Chappell Roan will release her country song “The Giver” on Thursday night, but as she tells Amazon Music’s Country Heat Weekly podcast, she’s not jumping on the bandwagon — she grew up with country music.
“I can’t call myself the Midwest princess and not acknowledge country music straight up,” she says, referring to the title of her Grammy-nominated album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. “Because that is what is around me in grocery stores. That’s what is playing on the bus.”
“I wrote a country song, not to invade country music, but to really capture what I think the essence of country music is for me, which is nostalgia, and fun in the summertime, and the fiddle and the banjo, feeling like [a] country queen,” she says. “It makes me feel a certain type of freedom that pop music doesn’t let me … it’s interesting and I had to do it.”
As for making an entire country album, she tells the podcast, “If I felt like it was honoring what my heart wanted to do, then yes, but … it’s a question mark.”
“I’m trying to really articulate that it’s not me trying to cross genres and be like, ‘Hey!’ you know, like, ‘Look at me,'” she explains. “I’m not trying to convince a country crowd that they should listen to my music by baiting them with a country song. … I just think a lesbian country song is really funny, so I wrote that.”
And her message for country fans is this: “I know you’ve probably never heard of me, but I want you at my concert, and the door is open for you, and even if you don’t understand it, that’s OK. You can still like it.”
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