Chappell Roan Seeks the Line Between IRL and URL

The rising pop singer has been transparently navigating the demands of fame — onstage and online — as she’s grown from cult queer-pop hero to zeitgeist-shaping star.

For Chappell Roan, who has been toiling in the pop music trenches for several years now, the recent burst of acclaim she’s received has been overdue, affirming and more than a little disorienting. Perhaps the most energizing breakout star of this year, she has songs that center queer romance, a robust aesthetic gift and, most striking of all, an unusually moral sense of how a famous person should be treated.

As she’s being embraced, she’s also being tested. The last couple of weeks especially have provided Roan a case study in the difference between IRL and URL fandom — the people who show up to commune with you, and the people who make you the object of their study and chatter online — and which to stake her future on.

Last Tuesday in Franklin, Tenn., she took a mid-show breather to survey the 7,500 people who’d come to see her perform at the FirstBank Amphitheater.

“I know how hard it is to be queer in the Midwest and the South,” she said. She grew up around seven hours west, in Willard, Mo., chafing against her conservative surroundings. As a young person, she continued, “I really needed a place where people weren’t going to make fun of me for how I dressed or who I liked.”

For the night, the amphitheater just outside of Nashville had become such a place. Carved into a rock quarry, the open-to-the-sky venue felt cloistered, protected. A place for intimate but very loud conversation out of view of prying ears and eyes.