Chappell Roan may have dropped “The Subway” after soft-launching it during live shows, but her sophomore album is far from being done. Like, far enough that she told Vogue it “doesn’t exist yet.” The Grammy winner recently sat down with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, where she explained why she hasn’t started writing her highly anticipated follow-up to The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.
She’s been killing it on tour, headlining music fests like Primavera Sound and Reading & Leeds Festivals. But, aside from being on the road, the “Pink Pony Club” hitmaker shared that she was displaced to Altadena during the L.A. wildfires earlier this year and has had trouble settling into a new space after living in Airbnbs for seven months.
Chappell Roan performing at Sziget Festival in Budapest, Hungary on August 11. Joseph Okpako – Getty Images
“I want to write music whenever I feel settled. I haven’t felt settled,” she admitted. “It’s been a very unsettling year and a half, and I think once I really feel calm in a new house and have a routine…then I can think about writing a song once I have a routine.”
As for what that routine entails? The Midwest Princess said that it’s as “basic” as waking up in the same place, making the same meals, and wearing the same slippers. “That’s just not a thing right now, and it hasn’t been for a very long time,” she said, in part. “And then I came on this big tour. So it’s been a journey on…how do I release music within the state of everything?”
While she’s “far done from touring,” Chappell shared that “it’ll definitely feel like a big breath of weight off [her] shoulders” when she wraps up her “victory lap” of shows next April. She hopes she’ll be able to “chill for a sec and actually think about writing.”
As we patiently wait for her return to the recording studio, she shared that her latest single is a “safe segue” into her upcoming era.
“I think it’s a good rung on the ladder,” she shared on the platform’s New Music Daily radio show. “Midwest Princess is her, but even though this next era, I don’t really know what it is, but ‘Subway’ is a very safe segue to it. But I just think that ‘The Giver,’ ‘Good Luck, Babe,’ ‘The Subway,’ they’re all kind of so different, so that’s why I’m just like, ‘I have no idea what the next era is.’”
She also spoke to the pressures of following up her breakout debut album and why she fears fans won’t be as interested in new material.
“That’s the scary part of putting out new music and then people not liking it because it’s not like the music you made before, and so it makes you scared to release stuff. Because you’re like, ‘Well, people aren’t ever going to like it as much as the first one’ and that’s the risk you take every single time,” she explained.
Chappell revealed that she hasn’t even started writing CR2 during a conversation with Vogue earlier this month. “There is no album. There is no collection of songs,” she told the publication. “It took me five years to write the first one, and it’s probably going to take at least five to write the next.”
She added, “I’m not that type of writer that can pump it out. I don’t think I make good music whenever I force myself to do anything.”
Check out Chappell’s full conversation with Zane Lowe for Apple Music below.
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