Chappell Roan: The Giver review – saddle up, there's a new sheriff in town
It's easy to forget that in the year that Chappell Roan became one of the world's biggest pop stars, she only released one single. Good Luck, Babe! came out in April 2024, precipitating the explosion of the US pop star as a live phenomenon who made pop hyper fun and queer again, while also remaining strikingly principled about how far she was willing to go for her art.
When streaming demands that pop stars pebbledash releases in order to stay buoyant on playlists, her disinclination to capitalise on Good Luck, Babe!'s success with more material is reflective of Roan's confidence in her way of doing things, whether persisting with a vision that her previous label rejected – and being totally vindicated for it – or using her recent Grammys win to call for labels to provide musicians with proper healthcare. The tactic has paid off: in the absence of new songs, Pink Pony Club – the song Atlantic dropped her over – reached UK No 1 last week, almost five years after its original release. Her debut album, 2023's The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, has been in the UK Top 10 since June, taking two separate weeks at No 1.
You wonder if releasing a new song almost risks disturbing that reign. Roan has been teasing two new tracks live for a while – lovelorn ballad Subway and The Giver, a gay-as-hell country song debuted when she performed on Saturday Night Live in November. Now officially released, the latter is a rowdy deviation from Roan's regular pure-pop melodrama, full of whoops and giddy fiddle solos reminiscent of the (Dixie) Chicks' massive 90s hits. Roan schemes, once more, about how she's gonna get the girl: not quite as delirious as Hot to Go! or Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl, but still riotous good fun.
A cynic might suggest that going country really is a risk-averse move: everyone from Beyoncé to Dumfries-born Calvin Harris has done it recently, nakedly lunging for a bite at Nashville's commercial dominance. (So dominant that the sound has even penetrated the historically country-averse UK.) But Roan grew up in Missouri surrounded by country music, and she took the Roan part of her stage name from her late grandfather's favourite western song, The Strawberry Roan. 'I can't call myself the midwest princess and not acknowledge country music straight up,' she said recently. Plus, she added: 'I just think a lesbian country song is really funny, so I wrote that.'
Roan felt encouraged to lean into her outre persona after witnessing a transformative drag show at a Hollywood gay bar, and she considers herself a drag act: no one is better placed to skewer and celebrate the high-camp inherent in country, which runs on equally hammed-up performances of gender and so-called authenticity. In the promotional imagery for the single, she's dressed in the attire of various working-class professions. 'I get the job done,' she sings in a chorus made for country-booted twirling, the job in hand being satisfying a woman better than 'no country boy quitter' ever could. In one satisfied wink, she punctures fantasies of masculine primacy, as well as skewering how political charlatans exploit blue-collar folksiness for personal gain. She offers up much a better fantasy: 'How I look is how I touch,' a fairly ecstatic notion to conjure with given Roan's usual wild, rococo costuming: no haphazard lick and a promise here.
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