CHAPPELL ROAN BIOGRAPHY
The Midwest Princess Her Unlikely, Unstoppable RiseBy Marcus J. Holloway
Length3h 24m
About this audiobook
She was dropped by her label at twenty two. She was working a coffee counter in her hometown. She gave herself exactly one year to make it work, or walk away from music for good.
Four years later, she stood on a Grammy stage and told the entire music industry it owed its artists more.
Chappell Roan’s rise looks, from the outside, like the kind of overnight success that happens once in a generation, a viral single, a record breaking festival summer, a Best New Artist win. This book tells the story the headlines left out: the decade of choir practice, piano lessons, a major label deal signed at seventeen, a shelved single, and a public rejection that sent her back to Missouri with nothing but a coffee shop job and one song she still believed in.
THE MIDWEST PRINCESS traces the full, unfiltered arc of Kayleigh Amstutz’s transformation into Chappell Roan: the small town, church going upbringing that shaped both her voice and the queer identity she would later build an entire artistic language around. The songwriting partnership that finally unlocked her sound. The bipolar II diagnosis she faced in the same year she rebuilt her career from nothing. The viral Tiny Desk performance, the record shattering festival crowds, and the single that finally, after four years of waiting, made her a household name.
It also tells the harder story: the stalking and boundary violations she called out publicly at the height of her fame, the festival dates she canceled to protect her own health, and the Grammy speech that turned a career highlight into a direct challenge to the labels that build careers like hers and so often fail to protect the artists living them.
This is not a fan magazine puff piece. It is a fully sourced, richly detailed account of exactly what it costs, and what it takes, to go from a small Missouri town to one of the defining pop stars of a generation, built entirely from public reporting and Roan’s own words.
If you have ever wanted the real story behind the pink wig and the pony club, the years of rejection before the record breaking rise, and the mental health and industry battles fought in plain public view, THE MIDWEST PRINCESS is the book you have been waiting for.
Audiobook details
GenreBiography and Memoir, Other, Psychology
Length3 hrs 24 mins
Narrated byListen with 1,000+ voices
FormateBook with Audio
LanguageEnglish
Table of contents
1Introduction
2Foreword
3Acknowledgements
4A Note on This Edition
5Introduction
Show all chaptersShow less
6Chapter One: A Small Town Voice
7Chapter Two: The Piano and the Choir
8Chapter Three: Interlochen and Die Young
9Chapter Four: Signed at Seventeen
10Chapter Five: Becoming Chappell Roan
11Chapter Six: Los Angeles and Dan Nigro
12Chapter Seven: Pink Pony Club
13Chapter Eight: Dropped
14Chapter Nine: One Year to Make It
15Chapter Ten: Naked in Manhattan, My Kink Is Karma
16Chapter Eleven: The Diagnosis
17Chapter Twelve: First Headline, First Big Support Slot
18Chapter Thirteen: Building the Album
19Chapter Fourteen: The Midwest Princess Tour
20Chapter Fifteen: Opening for Guts
21Chapter Sixteen: Tiny Desk
22Chapter Seventeen: Good Luck, Babe!
23Chapter Eighteen: Coachella
24Chapter Nineteen: Record Crowds
25Chapter Twenty: The Cost of Visibility
26Chapter Twenty-One: All Things Go and Cancellations
27Chapter Twenty-Two: Six Nominations
28Chapter Twenty-Three: Best New Artist
29Chapter Twenty-Four: VMAs and Beyond
30Chapter Twenty-Five: The Subway
31Chapter Twenty-Six: Advocacy
32Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Persona and the Person
33Chapter Twenty-Eight: Legacy in Progress
34Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Camp and Drag Tradition She Draws From
35Chapter Thirty: Midwest Princess: Small Town America in Pop Music
36Chapter Thirty-One: The Streaming Era Slow Build
37Chapter Thirty-Two: Mental Health in the Modern Music Industry
38Chapter Thirty-Three: The Artists’ Rights Movement and Her Place In It
39Chapter Thirty-Four: Critical Reception and Cultural Conversation
40Chapter Thirty-Five: Peers and the New Pop Landscape
41Chapter Thirty-Six: The Business Behind a Breakout Year
42Chapter Thirty-Seven: Fan Culture and the Modern Stan Economy
43Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Songs Themselves
44Chapter Thirty-Nine: What Her Rise Suggests About the Industry Ahead
45Chapter Forty: Willard to the World
46Appendix A: A Chappell Roan Timeline
47Appendix B: Selected Discography
48Appendix C: Selected Awards and Nominations
49Appendix D: A Note on Sources and Methodology
50Appendix E: Reading Group Discussion Questions
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