. It's a phase. Haha.”
Kayleigh’s experiences with sexuality in all its forms are still evolving. She’s still unpacking old things, the way we all do. Chappell is on stage singing about kink; Kayleigh is intentionally celibate right now. “This is the first time I've ever been single for real on purpose and not had a crush on literally anyone. This never happened in my life,” she says. “It's so freeing because I didn't realize how much that ruled my life.” It was changing the way she looked, the way she spoke. “Now that there's a weight lifted off, I feel free. I didn't realize how much I was putting myself through hell just to maybe find someone who would be attracted to me… you have to figure out how to be happy alone or what the f*ck are you going to do?”
It’s a duality that can become a disconnect when meeting fans sometimes. She gets understandably uncomfortable when fans are overly flirty, or try to hit on her. “It makes me feel really weird because I'm just not like that.” At the same time, she gets it. “What the f*ck could I expect? I don't know. I've been on live before on TikTok and talked about how I can't watch Euphoria. And they're like, ‘Okay, Miss Naked in Manhattan.’ I'm like, that makes sense that you said that. It's just like, it's just three-dimensional.”
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Kayleigh’s full queer awakening came when she moved to Los Angeles in 2018; she had been dating men and feeling lackluster about the vibes. “[Dating a boy is] just literally not fun,” she reflects now. “It's not fun. It's not hot. It's not interesting. It's boring.” Per the lore in the creation of her 2020 hit “Pink Pony Club,” she went to The Abbey. It was her first time in a gay club as a 21-year-old. “They have fog shooting out whenever the beat drops, and there's dancers swinging from the ceiling,” she says. Kayleigh imagined it as an oasis, and the anthem that now closes her live shows in a whir of confetti and euphoria was born.
Though “Pink Pony Club” is her biggest record to date, the song — produced by Olivia Rodrigo collaborator Dan Nigro — didn’t result in instant fame and money. That year, Kayleigh had run out of money in L.A., ended a four and half year relationship, and moved home with her parents, working the drive-through at Midwest chain Scooter's Coffee. She was in a period of hypomania with her Bipolar II. “It was just so bad,” she says. The same month she got out of the relationship, she was dropped from her label, Atlantic Records, which she had signed with at 17 years old.
It was the closest she came to leaving music altogether. “Everything was leading me to tell me that I need to stop,” she says. “Nothing's working. I have no idea where to go. I'm living at home. I was literally sleeping in a twin bed in my parents' office space. I was 22 and I was like, what is this anymore? I don't know.” She felt like she had one last shot to move back to L.A. and make it work, so she did. The rent was due. She took on gigs as a production assistant and a nanny, and got part-time work at a donut shop. By summer 2021, she could quit the donut shop — Sony had signed her.
“It was hard, but it made me not afraid to be there again because I know I was okay,” she says, thankful she had the backup option with her parents. “I made it while making $1,400 a month when my rent was a thousand dollars.”
When she was finally able to tour in 2022, she met people who had fallen in love with “Pink Pony Club” and her other 2020 singles, “Love Me Anyway” and “California.” Those songs had come out in one of the darkest periods of her life, but they had gotten other people through those early pandemic years. It was validating, a dream come true of the career she’d made up in her head as a teenager. (Meanwhile, her 12-year-old brother can often be found rolling around on his hoverboard singing “Pink Pony Club,” a song her parents love, too.)
As she prepares to release her debut full-length album later this year, Kayleigh is always thinking about the live show. “I love anthemic pop. I just go in to the studio every time like, how do we make the biggest, funnest song ever?” Two weeks before her 2023 tour started, she wrote an instant hit called “Hot to Go,” which she created with a cheerleading dance in mind, one that she guides the audience through each night. “I saw a Queen video where they're singing ‘Radio Ga Ga’ at [Wembley] stadium and the whole crowd was doing this thing. I was like, how do I make the crowd do that?”
When she released “Femininomenon,” about an online relationship gone sour, friends and fans told her it was “jarring.” (Kayleigh interjects herself: “Side note, I don't know why people feel the need to tell me this every night. Someone's like, I hated that song when you put it out. I’m like, fire.”) Experiencing “Femininomenon” live, however, is transcendent, iconic. She had the vision the whole time.
The forthcoming album isn’t exactly a concept album, but it has a full narrative arc. “It is the storyline of a girl who moved from a small conservative town to a city and had an awakening of this world she never knew existed,” Kayleigh says. “Which includes queerness, which includes heartbreak, which includes falling in love, which includes the city and clubs, and it's the world of Chappell Roan.” She likes the story in Ethel Cain’s 2022 record Preacher’s Daughter, this idea of a rise and fall.
On March 9 she released the new music video for the angsty slow-burn rock ballad “Casual,” which she describes as “Aquamarine, but like, gay.” It’s a culmination of the references that shape her visuals and live shows, heavily inspired by art films, cabaret, and drag performances. For each night on this tour, she recruited local drag queens in each city to open for her, a way to pay forward these influences on her work and celebrate local queer communities.
When Kayleigh wrote “Pink Pony Club,” when she planned these live shows, she didn’t know the significance they would take on in a country where trans rights are under attack, where public drag shows are being restricted. The same day the Tennessee General Assembly passed a bill that prohibits “adult-oriented performances that are harmful to minors” in public spaces and non-age restricted venues, she was performing with drag openers in Nashville to a crowd of many queer people.
“It was a very emotional show, it was heartbreaking,” she says passionately, tearing up. “To know that I was one of the last shows that would happen with all ages with drag performers [for now] is just… I am not scared, because the queer community is strong, we have each other’s backs, and we will overcome hate. We always do. I will continue doing drag. We will continue this, this is not stopping.” She’s been donating a portion of proceeds from her shows to For the Gworls, an organization that helps Black trans people with rent and gender-affirming healthcare; at the Nashville show, she partnered with The Oasis Center to help cover the cost of therapy for queer children.
To those who claim drag harms children, Kayleigh has an adamant rebuttal: “It’s not about kids, it’s about attacking trans people,” she says. “It’s a lot less about protecting children and a lot more about harassing trans people, or people who wanna dress how they wanna dress. It comes from a lot of fear and a lot of confusion and hatred.” If she had to do a call to action: “Let’s redistribute our fund to the trans community right now. Let’s make sure our trans community is okay on rent. Let’s have each other’s backs right now. Let’s be safe and watch out for each other. Give with your heart but also give with your wallet and your time.”
She thinks about her hometown show, all the queer people, more than she’d ever seen in that place. How far she’s come from the girl who would make fun of her own sexuality to survive. The persona she’s created, the world she’s building. The undeniable joy of the crowd under the disco ball, untainted by “whatever the f*ck the lawmakers are doing.” The pink pony club not just as an idea, but as a real, tangible place she can create for people, if only for a night. “You have to protect it,” she says. Queer joy, queer safety, queer love. “I have to protect it.”
