Pop star Chappell Roan draws ‘tacky’ inspiration from Missouri and this Kansas City bar

Chappell Roan has built her rising music career in the persona of a drag queen.

But the Missouri native was taken aback by the first drag show she ever went to — at Kansas City’s Hamburger Mary’s when she was around 18.

“I was just so shocked at how vulgar it was,” said Roan. Her “gay uncle” took her to the drag bar, 160 miles north of her hometown of Willard, outside Springfield.

“I was like, ‘Is this necessary?’ But it’s like, ‘OK … like you’re at a drag bar, it’s supposed to be this like kind of in your face, like vulgar, like campy kind of vibe.’”

Now Roan, fully embracing queer trashiness, is returning to Kansas City on Monday to headline a concert at The Midland Theatre.

The 26-year-old’s career has taken off since she released her debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” last year. Rolling Stone said, “Chappell Roan is a wildly ribald, extremely hooky thrill ride through sexual and personal awakenings” and named her record the 12th best album of the year.

Recently, Roan opened for 24 stops of Olivia Rodrigo’s tour and was featured in an NPR Tiny Desk Concert. On the Grammy Awards red carpet in February, she went over the top with a medieval-style headdress and a pig nose. She’s hitting the festival circuit this year, performing at Coachella and Lollapalooza.

Roan lives in Los Angeles, when not performing in places like Sydney, Australia, or New Haven, Connecticut, where she spoke to The Star by phone this past week.

Missouri vibes

Roan sees her onstage persona as drag. Born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, her stage name nods to her late grandfather — Chappell for his last name and Roan for his favorite song, the cowboy tune “The Strawberry Roan.”

Roan said she wanted to honor her Missouri roots in her songs, fashion and music videos. As a little girl, she lived in a trailer park in a town of 6,344.

In her song “California,” Roan sings, “I miss the seasons in Missouri, my dying town.” The lyrics of “Naked in Manhattan” describe thoughts about a crush as “constant, like cicadas in the summertime.”

She admits to sprinkling “trashy” and “redneck” details into her performances, like deer heads, cigarettes, long nails and a certain middle-America chain of gas stations: “I’m a Kum & Go girl,” she said.

And makeup.

“There’s like this tackiness and like kind of unsophisticated, for whatever reason, that blue eye shadow brings and I just, I think it’s beautiful,” she said.

In the music video for her song “Hot to Go,” Roan performed a bouncy cheerleader dance all around Springfield, including outside of a beloved frozen custard shop.

“If there’s an Andy’s in Kansas City, that is what I will absolutely be going to,” Roan said. (She’ll be thrilled to know that the Springfield-based company now has several KC-area locations.)

Her favorite order is the memorably named James Brownie Funky Jackhammer, a peanut butter and brownie frozen custard concrete filled with hot fudge.

Loving and hating Missouri

Roan’s explicitly queer and sexual persona gives her a complicated relationship with the nostalgic farms and cornfields where she grew up.

“There’s this push and pull between like loving Missouri for what it is and then like wanting to leave there so badly because I feel not accepted and just misunderstood because of queerness or like just being like a sexual artist,” Roan said.

She told The Washington Post in October that “there’s a special place in my heart for queer kids in the Midwest.” Roan hoped that her shows provide a place for them to dress up and feel safe, as she told Springfield News-Leader in January 2023

In an interview with Time magazine, Roan said, “I think people just think everyone in the Midwest agrees with like a far-right viewpoint and it’s just not true.”

As a queer performer, Roan said she is helping to break stereotypes about Missouri by showing that “all of these gay people exist here, including drag queens, and like trans people, and me.”

Chappell Roan will perform at 8 p.m. Monday, April 8, at The Midland Theatre. Tickets are sold out. See midlandkc.com.