Time in 2025 becomes increasingly absurd, but especially so when considering Chapeleon Roan's career. The Missouri-born pop artist has been in "the future" mode for years - I first heard about her prismatic gay club anthem "Pink Pony Club" through a friend's recommendation in 2020 - only to experience one of the fastest rises to mainstream fame I've ever seen. Just 18 months ago, she was playing amphitheaters of 2,000 capacity in mid-sized cities; by the end of summer, she'd seen the biggest crowd (over 100,000) Lollapalooza festival in Chicago had ever seen. Her ascent was so meteoric - viral Tiny Desk, Grammys Best New Artist, festival undercard to headliner, international chart-topping - that she feels like a different artist from the one I saw, stunned by her zeitgeist earthquake at New York's Governors Ball last June.
Her return to New York at Forest Hills Stadium this weekend, her first live show in the US in a year, is a kind of homecoming and a bittersweet journey in the victory lap through the stratosphere. Her eight "pop-up" shows this fall, called the Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things tour, include her musical geography touchstones: four shows in New York, the site of her sexual awakening (the Naked in Manhattan party) and the devastating breakups (the new single "The Subway", the nighttime main thoroughfare for Roan's torrent); two in Kansas City, a few hours' drive from her hometown of Willard, Missouri; and two in Los Angeles, where Roan formed her gleefully gay and infectiously sly pop about her debut and still studio album, Midwest Princess, rise and fall.
It's a testament to the maximalist power of Roan's sound, full of sexually direct asides, baroque feelings, and opulent camp, that a 93-minute set containing almost every song she's recorded had the feel of a greatest hits show. Roan felt "100%" on Sunday night - "I have a migraine, so I can't headbang too hard, but that's my job, so imagine I'm headbanging really hard tonight" - to the 13,000 devoted, ranging from young girls to gay thirtysomethings to the middle-aged man in front of me texting his mom "I love her!!!!" halfway through the show. But what she felt poorly about didn't translate to a show that was both triumphant and relaxed - an artist finally settling into superstar status. You know she'll appear in an anachronistic Gothic castle dressed as a musketeer and a princess, complaining about a boring man's "fugly jeans", that Roan has finally found her big tent rhythm.
A chameleon uniquely tasked with drag - several queens opened the show on Sunday as on other dates - Roan, born Kaeleigh Roze Amstutz, played every other royal role with ease in a storybook-themed show: lady, knight, jester, castle queen standing on high heels and punctuating every line; a fan of her all-female, 70s rock-styled tribute band, her heroines; an heiress, unabashedly, showmanship of the line of the bombastic, unapologetically feminine showgirl as she introduces Barracuda's thunderous and transformative version of Heart's Nancy Wilson.
Roan is easily one of the most powerful vocalists of her pop generation, though she was sometimes overwhelmed by the joyful noise - for sickness or celebration, she often let the audience take over. I lost her voice entirely in the pop-rock deluge that is "The Subway", her hearty wailing subsuming the devotion of fans, singer, and subject.
It's fitting for a show that, while eccentric and celebratory, still manages to feel intimate and ordinary, more relaxed than her last US show. "I'm really hard on myself, I'm really hard on myself, for performing... I can't be 100% today. I think that's okay, I'm gonna have fun," she said, sitting on a throne for coffee, reflecting a deserved and endearing relaxation after a whirlwind ascent through the stratosphere with attendant tracking and social media scandals. (Vocally, her "less than 100%" is someone's 10,000%).
But for all the pop-bombast - and I prefer Roan's more is more, uninhibited inner child performance style - it was "California" on the show's last song that left me stunned. Written and released in 2020 as her first stab at pop music before returning to Missouri, the song now seems wildly out of sync with the supernova Roan has become. And yet, in the short a cappella moments - "I stretched myself across four states / to new lands, the West Coast where my dreams lie" - her voice captured everything she once was: big dreams and disappointment, conflicting longings for a dying place, a distinctly Midwestern sense of duty and humility that doesn't fade. It was an emotional shock in an otherwise glittering show - a hymn and reminder that she and many in the crowd came from great, great places.
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