In September 2023, Chappell Roan opened the tour for her debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” in Sacramento at the Goldfield Trading Post, a venue that holds 600 people.
Last Friday night in Seattle, she held court before a festival crowd of 10,000 at the Capitol Hill Block Party. And lately, 10,000 is a small crowd for the rising pop star.
The narrow street where the event is held couldn’t contain all the fans who arrived in glittery pink cowboy hats — a homage to Roan’s song “Pink Pony Club,” about dancing at a gay bar — so those without tickets camped out at an adjacent gas station and sang along to synth-pop hits like “Good Luck, Babe!” and “Hot to Go!,” both of which have been climbing Billboard’s Hot 100 in the past six weeks.
The last few months have been transformative for Roan, 26, who released her first EP in 2017, was dropped by her label in 2020 and then began a fruitful collaboration with the songwriter and producer Daniel Nigro (Olivia Rodrigo, Sky Ferreira). Since she looked directly into the camera at the Coachella festival in April and declared, “I’m your favorite artist’s favorite artist,” she has seemingly been everywhere — on TikTok, YouTube, talk shows, NPR’s Tiny Desk.
She’s also been onstage, forcing her team to confront a problem (albeit an enviable one): How do you continue playing a tour that was booked before you became one of the year’s buzziest pop acts?
“Coachella was a paradigm shift,” Jackie Nalpant, one of Roan’s two booking agents, said in an interview. Clips from the livestream of her performances flooded social media. “It’s a zeitgeist moment,” she added. “You can’t manufacture it.”
Nalpant and Kiely Mosiman, Roan’s other agent, personally escorted festival bookers to the singer’s early club dates to show off their client. It worked, in part because Roan’s stage presence is big, and she has the live chops to match. After playing a 200-capacity Los Angeles club in May 2022, she opened for Rodrigo the next night at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, to 6,000 people. Afterward, her manager, Nick Bobetsky, recalled in an interview, “She’s like, ‘That feels natural to me.’”
After Coachella, she played to massive crowds at major festivals including Governors Ball in New York, where she took the stage dressed as the Statue of Liberty in green-gold body paint after emerging from a big red apple. “It was a complete transformation of the entire festival,” said Huston Powell, a promoter at C3 Presents, which booked the event. “It felt like Chappell Roan mania. It felt like everybody wanted to see her.”
As word of her theatrical live performances spread and Roan’s songs got bigger, demand started to outstrip supply on the road. “I used to say her fan base was not as wide, but it was very deep,” Mosiman said. “Like, if you listen to Chappell Roan, you’re a huge fan of Chappell Roan.” Now, her listenership is both. In May, she was scheduled to play the National, a 1,500-capacity venue in Richmond, Va. The show was moved to Brown’s Island, which sold out 6,530 tickets.
“We’ve basically had to upgrade as many markets as we could,” Bobetsky said. “There were some that we couldn’t — like Kalamazoo, Mich., we had to sit on. There just wasn’t another room to go into.”
Festival upgrades are trickier; events of that magnitude are plotted out nine to 12 months in advance, and promoters have to guess what’s going to hit big. At Bonnaroo in Tennessee in early June, Roan was moved to the second largest stage. The producers of two upcoming festivals — Lollapalooza in Chicago on Aug. 1, and Outside Lands in San Francisco on Aug. 11 — are well aware of the impending crush of sparkly fans coming their way.
Allen Scott, the president of concerts and festivals for Another Planet Entertainment, which produces Outside Lands, expects 75,000 concertgoers a day. While Roan was initially scheduled on the main stage, Scott said organizers pushed her slot there back a bit. (She’ll perform the same time Billie Eilish did in 2018.) The festival has a large L.G.B.T. audience, as does Roan. “So it’s going to be a huge moment at the festival,” he said. “I expect her to be playing in front of 50,000 people.”
Frank Krhounek, 48, who attended the Block Party in long, dangly bright-pink feather earrings, said part of Roan’s appeal is “she just speaks to us.” He added, “It’s about having fun and being fluid and, you know, kind of doing whatever you want and being whatever you want.”
Powell of C3 Presents, which also books Lollapalooza, saw the crowds gathered for Roan at Governors Ball and decided to switch her to a larger stage for the Chicago event. While the art of juggling artists’ time slots and egos is a delicate one, he found a solution: “In this case, we went to Kesha, who was on the main stage from 5 to 6, and we asked her to switch. She was gracious enough to do it,” Powell said. Kesha, it turned out, is a fan.
Safety is a concern when concertgoers are straining to see their new favorite artist: “We didn’t want a situation where it’s 5:45 and everybody’s trying to go see Chappell Roan,” Powell said. “That’s when the pushing starts.”
Daydream State, which organized the Capitol Hill Block Party, experienced this first hand, as the main stage area became so jam-packed that some members of the audience, unable to easily reach an exit, passed out or needed to be extracted by security. In a statement, the company said it had worked with the police and fire departments in anticipation of the large crowd: “We give immense credit to the security staff and attendees that helped create a safe and welcoming environment for fellow guests.”
Though Powell believes Roan could sell out two nights at the United Center in Chicago (“I think she’s worth 30,000 tickets in Chicago, hard tickets”), Roan’s team is holding off on arenas or stadiums, at least for now. She has been playing secondary and tertiary cities for a few years, building a die-hard fan base brick by brick, with singalong anthems that bring fans back.
“She’s really thoughtful about the experience for fans,” Bobetsky, her manager, said, “especially venue selection, parts of town, gender-neutral bathrooms, like really creating a safe space, making sure that we prep building security on, you know, that there’s a large queer young community coming to this.”
Moving to bigger venues also presents an omnipresent challenge — higher ticket prices. “You’d price a 6,000-cap room differently than an 1,800-cap room,” he said. Roan’s team has been trying to keep prices reasonable, around $50.
Holly Yuzer, 37, was at the Block Party with her friend Angie Despeaux, both decked out in black-and-pink cowgirl ensembles. “We were 10 when the Spice Girls happened,” Yuzer said. “We’ve been waiting for this moment. We’ve been training for this moment.”
Festivals have had to juggle lineups before — Lizzo exploded between Capitol Hill’s booking and festival dates in 2019. But Powell said the speed of Roan’s rise has been remarkable.
“When we announced the lineup in March, there wasn’t a lot of Chappell Roan hysteria,” he said. “All of a sudden, it just started to snowball with a velocity that we haven’t seen.”
There are a few other historical parallels; Mosiman mentioned Blink-182 in the early 2000s. “We had a promoter say, ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’” Nalpant said. “And I said, ‘I’m old, so I’m going to tell you it’s Madonna.’”
And perhaps there’s an even more obvious comparison: “In 2008, we booked an act for $0 to open up the smallest stage at noon,” Powell said. “Lady Gaga. She was the last name on the poster. In 2011, she was a stadium act and the first name on the poster as a headliner.”
