Nobody’s having a summer quite like Chappell Roan.
Ever since Coachella 2024, it feels as if the entire world has memorized the “Hot to Go” choreography and all the words to “Pink Pony Club.” Roan was hardly obscure before that star-making moment (there’s a reason she booked Coachella in the first place), but the aftermath has been intense. Her April single “Good Luck, Babe!” was Roan’s first to break through the Billboard Top 100, and her September 2023 album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, recently hit the top 10 of Billboard’s album sales chart for the first time.
On June 12, Bonnaroo announced it would be moving her upcoming performance from a tent to a main outdoor stage to accommodate a larger crowd. After all, drone footage from her Boston Calling performance in late May looked a lot more like something you’d expect to see from a particularly exciting headliner.
The point is, Chappell Roan has a lot going on at the moment, and it’s starting to catch up with her. On June 12, the 26-year-old Missouri-born artist got real about her newfound fame with fans in Raleigh, North Carolina. “I just want to be honest with the crowd and I just feel a little off today because I think that my career has just kind of gone really fast, and it’s really hard to keep up,” she said through tears during her Midwest Princess Tour performance at the Red Hot Amphitheater. “And so I’m just being honest that I’m just having a hard time today.”
After raucous cheers from the crowd, she continued, “So I’m sorry that—I’m not trying to, like, give you like a lesser show. It’s just like, there’s a lot on my mind.”
Fans at the venue and on social media were quick to applaud Roan’s vulnerability. “It has to be overwhelming to become so popular so quickly. But she deserves the world,” one TikTok user commented on a fan-recorded video of the moment. Another wrote, “This is so real, it’s been a meteoric rise and must be so intense to experience.”
One fan who was in the crowd called the moment “bittersweet,” adding, “I wanted to give her a big hug, I feel for her so hard.” Another pointed out that the crowd was “dead quiet” as the artist spoke, noting, “That’s power.”
Despite feeling overwhelmed, Roan thanked the crowd for understanding, adding, “This is all I’ve ever wanted, it’s just heavy sometimes, so thank you.”
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