“I would be more successful if I wore a muzzle.”

Chappell Roan cannot be stopped.

Over the past 12 months, the 26-year-old has become pop’s hottest star. A flamboyant, red-headed sensation whose songs are as colorful as they are raw.

Their debut album, released to little fanfare in 2023, has just topped the UK charts for the second time. Next week, she’s nominated for six Grammy Awards, including best new artist. And BBC Radio 1 has named her its Sound of 2025.

The success has been even sweeter because his former record label refused to release many of the songs that exploded on the charts last year.

“They said, ‘This isn’t going to work. We don’t understand it,'” Roan tells Radio 1’s Jack Saunders.

Reaching the A-list of pop is not only a claim but a revolution.

The 26-year-old is the first female pop star to achieve mainstream success as an openly queer person, rather than coming out as part of her post-fame narrative.

On a more personal level, she eventually did well enough to move into a home of her own and acquire a rescue cat, named Cherub Lou.

“She’s super small, her breath smells very bad and she doesn’t meow,” the singer loves.

If having a kitten is a benefit of fame, Roan has become angry at the disadvantages.

She has spoken out against abusive fans. yelling “creepy behavior” of people who harass her in airport queues and “stalk” her parents’ house. Last September, she went viral for cursing out a photographer who had been shouting insults at stars on the MTV Awards red carpet.

“I was looking around and I was like, ‘This is what people are cool with all the time? And I’m supposed to act normal? This isn’t normal. This is crazy,'” she recalls.

The incident made the news. British tabloids called her outburst the “tantrum” of a “spoiled diva.”

But Roan does not apologize.

“I’ve been responding like that to disrespect him my whole life, but now there are cameras watching me and I happen to be a pop star too, and those things don’t mix. It’s like oil and water.”

Roan says that musicians are trained to be obedient. Standing up for yourself is presented as a complaint or ingratitude, and rejecting conventions comes at a cost.

“I think I’d actually be more successful if I was okay with wearing a muzzle,” he laughs.

“If I were to override my base instincts more, where does my heart go?”Stop, stop, stop, you’re not okay‘, it would be bigger.

“It would be a lot bigger… and I’d still be on tour right now.”

In fact, Roan rejected pressure to extend his 2024 tour to protect his physical and mental health. She attributes that decision to her late grandfather.

“There’s something he said that I think about every move I make in my career. There are always options.”

“So when someone says, ‘Do this gig because you’re never going to be offered that much money again,’ it’s like, who cares?

“If I don’t feel like doing this right now, there are always options. There’s no shortage of opportunities. I think about that all the time.”

As fans may already know, Roan was born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz and raised in the Bible Belt town of Willard, Missouri.

The eldest of four siblings aspired to be an actress, but for a long time it seemed that her future would lie in sports. She ran at the state level and almost went to college for cross country.

She then participated in a singing competition at the age of 13 and won. Before long, she had written her first song, about her crush on a Mormon boy who wasn’t allowed to date outside of his faith.

He took his stage name as a tribute to his grandfather. Dennis Chappell and his favorite song, a Western ballad called The Strawberry Roan.

“He was very funny and very intelligent,” he recalls. “And I don’t think he ever questioned my ability.

“A lot of people were like, ‘You should go full country,’ or ‘You should try Christian music.’ And he never told me to do anything.

“He was the only person who said, ‘You don’t need a plan B. Just do it.'”

Finally, one of her compositions, a gothic ballad called Die Young, caught the attention of Atlantic Records, which signed her when she was only 17 years old.

Moving to Los Angeles, she recorded and released her first EP, School Nights, in 2017. It was a solid but unremarkable affair, infused with the sounds of Lana Del Rey and Lorde.

Roan only found her own sound when a group of gay friends took her to a drag bar.

“I walked into that club in West Hollywood and it was like heaven.” he told the BBC last year. “It was amazing to see all these people happy and confident in their bodies.

“And the go-go dancers! I was captivated. I couldn’t stop looking at them. I thought, ‘I have to do that.'”

She didn’t become a dancer, but she did write a song imagining what it would be like to be one and how her mother would react. Roan called him pink pony club after a strip bar in his hometown.

“That song changed everything,” he says. “It put me in a new category.

“I never thought I could be a ‘pop star girl’ and Pink Pony forced me to be one.”

His label disagreed. They refused to release Pink Pony Club for two years. Shortly after they relented, Roan was jettisoned in a round of pandemic-era cost-cutting.

Bruised but not broken, she returned home and spent the next year serving coffee at a drive-thru donut shop.

“It had an absolutely positive impact on me,” he says. “You have the knowledge of what it’s like to clean a public bathroom. That’s very important.”

The period was transformative in other ways. She saved her earnings, had her heart broken by a person “with pale blue eyes”, moved back to Los Angeles and gave herself a year to make it happen.

It may have taken him a little longer, but he got to work.

During his exile, Roan stayed in touch with his Pink Pony Club co-writer, Daniel Nigro.

He was also working with another up-and-coming singer named Olivia Rodrigo, and when her career took off, Roan got a seat on the court, supporting Rodrigo on tour and providing backing vocals on his second album, Guts.

More importantly, Nigro used the momentum to sign Roan to his own record label and secure the release of his debut album in September 2023.

At first, it seemed that Roan’s original tag was right. Sales were disappointing, and audiences were slow to catch on because their straight-up queer anthems weren’t in tune with the whispery, confessional pop trend.

But those songs came to life on stage. Big, fun and designed for audience participation, they are taken to new heights by Roan’s powerful voice and his extravagant stage personality.

“A drag queen doesn’t go on stage to calm people down,” he says. “A drag queen doesn’t say things to flatter people. A queen makes you blush, you know what I mean? Expect the same energy at my show.”

Indeed, it was a live-streamed appearance at last year’s Coachella Festival that propelled her into the upper echelons of pop.

Dressed in a PVC crop top that said “Eat Me,” she performed in the packed Gobi tent as a headliner, purposefully strutting across the stage and working the crowd on Hot To Go’s cheesy choreography.

He then looked directly into the camera and dedicated a song to his ex.

“Bitch, I know you’re watching… and all those horrible things that happen to you are karma.”

The clip went viral and, in a short time, so did his career.

By summer, all of their shows had been upgraded. Festivals still had to move it to larger stages. When he played Lollapalooza in August, he drew the event’s largest daytime crowd.

“It only takes a decade,” he says. “That’s what I tell everyone. ‘If you’re okay with it taking 10 years, then you’re fine.'”

When fans discovered his debut album, Roan also released a standalone single: a sarcastic slice of synth-pop called Good Luck Babe, which became his biggest hit.

“I don’t even know if I’ve ever said this in an interview, but it was originally called Good Luck, Jane,” he reveals.

“I wanted it to be about falling in love with my best friend and then her saying, ‘Ha ha ha, I don’t like you, I like boys.’

“And it was like, ‘Okay, good luck with that.’ jane‘.”

A masterclass in pop storytelling, Good Luck Babe has a proper three-act structure, with a spectacular payoff in the middle eight and a chorus you simply can’t avoid.

Still, Roan was surprised by his success.

“I just threw it away thinking I don’t know what it’s going to do, and it stayed up all year long!”

The question, of course, is what the star will do next, now that he’s the Sound of 2025.

She’s already previewed two new songs, The Subway and The Giver, in concert, but all she’ll reveal about a second album is that she’s “more reluctant to be sad or dark.”

“It feels so good to be partying,” he explains.

Looking back on the past 12 months, she’s philosophical about what it means to be pop’s hottest new product.

“Many people think that fame is the pinnacle of success, because what more could you want than adoration?”

Roan admits that the admiration of strangers is more “addictive” than he expected.

“I understand why I’m so afraid of losing this feeling.

“It’s very scary to think that one day people won’t care about you the same way they do now, and I think (that idea) lives in women’s brains very differently than men’s.”

Ultimately, he decides, success and failure are “outside my control.” Rather, you want to make good decisions.

“If I can look back and say, ‘I didn’t crumble under the weight of expectations and I couldn’t stand being abused or blackmailed,’ (then) at least I stayed true to my heart,” he says.

“As I said before, there are always options.”

Chappell Roan was named BBC Radio 1’s Sound of 2025, by a panel of over 180 musicians, critics and music industry experts.

The top five, in order, were: