The Fall of Chappell Roan. (Patreon)

Good morning my loves.

Happy Saturday.

Greetings from Boston, where I'm currently spending the weekend in post-tour laundering, with added houseguests. I'm couch-hosting and going to see my dear old loopy-cellist friend Zöe Keating at the Somerville theater tonight (if any of you are also gonna be there, holler in the comments here or the Boston chat in the app, there's still tickets, show is 8pm).

I've been thinking about this Chappell Roan post/review for four days straight, cooking it up in my brain-box, and there are so many things to say.

It's autumn, it's fall, it's rise, it's fall again, it's the rise of fascism, it's the fall of naivety, the whole world around here is going technicolor-soaked and fuzzy and everybody in my zone is drenched in a kind of...existential dread.

It may be the rise of the Algorithm, but it's the season of Art as Resistance.

It's the season of Chappell. The Fall and Spring and Summer of Chappell.

Yes. It's bad out there.

At the same time, the punk cabaret is alive and well and living in the real world.

It's the next gen of Queerdos.

This season - this fall - the stage belongs to Chappell Roan, and it belongs to Jinkx Monsoon, and Billie Eilish, and Doja Cat, and Marina, and Lady Gaga, and Lorde, and while they get up on those stages and werk werk werk their collective assess off, I'm going to be in this kitchen, making sandwiches without resentment, working on my next few albums, and a book.

I need the inspiration to keep going, like you all do.

I found it, I find it, I have it.

This year, I was supposed to be releasing a brand-new Dresden Dolls record, and we were playing to thousands of people every night on the massive stages of the world. That didn't happen, for reasons I know you all well understand.

I'm going to be playing other brand-new songs instead, the darker-than-dark songs that sprang out of my soul over the last ear or so, in the basement clubs of the towns I need to conduct business in or visit friends in: Minneapolis, Seattle, Portland. I'll be playing to fewer than a few hundred people in each town instead of playing to crowds of thousands, but I don't mind, strangely. I'm calling it my Speakeasy Piano Divorce Song tour. I will not make shirts.

I WILL make shirts (no, I probably won't) for the fictional band that Storm Large and I cooked up over the phone yesterday....we want to call our band Community Tampon.

Anyway.

I am becoming ever more aware that this job I do - this crowdfunded, free-wheeling, non-edited, scream-of-consciousness style of writing - is even more and more important and special than ever. It's bizarre, watching the rise and fall of social media in realtime, I have to admit I did not see this coming. I did not think twitter would fall the way it did. I did not predict the take-over of short-form video. I left the full-time social internet video game about the time I had a child: much like the deliberate choice I made in my late teens to turn away from my midi-tools and synthesizer and simply embrace piano-only songwriting, I decided to pick my lane and stay in it.

I was never going to be a pop star. It was a choice. I broke away from the mold and have been self-publishing my songs and writing since 2009.

I was never going to be a journalist for the Guardian.

I was never going to be a publisher-approved feminist book-writer and memoirist, getting paid by a boss.

I was always going to be just this.

This, this thing you're looking at and reading.

It's really extraordinary, seeing my career through the telescope of time right now, especially as I ramp up to new projects, consider what it means to be not-famous, huge-famous, canceled, uncanceled, up, down, side to side we go.

The video game of PR that all these new artists have to do...it was similar back in 2000, but we did not have the instant-internet to deal with, and the waves of complexity seemed easier to handle. We were more there in the room with people, proving our human-ness, we weren't on the internet. Chappell has two jobs, at all times, when she's on stage: she's live and she's memorex...she's always on camera when she's in public, 24/7. I suppose Madonna and co. had to deal with that when going out in public in the 1980s, but most things weren't trapped on video. Most shows weren't filmed.

The Dolls - and I - escaped that lens. When we played live, it was pretty ephemeral, lost to time. I think that made us louder, free-er, more spontaneous. I don't know. Maybe not. We have no way of knowing.

And I have managed to stay a community artist thorugh this entire ordeal.

It's kind of amazing, when you look at it and turn it over.

What will happen to Chappell in 20 years? Who knows. There are so many directions to head in. I'm committed for life.

............

To be soft is to be powerful.

The first time I heard Chappell Roan, my heart exploded.

I grew up addicted to pop music: Cyndi Lauper was my first concert and I was a Madonna addict as a young girl.

I've been following the stream of female pop artists since then, always waiting, apparently, for the appearance of Chappell Roan, because she's the first one who has bowled me over completely with her actual songwriting. The look, the style: amazing. She's a cabaret drag clown from my home planet. And she's an incredible vocalist, my god. But those things have all been covered before. It was the songs, the songs, the songs for me. The eighties production wiggles right into the core of my heart, for sure, but it was the lyrics.

I'm a songwriter's songwriter and I have a really hard time loving other peoples songs. (Phoebe Bridgers was the last one to truly worm her way into my ear-hearts around 2021, and Christian Lee Hutson managed to get in there, too, a couple years. Neither of them are really pop, and they're squarely in the Elliott Smith camp.)

This songwriter - this Chappell Roan kid - holy fuck. The first time I listened to the entire album, I wanted to cry, I wanted to cheer. On so many levels. Just for her existence, and also for the joy of knowing that my own heart wasn't closed or broken. There was still music that made me feel alive and vital. Like the doors to the part of me that loves music were not permanently rusted shut. I was still able to feel these things.

Chappell unlocked me.

I wondered to myself if this, this feeling, was what some people were talking about when they fell into my embrace, telling me that my own songs did a thing for them that they couldn't put into words. Maybe. Probably.

I've been around long enough to know that this is a circle.

I've also been watching in slow awe as Chappell navigates a scale of celebrity that has never touched me, but that I have tasted. The lack of control. The isolation. The weirdness.

I have been saying my whole life that, luckily, i have been able to ride the tightrope and live a sort of "normal" life. But lately, I have to sort of admit that I've lost that tightope. My fame lost me my freedom, in many ways. I'm still diggin' out. But I'm able to go to any coffeeshop or bookstore or restaurant in New York or Boston without being bugged.

She is not.

............

When I was recovering from a brutal miscarriage, a few years after Ash was born, and also feeling into the disintegration of my marriage, I discovered cold plunging. I realized that if I immersed myself into cold water, I could break the haze of sadness and stuckness and whip myself back into reality. I would fill the bathtub with ice and set a timer.

Then I realized it was a lot more enjoyable to play a 3-minute song on my phone than set a 3-minute timer.

So I chose "Turn, Turn, Turn" by the Byrds one morning, since I happened to be on a Byrds kick, and I got stuck in a pleasant loop.

For months, I lay in a bathtub of ice, listening to "Turn, Turn, Turn", while my nerves settled and my soul and my empty womb sorted themselves out.

To everything:

Turn, turn, turn.

There is a season. Turn, turn, turn.

I remember my mentor/latin teacher, Dr. Fiveash, teaching us that these lyrics were ripped from the bible. Ecclesiastes 3:1-8.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven.

Then Pete Seeger took some songwriting liberties. (There's no "Turn, turn, turn" refrain in the bible, nope).

A time of love, a time of hate
A time of war, a time of peace
A time you may embrace
A time to refrain from embracing.

................

The first time I heard "Pink Pony Club", I was in tears by the end.

It was a perfect song in so many ways, and so far beyond the jealously of not having been the person who wrote it, it just gave me a mainline injection of hope for the planet.

I know you wanted me 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 moved out of the house that was haunting my life in the summer of 2024, and I barely had time to pack. There were a lot of objects, a lot of furniture, a lot of shit I hadn't even looked at or unpacked since coming home from New Zealand in 2022 with a hopeful heart, thinking that I could finally get away from my past and start anew with my kid in a new town. The darkness trailed me, and I was so happy to be moving back to the safety of Boston, to my hometown, to dry land. The move was abrupt, the middle-aged equivalent of throwing all my clothes in plastic bags and tossing them in the trunk of my car and peeling out of the driveway in the dead of night.

My friends in Boston caught me and helped me unpack. It was a mess. There was shit and piles and bags and boxes everywhere. Broken dishes, unmarked boxes. My friend Amanda - who's in their thirties - came over for a few days and we blasted Chappell Roan in the kitchen while I tried to make sense of my new life.

I started picking out the chords to "Pink Pony Club" and "Casual" and covering both songs at my tiny Boston shows. Amelia Allen sang "Casual" with me at one of my little Speakeasy Divorce shows in Cambridge. The music had this alchemical effect. It pulled me through.

It captured the Zeitgeist. It felt like we were all hitching our trailers to Chappell, letting the gravity of her words pull us out of the dark.

I became a Chappell devotee. I introduced a trans friend of mine to her music - she's a local patron here in Boston - who makes guitars. She told me, the other day, that she was picking out the chords and lyrics on her guitar, and she burst into tears.

I played "Pink Pony Club" on ukulele for a group of Ash's mates at the school talent show.

The 4th graders went crazy.

I played "Pink Pony Club" the other night on an old piano for a group of 25 people at a Rosh Hashanah dinner in Brooklyn. The four-year-old next to me - who had requested it - went apeshit and banged along on the piano with his fists and sang the choruses.

On one of my hard divorce days last year, I played the song on the piano at a private patron gig, and I decided to pull out an old turqoise debutante prom dress, inspired by Chappell.

I thought about all the beleaguered single mothers of the 80s who raised me and my middle school friends, all of them listening to ABBA and Whitney Houston in their kitchens while they secretly broke dishes and resented their lives, and the ones who screamed at the top of their lungs alone in their cars as they plotted their divorces after they found out that their husbands had been fucking their secretaries.

OH I WANNA DANCE WITH SOMEBODY.

That whole generation of women, trying their best to do all the jobs, to make it work, to escape, to dance, to find meaning.

I'M GONNA KEEP ON DANCING.

I sang those lines, that day, with a howl, I slowed down the tempo, I let those words land and repeat. It was a battle cry. My own song wouldn't have been as powerful, that day. There was something about covering Chappell.

..........

I was lucky: my old manager helps run the venue that Chappell was playing in last week in New York, four shows at Forest Hills.

I had reasons I had to jet down to New York anyway: management meetings, publisher meetings, other meetings, I figured I would squeeze it all in.

I showed up at the venue early with Lance, Michael and EJ and we got ushered to a fancy box seat with a fantastic view.

I careened around with my camera for a while, taking shots of the crowd, feeling that burst of love for all the people who got dressed up for the show: it reminded me so much of a Dresden Dolls' show, where everyone was taking this opportunity to let their freak flag fly. There were half-naked people, people in whiteface, people in full ren faire gear, people in kinky outfits, people in pink. People in red and black. People playing at being other versions of themselves. It was just gorgeous.

We were sharing the box with a bunch of other industry people, and there were two around-eight year old girls there who were the daughters of one of the main merch sellers.

These girls made the night...and it was especially touching to watch them drinking in the drag queens who opened up the show (who more or less took the job of doing the poltical work, since Chappell didn't breathe a word about immediate politics, Trump, Ukraine, trans rights or Gaza on stage...and maybe didn't need to, she sent the local drag queens to herald her, and Izzy Uncut - get it - gave some powerful speeching, and the applause was raucus. Here are the young, seeing the way it's done.

They had that level of enthusiasm that I recognized deep in my core: that pull and desire to be ANYWHERE NEAR CHAPPELL ROAN, that feeling that I felt when I first went to see Cyndi Lauper at age 12 and could not believe that I was actually in the same room as here, even if it was a room that fit 15,000 people.

They had made signs. They were hoping, I am sure, that Chappell wold be able to read their signs, even though the stage was 500 feet away, and these signs were 1 foot.

This is the way you think when you are 8.

They held their signs aloft, they screamed the lyrics at the very tops of their lungs.

Michael, Lance, EJ and I got a kind of vicarious injection of fandom through these eight year olds, and we kept gesturing at them with glee. They were almost more fun to watch than the show itself.

And the show itself?

You can go read a real review of it if you want, but my job here - I think - is to tell you how I felt, and I felt a surge of pride in her command of that stage. Command is the perfect word. She commandeered the stage. She didn't seem to be trying to pull off anything that wasn't authentic. She wasn't trying to fit herself into a corset of choreography; she's not a dancer. The set was a playground that resembled the Skeletor -themed Castle Grayskillof the 80s, with multiple sets of stairs and dungeons-and-dragons-style balconies, and she hit her marks and sang from a million spots while her all-female rock band backed her up. She pranced down a catwalk into the crowd during a half dozen songs. But mostly, she just looked like a woman in a fantastic outfit at the height of her professional powers, singing her songbook (with one "Barracuda" cover thrown in) without any undo or frivolous extra pomp. There was a ton of CAMP, there were animations on a screen in that style of the 80s cartoons, and there was a TON of pyrotechnics, but that all felt like part of the joyful game.

She shone.

She closed with "Pink Pony Club", the stadium went wild, us and the two eight-year-olds included, and she played no encore.

..........

AS she was waving goodbye to the crowd, she waved in our direction.

The two eight year old girls screamed bloody murder. They just LOST IT.

And then it hit me: they think that Chappell is waving at THEM.

Like, specifically at THEM.

And then I thought again: well, in a way...she IS.

She IS waving at them. More or less, specifically.

It made me think of all of you, and of this new conversation around the "parasocial" relationship we all share. The very word bugs me out, but I wonder, deeply, what this all means and how it works.

I am, often, waving at all of you. I'm doing it right now, writing this post.

Do you feel seen? Do you think I see you? I mean...I do. I think I do. If you feel seen, and I feel I'm seeing you, I think we can call this real.

I think we are allowed to say that Chappell really was waving at those 8 year olds. I think we can, yes.

........

It reminds me a little bit of Ash's friend - let's call him R. - who claimed to me that he knew Sabrina Carpenter. I heard this piece of news from Ash, who was very impressed that his freind R. KNEW Sabrina Carpenter.

At the next playdate, I asked little R. how he knew Sabrina Carpenter. I was fully expecting that his mom or dad worked in the industry and that he had been allowed to go to some backstage meet n greet at the local Boston enormodome.

"She texted me once", was R's answer.

"Ok", I said: "SHE texted you? Like, a personal text?"

"Well, it was about the concert tickets. I THINK it was from her, though."

And I just wanted to swing this kid in the air.

He'd gotten a bot-text about his concert tickets from "Sabrina Carpenter".

Now he KNEW her.

I love it.

........

Watching this Chappell show was a reminder that the turn is....turning.

I'm not going to be doing any huge tours for a year or so.

I'm benched, but it was time; I needed to sew some shit before I could go back to full-time reaping.

I felt a lot of the same emotions that I felt when I went to see Jinkx Monsoon at Carnegie in February. It's Jinkx, right now. It may be me, alter, and it may not. It doesn't matter. The music picks its vehicle. What matters is that we keep on dancing, and the music accompaying us is played by different players, sung by different voices.

The epic poem is not written down, it's carried by voice. Not anyone can sing it, but anyone can try. Anyone can try to carry the torch, the song, the message.

And right now, it's all eyes on the next gen, and they're klling it.

It's the fall of Chappell. She's going to do a few more dates and then she's going to work on a new record, hopefully without too much pressure from the outside. I hope she finds the peace she needs to write what's on her heart without feeling she needs to outdo her first album in some bullshit, superficial, chart-topping way.

It's her spring, it's her fall, it's her season, and I now know; we are a seasonal ecosystem. We are an interconnected bundle of connectivity. If I believe all my zen masters, especially the old crones I've been hanging out with as of late, we are all the same person, anyway.

To everything: turn. Turn. Turn.

There is a season.

We are all sort of me, and we are all sort of Chappell, and the fall and spring will continue to bend towards and away from the sun.

I love you all so fucking deeply, so dearly.

I am waving to you all, right now.

A time to gain, a time to lose.
A time to rend, a time to sew.
A time for love, a time for hate.

A time for peace, I swear it's not too late.....

Remember where you are in the circle.

Take your turn, take your time.

Turn. Turn. Turn.

Thank you all for being here, for being patrons, for dancing with me.

It's a life-long dance, my friends. A life-long dance.

The kids are alright.

I'm gonna keep on dancing.

X

Amanda

..............

More shots from the show.....