Chappell Roan
photo: raph_ph · cc by 4.0 ↗Kayleigh Amstutz grew up singing in church and community theater in Willard, Missouri, before moving to Los Angeles as a teenager and reinventing herself as Chappell Roan, a drag-inspired alter ego built on thrift-store glamour, elaborate face paint, and unguarded queerness. A first major-label deal ended without a hit, and she spent the pandemic years developing the persona in near-obscurity while working a drive-through job, before breaking through in 2023-24 with the album 'The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.' Her rapid ascent to Grammy-winning, festival-headlining stardom reframed 2020s pop around camp spectacle, drag aesthetics, and openly queer storytelling.
Roan has repeatedly named Lady Gaga among her key influences and has praised Gaga's 'Joanne' era in interviews; she cites Gaga (alongside Nicki Minaj) as inspiration for an onstage attitude built on making an audience feel bold and confident, and describes her own Chappell Roan persona in explicitly drag-queen, performance-art terms much as Gaga built hers.
listen forCue Gaga's art-pop spectacle piece 'Applause' next to Roan's 'Femininomenon' — both open on theatrical, near-camp buildup and detonate into a maximalist chorus that turns the performer's own artifice and showmanship into the hook.
Roan has cited Kate Bush as a prominent influence on her work, part of a lineage of theatrical, high-drama art-pop singers she's drawn to for both vocal delivery and staged, story-driven performance.
listen forCompare Bush's soaring, near-operatic 'Running Up That Hill (A Deal with God)' to Roan's 'Casual' — both build from an intimate, narrative verse into a huge, unguarded vocal swell that turns private feeling into widescreen drama.
According to Wikipedia's account of her career, discovering artists like Katy Perry, Kesha, Britney Spears, and Pink during adolescence pushed Roan to start writing music and to begin constructing her own onstage persona — Perry's candy-colored, winking maximalism was an early entry point into pop stardom's possibilities for her.
listen forSet Perry's glossy, hook-stacked 'Teenage Dream' against Roan's 'Good Luck, Babe!' — both ride a bright, insistent synth pulse and an oversized, singalong chorus built for arena-sized adolescent longing, even as Roan bends the formula toward her own queer narrative.