Chappell Roan: “The Subway” finally pulls into the station
On Sunday, June 9, 2024, Chappell Roan came out onto the Governors Ball Festival stage in New York, hidden by a literal Big Apple. She rose out of the fake fruit to stand at attention, wearing yet another one of her famous costumes. Roan is known for not only bringing theatricality through her literal vocal performance, but in the set design that she struts across and the flashy costumes she wears. Governors Ball got to see Roan completely copper green, as she dressed as Lady Liberty in honor of the festival’s location. With her torch in one hand and a blunt in the other, Roan began her performance at Governors Ball the same way she kicks off most of her sets, with the manic energy of her hit Femininomenon. Roan’s performance at Gov Ball 2024 would go down as one of the most pivotal of her career, with her Statue of Liberty costume serving as a reference for fan art, Halloween costumes, and so forth. But Roan’s Gov Ball performance introduced another critical part of the Chappell Roan canon – a new unreleased track called The Subway.
By this point in her set, Roan now donned a yellow taxi cab on top of her green body paint. The audience finally had a chance to relax during her set as Roan sang about a lost love, filled with imagery of the very city she was performing in. Like other songs in her catalog, Roan uses humor in The Subway to emphasize how heartbroken she is. In the case of the new track, this line manifests in “I made a promise, if in four months this feeling ain’t gone/Well, fuck this city, I’m movin’ to Saskatchewan.” While this line is certainly beloved by fans of Roan, the most memorable part of The Subway is Roan’s vocals soaring above the instrumental as the track finally dies down. Roan cries out The Subway’s ending refrain of “She’s got a way” to eventually transform into “She got away,” a rip roaring performance that strikes listeners in the heart.
Roan’s sudden rocket launch into stardom was heavily covered throughout 2024, an unstoppable supernova that was further fueled by social media frenzy. The Subway certainly added more fuel to the fire, with Roan’s performance at Gov Ball also going viral on TikTok. In particular, the aforementioned outro made the rounds across social media. Roan is known for having power in her voice and the ending refrain of The Subway was a perfect vehicle for her to show off. Fans eagerly speculated when the unreleased track would finally make its way to streaming services, but it never came. Instead, Roan kept up her series of performances on the summer festival circuit, performing The Subway at events like Lollapalooza. Months would eventually pass, with Roan debuting another new track, The Giver, at Saturday Night Live, which would also receive an official release before The Subway. She set the VMA’s on fire and dazzled the Grammy’s. While The Subway obviously was not dead and gone, as she was still performing it at occasional shows, most fans had lost hope of the track releasing any time soon.
But in early July, people spotted Chappell Roan back in New York City. Images of Roan with her red hair draped like Rapunzel over a balcony led to speculation that she was shooting a music video. Shortly after, a clip of Roan lipsyncing, as a taxi cab dragged her by her fake mane down an NYC street, was posted. Fans quickly matched Roan’s lipsyncing to the lyrics of The Subway, proof that not only the track would release relatively soon, but that it would get its own music video. Roan’s tracks released after her debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, did not receive their own music videos. Her performance of Good Luck, Babe! at the VMAs and The Giver at SNL have acted as music videos for their respective tracks. The music video would release on August 1, with The Subway making its way to streaming the night before on July 31.
Of course, fans were immediately excited about the news, but there still remained a tremor of worry. The Subway’s refrain has been repeated an uncountable number of times across social media, with the LGBTQ+ community sharing tales of heartbreak to the outro on platforms like TikTok. Part of the beauty of this version of The Subway is Roan’s raw live performance, as the song shoots across the audience regardless of acoustics. A produced version of this track could dampen the very magic of The Subway that listeners have loved for so long. In fact, Roan herself has mentioned that recording for the track was difficult, as she wanted to get it just right.
It seems that Roan and her producer Dan Nigro have managed to capture that magic. While hopefully a live version of The Subway will be available on streaming at some point, this newly produced version of the track will definitely still delight fans. As expected, there are some key differences between live versions of The Subway and the track listeners can hear on streaming. The instrumental introduction of the track has a hint of reverb on it, reminiscent of acts like The Cranberries and The Sundays. This reverb extends to Roan herself on the chorus, as the backing vocals on the song practically melt in with the instrumentation itself. Many have compared Roan’s songs off The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess to other pop superstars like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. All singles after her debut album have managed to creep into other genres, with Good Luck, Babe! receiving comparisons to 80’s synth acts and The Giver being compared to Shania Twain’s Man I Feel Like a Woman by Roan herself. The Subway, after being only available as a live performance for so long, felt the most innocuous of the three post-Midwest Princess singles. While a distinction between The Subway and other tracks in Roan’s discography have been made, largely due to the song’s tempo and its outro, its genre and musical influences were not called into question like Good Luck, Babe! and The Giver.
This new take by Roan is certainly welcome. Her outro on this produced version of The Subway does not have the same magic as her live renditions, but it does introduce and refer to a different sort of vocal alchemy. If the instrumentation and reverb on The Subway are a clear homage to the jangle pop bands of the 90’s, Roan’s soaring outro deserves comparison to Dolores O’Riordan’s sonic boom at the end of Dreams. A comparison between the two singers may feel out of nowhere, considering Roan’s reputation as a pop princess and her discography backing it up. But before Roan was Chappell Roan, she opened for both Vance Joy and Declan McKenna as Kayleigh Rose. Roan’s history as an overnight success almost a decade in the making has received plenty of coverage, but the songs from this era of her career have not seen as much light. While she may be a pop princess now, for a time, Roan was yet another indie pop girl with a cursive swirl in her voice. But, her powerful voice still had time to shine as this early stage in Roan’s career progressed. One such example of this was a cover of Dreams by The Cranberries that she performed in 2018 while opening for Declan McKenna.
In a way, The Subway’s outro feels like a direct reflection on this part of her career. The song in its entirety is about reflection, and it is confirmed to be about a relationship Roan was in, but perhaps there is more about The Subway to be uncovered. Roan recently announced a series of pop up shows on the Visions of Damsels & Other Dangerous Things tour. Fans had put their detective hats on earlier this summer when the tour title had been mentioned previously. Whether or not this is the name of Roan’s next album is unknown, but it does hint at the creative and artistic direction she is headed in. Good Luck, Babe!’s single art features Roan dressed as a medieval Miss Piggy and her VMA performance of the track saw her take on the role of a knight, her performance of The Giver at SNL was accompanied by a choir of animals, and now The Subway’s visuals reference both Rapunzel and Jack and the Beanstalk. Fairytale whimsy seems to be Roan’s next stop, and The Subway is certainly a well made, and long-awaited, vehicle for this new stage in Roan’s career.
