Chappell Roan says it took years to convince anyone to release her Grammy-nominated album

Chappell Roan was originally signed to Atlantic Records when she was just 17 years old, and yet “It just took a lot of years to convince people” to release her debut album, which just earned her a Grammy nomination. “I had no money. I had no numbers backing me up. I had an EP that did not do well by the music standards,” she said at a Grammy Museum event on Thursday (via The Hollywood Reporter). “I had toured, but no headlines. There was nothing backing me up.”

Roan connected with producer Dan Nigro in 2018, leading to the collaboration of her now famous track, “Pink Pony Club.” But when it was released in 2020, “It was the worst time for a club anthem to come out,” the singer pointed out. It wasn’t an immediate success, and Roan was dropped from Atlantic Records. Nigro switched his focus to Olivia Rodrigo’s debut album, and Roan worked several odd jobs both in her home state of Missouri and in Los Angeles to stay afloat. (“I used to go visit her when she worked at a doughnut shop before she got signed, before she put out any of her music,” Rodrigo said in a recent appearance on The Tonight Show. “I used to go and eat doughnuts with her and hang out.”)

Nigro and Roan eventually made it back into the studio. She released a string of singles and continued to tour, both with Rodrigo and in her own headlining show. In 2023, five years after they first started working together, she released her debut album The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess under Nigro’s Island Records imprint Amusement. This momentum (and the strength of her follow-up single “Good Luck Babe“) catapulted her to the stratosphere in 2024.

Going from working-class artist to megastar has been—quite infamously—a challenge for the 26-year-old, who emphasized again at the Grammy Museum event that “Chappell Roan” is a character, not her true self. “My life is completely different now. Everything is out of whack right now,” she reflected. “This type of year does something to people. Every big thing that happens in someone’s career happened in five months for me. It’s so crazy that things I never thought would happen happened times 10. I think that that just really rocked my system. I don’t know what a good mental health routine looks like for me right now.”