On the latest episode of Switched On Pop, musicologist Nate Sloan and songwriter Charlie Harding, are finally giving the people what they want — an episode about Chappell Roan. Or rather, another episode, since the duo already interviewed the soon to be mega-star back in December 2023.
LISTEN NOW: Switched On Pop — Why Chappell Roan is the sound of 2024
According to Nate, what the listeners are looking for now, and intently urge the duo to deliver, is a full breakdown of Chappell Roan’s musical wizardry. After all, since they spoke in December, Chappell has catapulted into super stardom. With five songs on the Billboard Hot 100, iconic performances on the biggest stages, and an average of seventy million streams a week, Chappell Roan is having a moment, and after 7 years, has become an overnight success.
As Nate detailed, “Though she’s seen a sort of meteoric rise in the past six months,” Chappell Roan “is not an overnight success story. She’s been on the come up since she signed a deal with Atlantic Records when she was only 17.” She “then moved from small town Missouri to Los Angeles, then got dropped from her label. Went home to Missouri, reinvented herself, returned to LA, and took the world by storm with her slow burning album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.”
Even if they don’t know it, everyone from the mailman to your grandma is dancing along to her buoyant choreography and undeniable melodies on tracks like “Good Luck, Babe!,” “HOT TO GO!,” “Red Wine Supernova,” and “Pink Pony Club.” And Nate and Charlie are here to answer — Why?
What are the musical devices Chappell and producer Dan Nigro are using to craft her ubiquitous sound? And why are her empowered, defiant lyrics resonating with audiences at this particular moment in history, when queer and trans rights are under attack?
Starting with “Good Luck, Babe!,” written by Dan Nigro, Justin Tranter and Kayleigh Rose Amstutz aka Chappell Roan, which “is not only the most popular of Chappell’s songs right now," as Nate pointed out. "It’s also a great place to start to try and understand why she has captured our collective imagination.”
“Just starting with this chorus and this title,” Nate said, “it’s kind of ironic and detached, but then it’s also sung with so much passion and commitment,” before delving into dissecting the track from the top.
“Here’s reason number one why Chappell Roan is the sound of 2024, it’s the lyrics at the very start of ‘Good Luck, Babe!’" referring to literally just the first four lines of the song.
“It's fine, it's cool / You can say that we are nothing, but you know the truth / And guess I'm the fool / With her arms out like an angel through the car sunroof.”
"These are so hyper-specific… imagistic,” Nate added, pointing out Charlie had noted that earlier. “And yet they also roll of the tongue so effortlessly. They’re so perfectly matched to the melody, they sound like normal speech in a way.”
Nate continued, “So there’s this combination of these perfectly chiseled diamond like turns of phrase that get etched into your memory banks. And yet they sound so causal… And it’s also setting up a dynamic that we are going to hear throughout Chappell Roan’s discography. Which is this tension between her desire and the object of her affection kind of looking somewhere else. There’s a star-crossed quality to a lot of these songs.”
To listen to the entire deep dive, press play on the episode above.