Diaries of a Midwest Princess
My thoughts on queer-pop icon Chappell Roan's Midwest Princess Tour
This week’s rummaging was written by Annie Cappetta and edited by Isa Cueto.
Live music is one of those very rare kinds of experiences that can deliver so instantaneously and precisely what our souls need to flourish. It feels almost divine. I remembered this as I sobbed during the encore of a Monday-night concert in a packed bar in Roseville, California, not knowing or caring whether the tears flowed from joy or grief.
“The Midwest Princess Tour” from Chappell Roan stopped in Roseville, a town 30 minutes outside Sacramento, just three days after the release of Chappell’s first studio album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. I spent the whole day of the show listening to the album on repeat, partially so that I would know the new songs when she performed them, but mostly because it was just that good. (I continue to listen to this album on repeat.)
For those not familiar with Chappell, my most musically inclined friend described her genre as “vintage queer bitchpop.” It’s all camp and glitter and heartache and liberation — music that doesn’t just speak to me, but feels like me.
That’s not a coincidence. Chappell and I are both Midwest-born and raised, in our mid-twenties, queer and femme. We both left our hometowns (her small town in Missouri, me a small suburb of Chicago) and set sail toward undiscovered possibilities on the West Coast.
Before Rise and Fall, Chappell’s singles were part of the cobbled-together patchwork of coping mechanisms that got me through the last few months. I had to take a bar exam (again) to move to California, so I was studying for it while working full time. And I was dealing with a physically draining health issue, in addition to an array of minor and major setbacks along the way—including changing jobs and health insurance and not having access to my antidepressants for over two months.
So when I walked up to the venue for the Midwest Princess tour, I felt fragile and vulnerable, like a houseplant that had been shoved in a closet and forgotten for a few months.
Chappell stepped onstage to “Femininomenon” in a shiny lavender corset with matching knit arm warmers and flare-leg pants, which were all embellished with gaudy golden and purple tassels, pearls and embroidery. With this entrance, it felt like Chappell pulled me back into the sunlight, watered me with punchy, preppy beats and saturated me with celebration. Backed up by her all-women band of rockstars, Chappell delivered high-octane performances of several dance-pop hits on the album before transitioning into the melancholy piano ballad, “Kaleidoscope.”
When Chappell introduced the song, she shared that she wrote it right after a breakup, not knowing what to do, because when you fall in love with your best friend and things don’t work out, it levels you. As someone who, in her younger and more turbulent years, had a tendency to fall in love with her best friends, I broke.
If you really wanna leave
I'll never make you stay
Whatever you decide
I will understand
And it will all be fine
Just go back to being friends
And love is a kaleidoscope
How it works we'll never know
In my late teens and early twenties, I was always plagued with the question “why isn’t this enough,” as if there was some missing variable that could fix our equation and make it add up to love. Chappell’s lyrics reminded me that romantic love isn’t an equation but a kaleidoscope. We are not capable of understanding the turns and changes, nor are we meant to; it exists only for us to bask in and marvel at its beauty. With this verse, my inner 20-year-old released her pain, and it crashed into the rest of me. I cried for the first time that night.
One of Chappell’s gifts is commanding the energy in the room at will. Soon she was teaching us a group cheer, “YMCA” style — with arms overhead and shifting into the shape of each letter with the rhythm — to ”H-O-T-T-O-G-O, You can take me hot to go.” I cheered along with the rest of the audience, all of us jumping little grains of rice in a to-go box soaking up the warmth of our leader’s radiant heat lamp.
Before I knew it, the set had ended. We all knew what the encore would be. “Pink Pony Club” is Chappell’s breakout single, released in April 2020, when the only place I was dancing in was my kitchen. The single gained more traction when the world opened up again, and Vulture posed the question, “What If I Told You the Song of Summer 2021 Is This Stripper’s Delight From Summer 2020?”
Chappell wrote the song just as she was coming out of a dark time and beginning to feel joy again. Each of the verses in “Pink Pony Club” reflects her emergence, the lines metamorphosing and building into a crescendoing chorus that can only be sung belting with all your might. It is an essential liberation anthem for the girls, gays and theys who left their hometowns to step into their power. It became my hype song for moving away from Tennessee, and its increasing attacks on the LGBTQIA+ community — my community — and to California, where I would have greater freedom to be me.
If “Pink Pony Club” is a set-yourself-free pledge, “California” is its flipside. The penultimate track on the new album, “California” is about longing for home, aching for all we give up when we choose our desires and run after them.
I noticed before the encore that “California” was the only new song Chappell hadn’t played.
I couldn’t tell if I was relieved or disappointed. “California” hits me in a place that felt far too tender, far too susceptible to the power of Chappell’s live performance.
A month before the show, I moved to California, further away than I’d ever been from my suburban Chicago home and everything I’d known and built since. I did it for good reason: to take a job that would let me do work I’ve long dreamed of — civil-rights law. By the time Chappell came to town, I had been in survival mode for months and was just catching my breath, the newness and excitement of the move wearing off. I had not really processed what it meant to be out West, so far from my before-life and the places that shaped me.
“California” must be too much of a downer for her to play, I thought, especially at a show in California.
But then, Chappell came onstage for an encore and, in the face of hundreds of Californians begging for “Pink Pony Club,” she asked if she could play “California” for us first. Still, we gave an enthusiastic yes, and she started in with somber tones:
I stretched myself across four states
New lands, west coast, where my dreams lay
I trade amber clay roads for the
Sea foam and the endless sun rays
And then she built to a painful chorus:
Come get me out of California
No leaves are brown
I miss the seasons in Missouri
My dying town
Thought I'd be cool in California
I'd make you proud
To think I almost had it going
But I let you down
It’s such a defining experience of this time in our lives to achieve something we’d dreamed of and worked at for years, only to arrive at that place — whether it’s a job or a place to live or a relationship — and still feel completely lost and confused and out of place. No one told me it was going to feel like this. Or, if they did, it didn’t resonate. But with “California,” Chappell tells it all with such clarity. I let her words envelop me in a hug as the dam holding back swells from my softest place suddenly burst.
If I thought “Kaleidoscope” took me out, this destroyed me. Bawling.
I just kept thinking, chanting to myself, “This isn’t home,” but knowing I can never really go back to the “home” I knew, and where I used to fit before I grew. And I don’t quite have words for this place I live now, even though I’ve had ample opportunity to try — basically every conversation I’ve had with friends, family, coworkers and strangers who know I’m a recent transplant starts with, “How’s California? How are you liking Sacramento?”
I don’t know her well enough to describe her yet. So for now, Sacramento is just “a place” or “a city” to me. Not Oreos, but a cookie. But oh, the words I have, the songs I could write about home. I know that cookie’s recipe by heart. It sticks to my palms.
Before I could even think about wiping my tears, the opening trill of “Pink Pony Club” played — Chappell with her seamless mood shifts again — and a smile spread across my face. While the tears were still streaming, they too metamorphosed with her words:
I know you wanted me to stay
But I can't ignore the crazy visions of me in LA
And I heard that there's a special place
Where boys and girls can all be queens every single day
I'm having wicked dreams
Of leaving Tennessee
Oh, Santa Monica
I swear it's calling me
Won't make my mama proud
It's gonna cause a scene
She sees her baby girl
I know she's gonna scream
God, what have you done
You're a pink pony girl
And you dance at the club
Oh mama, I'm just having fun
On the stage in my heels
It's where I belong down at the
Pink Pony Club
This verse is all I needed to be reminded why I’m here. When I go back home to Chicago, the experience is defined by my big-family dynamics, and I feel constrained by who I was as a child, somehow sucked into smallness and the immature patterns I’ve since outgrown. When I lived in Tennessee, it often felt unsafe to present publicly as a queer person. And there was such a great need for the civil-rights work I do there, but so few organizations that do it, or so little funding for it, that my opportunities lied elsewhere. Here, I am doing the work I love and dreamed of doing, without compromise. I wear my gayest outfit to the grocery store, and I get compliments instead of looks.
“Pink Pony Club,” was the medicine my soul needed to remember why I moved to California. I could no longer tell whether my tears were from the pain of what I’ve lost or the bliss of what I’ve gained: the freedom to live more authentically as myself.
And it didn’t really matter. It will always be both.
Don't think I've left you all behind
Still love you and Tennessee
You're always on my mind
The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, all at once.