Chappell Roan has reportedly separated from her management team.
The news comes days after the pop singer picked up nominations in all four major categories for the 2025 Grammy Awards, with her debut album ‘The Rise And Fall Of A Midwest Princess’ up for Album of the Year, and her track ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ in contention for both Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Roan is also nominated for Best New Artist.
Billboard notes that the company that Roan had been signed to, State Of The Art, had conspicuously left her out of a social media post congratulating their Grammy nominees, and now the reason for that omission appears to have become clear.
Chappell Roan at the 2024 Austin City Limits Music Festival. Credit: Gary Miller/FilmMagic
Roan, 26, had been represented by the group and her manager Nick Bobetsky since 2018, the year after her first major release on Atlantic Records, the ‘School Nights’ EP, and just two years after the singer, real name Kayleigh Amstutz, adopted her stage name in honour of her grandfather Dennis K. Chappell, who died in 2016.
She first released her debut album in September 2023, earning a four-star review from NME. “The vocal style may borrow from modern country crossover heroes like Kacey Musgraves (‘Kaleidoscope’, ‘Red Wine Supernova’), but there’s unadulterated pure pop too. ‘Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl’, lands somewhere between Confidence Man, Lady Gaga’s ‘Chromatica’ and ‘Ray of Light’-era Madonna.”
“The bratty chorus of ‘Hot To Go!’, meanwhile, can be read as a cousin of Olivia Rodrigo‘s recent hit ‘Bad Idea Right?’; incidentally, producer and songwriter Dan Nigro – a longtime collaborator of Rodrigo – also worked on this album.”
Roan was the musical guest on a recent episode (November 2) of Saturday Night Live, where she debuted a new country song ‘The Giver’, which some fans have already dubbed a “lesbian anthem”.
That came after Roan teased her highly anticipated sophomore album. Last month, she shared a post on Instagram, where she hinted at the upcoming project with a reference to Love Island.
In the carousel post, she holds up her debut album, and another slide on the post sees her with a microphone in her hand, seemingly in a recording studio. She wrote on the caption: “Album kinda popped off imo but it is time to welcome a hot new bombshell into the villa.”
Roan has been candid with her feelings about fame in recent months, recently comparing it to “an abusive ex-husband”. In an interview with The Face, the former NME Cover star vented about the normalisation of extreme fan behaviour including “stalking, talking shit online, [people who] won’t leave you alone, yelling at you in public.” She added: “I didn’t know it would feel this bad.”
Prior to that, she had taken to TikTok to share her thoughts on “weird” and “creepy” followers, calling out the “predatory behaviour” of so-called “superfans” that includes “nonconsensual physical and social interactions”.
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