Kayleigh Rose Amstutz (born February 19, 1998), known professionally as Chappell Roan ( CHAP-əl ROHN), is an American singer and songwriter. She is known for her camp and drag queen–influenced style.
Kayleigh Rose Amstutz (born February 19, 1998), known professionally as Chappell Roan ( CHAP-əl ROHN), is an American singer and songwriter. She is known for her camp and drag queen–influenced style.
After signing to Amusement Records—in partnership with Island Records—in 2023, Roan released her debut studio album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. The next year, Roan achieved global recognition with the single "Good Luck, Babe!", which reached number four on the US Billboard Hot 100 and became an international top-five single. The song's popularity led to a resurgence of her debut album, which became a sleeper hit and peaked at number two on the US Billboard 200. It yielded the multi-platinum single "Hot to Go!", while her 2020 single, "Pink Pony Club", reached number one on the UK singles chart. In 2025, Roan won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist and earned her second UK number-one single with "The Subway".
Kayleigh Rose Amstutz was born on February 19, 1998, in Willard, Missouri, the oldest of four children. Her mother, Kara (née Chappell), is a veterinarian; her father, Dwight Amstutz, is a retired Naval Reservist who also managed the family's veterinary practice in Springfield, and previously trained as a registered nurse, working in neurological and burn intensive care units. Her uncle is Darin Chappell, a Republican member of the Missouri House of Representatives.
Roan has described her hometown and upbringing as conservative and Christian. During her childhood, she attended church three times a week and spent several summers at Christian camps. In a 2023 Variety interview, she said she struggled with her upbringing and often snuck out, explaining: "I just wanted to feel like a good person, but I had this part of me that wanted to escape so bad."
Roan began playing piano when she was ten or eleven years old and started taking lessons at the age of twelve. She performed publicly for the first time at the age of thirteen, singing "The Christmas Song" at her school's talent show, which she won. When she was about fourteen, she auditioned for America's Got Talent without success. At fourteen or fifteen, she began uploading cover songs to YouTube, drawing attention from several record labels. She also began writing her own songs as she entered her teenage years, uploading those to YouTube as well. Alongside her online presence, she performed around her hometown and in Springfield from 2012 to 2015. She graduated a year early from Willard High School. Roan has said she missed many typical childhood experiences during the "messy" early years of her music career, including her prom and high school graduation.
Kayleigh Rose Amstutz (born February 19, 1998), known professionally as Chappell Roan ( CHAP-əl ROHN), is an American singer and songwriter. She is known for her camp and drag queen–influenced style.
Kayleigh Rose Amstutz (born February 19, 1998), known professionally as Chappell Roan ( CHAP-əl ROHN), is an American singer and songwriter. She is known for her camp and drag queen–influenced style.
After signing to Amusement Records—in partnership with Island Records—in 2023, Roan released her debut studio album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. The next year, Roan achieved global recognition with the single "Good Luck, Babe!", which reached number four on the US Billboard Hot 100 and became an international top-five single. The song's popularity led to a resurgence of her debut album, which became a sleeper hit and peaked at number two on the US Billboard 200. It yielded the multi-platinum single "Hot to Go!", while her 2020 single, "Pink Pony Club", reached number one on the UK singles chart. In 2025, Roan won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist and earned her second UK number-one single with "The Subway".
Kayleigh Rose Amstutz was born on February 19, 1998, in Willard, Missouri, the oldest of four children. Her mother, Kara (née Chappell), is a veterinarian; her father, Dwight Amstutz, is a retired Naval Reservist who also managed the family's veterinary practice in Springfield, and previously trained as a registered nurse, working in neurological and burn intensive care units. Her uncle is Darin Chappell, a Republican member of the Missouri House of Representatives.
Roan has described her hometown and upbringing as conservative and Christian. During her childhood, she attended church three times a week and spent several summers at Christian camps. In a 2023 Variety interview, she said she struggled with her upbringing and often snuck out, explaining: "I just wanted to feel like a good person, but I had this part of me that wanted to escape so bad."
Roan began playing piano when she was ten or eleven years old and started taking lessons at the age of twelve. She performed publicly for the first time at the age of thirteen, singing "The Christmas Song" at her school's talent show, which she won. When she was about fourteen, she auditioned for America's Got Talent without success. At fourteen or fifteen, she began uploading cover songs to YouTube, drawing attention from several record labels. She also began writing her own songs as she entered her teenage years, uploading those to YouTube as well. Alongside her online presence, she performed around her hometown and in Springfield from 2012 to 2015. She graduated a year early from Willard High School. Roan has said she missed many typical childhood experiences during the "messy" early years of her music career, including her prom and high school graduation.
In November 2014, Roan uploaded her original song "Die Young" to YouTube under the name Kayleigh Rose. She wrote the song while attending summer camp at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, which she said "changed my trajectory forever". She later traveled to New York for several musical showcases, leading to her signing with Atlantic Records in May 2015. In 2016, she adopted the stage name Chappell Roan in honor of her grandfather, Dennis K. Chappell, who died of brain cancer that same year. The name combines her grandfather's surname with a word taken from his favorite song, "The Strawberry Roan" by Curley Fletcher. She has also expressed dislike for her birth name.
On August 3, 2017, Roan released her first single, "Good Hurt". Interview reviewed the song favorably, praising her "striking maturity and surprisingly deep vocals". On September 22, 2017, she released her debut extended play (EP), School Nights, through Atlantic. Also in 2017, she supported Vance Joy on his Lay It On Me Tour. During this period, Roan lived with her parents in Springfield, flying with them to Los Angeles or New York City when needed. In 2018, she moved to Los Angeles. She has since said this was the first time she felt able to live openly as a queer woman, and that she felt "overwhelmed with complete love and acceptance", which allowed her to begin "writing songs as the real [her]". From January to March 2018, she toured the United States with Declan McKenna.
Roan began working with songwriter and producer Dan Nigro in late 2018. In April 2020, she released "Pink Pony Club", which she described as a "hard left turn" from School Nights. The single was produced by Nigro, and its music video was directed by Griffin Stoddard. Roan has cited a visit to The Abbey, a gay bar in West Hollywood, as the inspiration for the song. She said the track expressed her desire to become a go-go dancer in Los Angeles, stating, "truthfully, I'm not confident enough to do that, so I wrote a song about it."
Roan released two additional singles, "Love Me Anyway" and "California", in May 2020. However, her releases were not profitable enough for Atlantic, which dropped her from the label in August 2020. Shortly afterward, Roan returned to Los Angeles in October 2020 to continue working on her music independently while holding a series of odd jobs, including as a production assistant and at a donut shop. That December, USA Today ranked "Pink Pony Club" third on its list of the "10 best songs of 2020", describing it as dance-pop that "earnestly [celebrates] queer culture, acceptance and chasing your dreams". A year after its release, Vulture called "Pink Pony Club" the "Song of Summer 2021", describing it as a "synthy infectious bangarang". By August 2022, the song had been streamed more than 10 million times on Spotify. In early 2021, the success of Olivia Rodrigo's "Drivers License" shifted Nigro's focus away from Roan as he worked on Sour with Rodrigo. Roan was unable to find another collaborator she liked as much. She briefly moved back to Missouri and worked at a drive-through while continuing to write music independently.
By March 2022, Roan had signed a publishing deal with Sony and reunited with Nigro to create and release "Naked in Manhattan", her first release as an independent artist. NPR described the song as a "queer girl bop" with lyrics that are "tender, nostalgic" and "flirty yet uncertain". While working with Nigro in a studio adjacent to Olivia Rodrigo, Roan recorded backing vocals on three of Rodrigo's songs, including "Can't Catch Me Now". Roan was selected as an opening act on Rodrigo's Sour Tour and for Fletcher on her Girl of My Dreams Tour.
In August 2022, she released her third independent single, "Femininomenon". Earmilk described the track as "so fun and loud but so intricate" and noted that it differed from Roan's earlier releases. Roan said the song, produced by Nigro, was an attempt to "get away with being as ridiculous as I possibly can". The accompanying self‑directed music video features Roan riding a dirt bike.
In February 2023, Roan embarked on the Naked in North America Tour, her debut headlining tour. Each stop on the tour had a theme, with Roan suggesting outfits for fans while making her own camp costumes herself. Inspired by Orville Peck, Roan chose to book drag queens as openers for the tour. Concerts from the tour received positive reviews in The Harvard Crimson and Variety, with Jem Aswad describing it as a concert where "you recognize when a new-ish artist's career is about to blast off" similar to Lorde in 2013 and Billie Eilish in 2019.
In March 2023, Roan released the music video for "Casual". The song, produced by Nigro, criticizes a romantic partner who refuses to commit and was inspired by Roan's brief relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic that ended with her partner saying they had met someone else. That same month, Roan signed with Amusement Records, a label created by Nigro expressly for Roan. To provide major label support, Roan also co-signed with Island Records, after seeking out 9 different potential partners. Later that year, she released the singles "Kaleidoscope", "Red Wine Supernova" and "Hot to Go!".
On September 22, 2023, Roan released her debut full-length album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, and began her second headlining tour, the Midwest Princess Tour. The tour, ending in the spring of 2024, traveled across North America and had shows in London, Paris, Berlin, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and Amsterdam. Roan donated $1 per ticket sold to the nonprofit For the Gworls and opened each show with drag performers. The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess was included in various best-albums-of-2023 year-end lists, such as those by The A.V. Club, Time, Nylon, Dork, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Vogue. It was also listed as one of Pitchfork's 22 Best Pop Albums of 2023 and was named PopBuzz's Number One Album of 2023.
Roan opened for Olivia Rodrigo's Guts World Tour in the United States and Canada from February to April 2024. In Roan's first week of the tour, her streams rose by 32 percent. Also in February, Roan was a musical guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. In March, NPR Music released Roan's Tiny Desk Concert performance.
In April 2024, Roan released the single "Good Luck, Babe!". The song speaks about compulsory heterosexuality, describing a woman trying to deny her romantic feelings for Roan and women in general. Praised by Billboard as a "well-deserved breakthrough", the song received 7 million streams in its first week, was listed in the Spotify top ten, and debuted at number 77 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song was Roan's fastest to hit 100 million streams on the platform. By June, the song became her first top 20 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and by September, it reached a peak of number four, becoming her first top ten song on the chart. Although not included on her debut album, the single's success was a catalyst for propelling it to worldwide recognition. In June 2024, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess entered the top ten on the Billboard 200 for the first time, with more than 40,000 equivalent album units sold. By August, the album had reached number two.
Also in April, Roan performed at Coachella. At this time, Roan saw growing success on Spotify, with her monthly listeners increasing more than 500% from February to April. As reported by Billboard, by June 2024, Roan's weekly streams had grown by more than twenty-fold from the start of the year.
During her performance at the Governors Ball Music Festival, Roan debuted a previously unreleased song titled "The Subway", continuing to work towards a new album. At a concert in June, Roan spoke to the crowd, stating "I think my career is just kind of going really fast and it's really hard to keep up. I'm just being honest, I'm having a hard time today. [...] This is all I've ever wanted—it's just heavy sometimes." Following her performance at Lollapalooza in August, she drew the biggest daytime set ever seen at the festival.
In September, Roan performed at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards and won Best New Artist. She dedicated the trophy to queer and trans people. In October 2024, she reached number one for the first time on the Billboard Artist 100, coinciding with the biggest sales week ever of her debut album. Roan appeared as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live on November 2, 2024, with host John Mulaney, where she performed and teased a new country-tinged song titled "The Giver". Roan appeared in the Netflix special A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter on December 6, 2024. In January 2025, Roan was named the winner of the Sound of 2025 poll of musicians and music experts, organized annually by the BBC.
In February 2025 at the 67th Grammy Awards, Roan won her first Grammy Award for Best New Artist. In her acceptance speech, she called for record labels to provide artists with a living wage and healthcare. Roan's The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess was nominated for Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album, and "Good Luck, Babe!" was nominated for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Solo Performance. Following Roan's Grammy acceptance speech, the former music executive Jeff Rabhan wrote an essay via The Hollywood Reporter criticizing Roan's acceptance speech as naive and saying labels do not have responsibilities to artists outside paying advances and royalties. The piece went viral, and Roan responded by challenging Rabhan to match a $25,000 donation to artists experiencing financial difficulty.
On March 14, 2025, Roan released "The Giver" on all platforms. In June, she embarked on a new tour, titled the "Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things Tour". It was announced in July that the tour would be coming to New York City; Kansas City, Missouri; and Pasadena, California. On July 31, 2025, Roan released "The Subway", more than a year after it first premiered at her 2024 Governor's Ball set. The song was later nominated at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards in the categories Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance.
In February 2026, Roan announced she was terminating her representation by Wasserman, the talent agency led by Casey Wasserman, due to the businessman's affiliation with the Epstein files. On June 22, Roan was announced as part of the lineup for Olivia Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields music festival in Irvine, California on August 29.
Roan currently lives in Los Angeles, California. She is a lesbian. Though raised Christian, Roan no longer identifies with the church and has said that her current relationship with religion is "evolving". She was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder at age 22, an illness that contributed to her difficult childhood. She has described therapy and medication as important parts of maintaining her mental health. She has also been diagnosed with severe depression, a condition which she said worsened with her rise to fame.
Roan has said that the idea of her trademark "tacky pop star" aesthetic came to her while discussing her inner child with her therapist. While "Chappell Roan" began solely as a stage name, she has since referred to it as her drag persona and compared it to Hannah Montana, describing the character as "more open and confident [...] especially regarding sex" than her real self.
Source: wikipedia
In November 2014, Roan uploaded her original song "Die Young" to YouTube under the name Kayleigh Rose. She wrote the song while attending summer camp at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, which she said "changed my trajectory forever". She later traveled to New York for several musical showcases, leading to her signing with Atlantic Records in May 2015. In 2016, she adopted the stage name Chappell Roan in honor of her grandfather, Dennis K. Chappell, who died of brain cancer that same year. The name combines her grandfather's surname with a word taken from his favorite song, "The Strawberry Roan" by Curley Fletcher. She has also expressed dislike for her birth name.
On August 3, 2017, Roan released her first single, "Good Hurt". Interview reviewed the song favorably, praising her "striking maturity and surprisingly deep vocals". On September 22, 2017, she released her debut extended play (EP), School Nights, through Atlantic. Also in 2017, she supported Vance Joy on his Lay It On Me Tour. During this period, Roan lived with her parents in Springfield, flying with them to Los Angeles or New York City when needed. In 2018, she moved to Los Angeles. She has since said this was the first time she felt able to live openly as a queer woman, and that she felt "overwhelmed with complete love and acceptance", which allowed her to begin "writing songs as the real [her]". From January to March 2018, she toured the United States with Declan McKenna.
Roan began working with songwriter and producer Dan Nigro in late 2018. In April 2020, she released "Pink Pony Club", which she described as a "hard left turn" from School Nights. The single was produced by Nigro, and its music video was directed by Griffin Stoddard. Roan has cited a visit to The Abbey, a gay bar in West Hollywood, as the inspiration for the song. She said the track expressed her desire to become a go-go dancer in Los Angeles, stating, "truthfully, I'm not confident enough to do that, so I wrote a song about it."
Roan released two additional singles, "Love Me Anyway" and "California", in May 2020. However, her releases were not profitable enough for Atlantic, which dropped her from the label in August 2020. Shortly afterward, Roan returned to Los Angeles in October 2020 to continue working on her music independently while holding a series of odd jobs, including as a production assistant and at a donut shop. That December, USA Today ranked "Pink Pony Club" third on its list of the "10 best songs of 2020", describing it as dance-pop that "earnestly [celebrates] queer culture, acceptance and chasing your dreams". A year after its release, Vulture called "Pink Pony Club" the "Song of Summer 2021", describing it as a "synthy infectious bangarang". By August 2022, the song had been streamed more than 10 million times on Spotify. In early 2021, the success of Olivia Rodrigo's "Drivers License" shifted Nigro's focus away from Roan as he worked on Sour with Rodrigo. Roan was unable to find another collaborator she liked as much. She briefly moved back to Missouri and worked at a drive-through while continuing to write music independently.
By March 2022, Roan had signed a publishing deal with Sony and reunited with Nigro to create and release "Naked in Manhattan", her first release as an independent artist. NPR described the song as a "queer girl bop" with lyrics that are "tender, nostalgic" and "flirty yet uncertain". While working with Nigro in a studio adjacent to Olivia Rodrigo, Roan recorded backing vocals on three of Rodrigo's songs, including "Can't Catch Me Now". Roan was selected as an opening act on Rodrigo's Sour Tour and for Fletcher on her Girl of My Dreams Tour.
In August 2022, she released her third independent single, "Femininomenon". Earmilk described the track as "so fun and loud but so intricate" and noted that it differed from Roan's earlier releases. Roan said the song, produced by Nigro, was an attempt to "get away with being as ridiculous as I possibly can". The accompanying self‑directed music video features Roan riding a dirt bike.
In February 2023, Roan embarked on the Naked in North America Tour, her debut headlining tour. Each stop on the tour had a theme, with Roan suggesting outfits for fans while making her own camp costumes herself. Inspired by Orville Peck, Roan chose to book drag queens as openers for the tour. Concerts from the tour received positive reviews in The Harvard Crimson and Variety, with Jem Aswad describing it as a concert where "you recognize when a new-ish artist's career is about to blast off" similar to Lorde in 2013 and Billie Eilish in 2019.
In March 2023, Roan released the music video for "Casual". The song, produced by Nigro, criticizes a romantic partner who refuses to commit and was inspired by Roan's brief relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic that ended with her partner saying they had met someone else. That same month, Roan signed with Amusement Records, a label created by Nigro expressly for Roan. To provide major label support, Roan also co-signed with Island Records, after seeking out 9 different potential partners. Later that year, she released the singles "Kaleidoscope", "Red Wine Supernova" and "Hot to Go!".
On September 22, 2023, Roan released her debut full-length album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, and began her second headlining tour, the Midwest Princess Tour. The tour, ending in the spring of 2024, traveled across North America and had shows in London, Paris, Berlin, Melbourne, Brisbane, Sydney, and Amsterdam. Roan donated $1 per ticket sold to the nonprofit For the Gworls and opened each show with drag performers. The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess was included in various best-albums-of-2023 year-end lists, such as those by The A.V. Club, Time, Nylon, Dork, Rolling Stone, Billboard, and Vogue. It was also listed as one of Pitchfork's 22 Best Pop Albums of 2023 and was named PopBuzz's Number One Album of 2023.
Roan opened for Olivia Rodrigo's Guts World Tour in the United States and Canada from February to April 2024. In Roan's first week of the tour, her streams rose by 32 percent. Also in February, Roan was a musical guest on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. In March, NPR Music released Roan's Tiny Desk Concert performance.
In April 2024, Roan released the single "Good Luck, Babe!". The song speaks about compulsory heterosexuality, describing a woman trying to deny her romantic feelings for Roan and women in general. Praised by Billboard as a "well-deserved breakthrough", the song received 7 million streams in its first week, was listed in the Spotify top ten, and debuted at number 77 on the Billboard Hot 100. The song was Roan's fastest to hit 100 million streams on the platform. By June, the song became her first top 20 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, and by September, it reached a peak of number four, becoming her first top ten song on the chart. Although not included on her debut album, the single's success was a catalyst for propelling it to worldwide recognition. In June 2024, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess entered the top ten on the Billboard 200 for the first time, with more than 40,000 equivalent album units sold. By August, the album had reached number two.
Also in April, Roan performed at Coachella. At this time, Roan saw growing success on Spotify, with her monthly listeners increasing more than 500% from February to April. As reported by Billboard, by June 2024, Roan's weekly streams had grown by more than twenty-fold from the start of the year.
During her performance at the Governors Ball Music Festival, Roan debuted a previously unreleased song titled "The Subway", continuing to work towards a new album. At a concert in June, Roan spoke to the crowd, stating "I think my career is just kind of going really fast and it's really hard to keep up. I'm just being honest, I'm having a hard time today. [...] This is all I've ever wanted—it's just heavy sometimes." Following her performance at Lollapalooza in August, she drew the biggest daytime set ever seen at the festival.
In September, Roan performed at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards and won Best New Artist. She dedicated the trophy to queer and trans people. In October 2024, she reached number one for the first time on the Billboard Artist 100, coinciding with the biggest sales week ever of her debut album. Roan appeared as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live on November 2, 2024, with host John Mulaney, where she performed and teased a new country-tinged song titled "The Giver". Roan appeared in the Netflix special A Nonsense Christmas with Sabrina Carpenter on December 6, 2024. In January 2025, Roan was named the winner of the Sound of 2025 poll of musicians and music experts, organized annually by the BBC.
In February 2025 at the 67th Grammy Awards, Roan won her first Grammy Award for Best New Artist. In her acceptance speech, she called for record labels to provide artists with a living wage and healthcare. Roan's The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess was nominated for Album of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Album, and "Good Luck, Babe!" was nominated for Record of the Year, Song of the Year, and Best Pop Solo Performance. Following Roan's Grammy acceptance speech, the former music executive Jeff Rabhan wrote an essay via The Hollywood Reporter criticizing Roan's acceptance speech as naive and saying labels do not have responsibilities to artists outside paying advances and royalties. The piece went viral, and Roan responded by challenging Rabhan to match a $25,000 donation to artists experiencing financial difficulty.
On March 14, 2025, Roan released "The Giver" on all platforms. In June, she embarked on a new tour, titled the "Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things Tour". It was announced in July that the tour would be coming to New York City; Kansas City, Missouri; and Pasadena, California. On July 31, 2025, Roan released "The Subway", more than a year after it first premiered at her 2024 Governor's Ball set. The song was later nominated at the 68th Annual Grammy Awards in the categories Record of the Year and Best Pop Solo Performance.
In February 2026, Roan announced she was terminating her representation by Wasserman, the talent agency led by Casey Wasserman, due to the businessman's affiliation with the Epstein files. On June 22, Roan was announced as part of the lineup for Olivia Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields music festival in Irvine, California on August 29.
Roan currently lives in Los Angeles, California. She is a lesbian. Though raised Christian, Roan no longer identifies with the church and has said that her current relationship with religion is "evolving". She was diagnosed with bipolar II disorder at age 22, an illness that contributed to her difficult childhood. She has described therapy and medication as important parts of maintaining her mental health. She has also been diagnosed with severe depression, a condition which she said worsened with her rise to fame.
Roan has said that the idea of her trademark "tacky pop star" aesthetic came to her while discussing her inner child with her therapist. While "Chappell Roan" began solely as a stage name, she has since referred to it as her drag persona and compared it to Hannah Montana, describing the character as "more open and confident [...] especially regarding sex" than her real self.
Source: wikipedia