Pop star Chappell Roan highlighted LGBTQ contributions to country music in an Apple Music interview posted Friday. The Grammy-winning singer released a country single, “The Giver,” featuring lesbian innuendos, banjos and a catchy fiddle melody on Thursday. Roan, who premiered the song on “Saturday Night Live” in November, has said it was inspired by her Midwestern upbringing.
The “Good Luck, Babe!” singer emphasized the connections between LGBTQ and country culture, calling the genre “so incredibly camp” in the Apple interview. Though queer people are underrepresented in the genre, Roan said that LGBTQ people often fill the stadiums and supplement the bands.
“Even if it’s not the artist that’s gay singing — girl, those backup singers, those girls on tour, the people playing banjo — there are gay people making the music,” Roan told Kelleigh Bannon, a country singer and Apple Music radio show host.
“There are a lot of gay country fans, a lot of drag queen country fans,” Roan added, noting that drag queens around the world have performed lip syncs to Carrie Underwood’s “Before He Cheats” and Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like A Woman!” Others, like drag superstar Trixie Mattel, have written their own country albums.
Roan, 27, said she drew inspiration for “The Giver” from Twain, also citing the classic country stars Miranda Lambert, Alan Jackson and George Strait. She detailed her relationship with the genre dating to her childhood in the Ozarks, touching on both nostalgia and cultural norms that she had to “unlearn.”
“I think I have a special relationship to where I’m from because of country music, and so to kind of honor that part of myself by making a country song where it’s like, ‘You know what? Yes, I’m gay, and yes I am ultra pop. Yes, I am a drag queen … who can also perform a country song,’” Roan said.
Roan said “The Giver” is a “song of joy” inspired by her difficult upbringing as a queer woman in the Midwest.
“I can, like, hate myself for being gay at 15, and be like, ‘I’m a woman, I’m supposed to just be there for my husband, and I’m going to learn how to cook and blah blah blah.’ I can do that, move to L.A., have a revelation and write a country song to kind of wrap it all up,” Roan said.
The singer promoted the single with a nod to her home state: Earlier this month, fans spotted a billboard in Springfield, Missouri, featuring Roan clad in scrubs that read, “Dental dams aren’t just for dentists!” Flyers and billboards of Roan dressed in vocational uniforms went up around the country, playing on “The Giver” lyric, “She gets the job done.”
“It just shows that country can exist in a queer space, and a queer space can exist in a country space,” Roan said, speaking about the campaign for her single. She noted that there are country artists who aren’t out and may never come out because of the “stigma” and the lack of queer representation in the genre.
In the Apple Music interview, Roan also spoke about the infamous squabble she had at the 2024 VMAs with a photographer whom she later called “disrespectful” and demanded an apology from. She said the incident reminded her of the “country boys” she grew up with who had made her feel “inferior” (and whom she also pokes fun at in “The Giver,” singing, “Ain’t no country boy quitter / I get the job done”).
“I think that’s what the country song actually represents,” Roan said. “I don’t hate myself for not knowing everything about the queer culture at the time. … I love myself [because] I came around to the other side.”
