This spring, aspiring “indie outlaw” singer Sarah Gross performed a Patsy Cline-ified cover of “Red Wine Supernova” at a gig in Long Island. “Rip Hank Williams he would have loved Chappell Roan,” she wrote when she uploaded the video to TikTok in April, with a caption that’d soon become prophetic: “The honkytonk-ification of Chappell Roan is upon us.”
If you go to a country show in 2024, there’s a decent chance you might hear some Roan. The “Hot to Go” singer is quickly becoming the latest blockbuster pop act most likely to be covered by Nashville star. Kacey Musgraves, who hung out with the Midwestern princess earlier this summer, is covering “Pink Pony Club” every night of her new tour.
Earlier this week, songwriter Caylee Hammack released her solo banjo rendition of “Good Luck, Babe!”, Roan’s biggest hit, and not unrelatedly, her most popular country cover du jour. Roots-leaning country acts like Kaitlin Butts, Silverada, and Josiah and the Bonneviles have all interpreted the song in recent sets.
Country acts covering pop acts is nothing new. The longstanding practice, especially at live concerts, serves a number of purposes: It can draw in country-skeptical members of the crowd, help position country singers who themselves are looking to cross over and expand their sound, and also make a musicological point about the arbitrariness of genres. Replace a synth with a fiddle, and chances are the pop song becomes a country tune. (Country isn’t the only genre going all in on Chappell Roan: Blink-182, Dismemberment Plan, and Tom Morello have all covered or played along to her songs). There’s also a viral incentive as an artist to associate oneself with the buzziest act in the country. Josiah and the Bonnevilles, a fast-rising folk act who got big posting acoustic covers, was early to the acoustic Roan trend, releasing his cover of “Good Luck, Babe!” in June.
It helps that Roan’s songs lend themselves particularly well to country arrangements. The genre is a less obvious, but nonetheless major part of her musical DNA — listen to her yodel her way through “Guilty Pleasure.” In fact, in her Rolling Stone cover story, the singer talks about having written a country song for her next album, after growing up listening largely to Christian rock and country music as a teenager in Missouri. “I just didn’t really identify with it at the time,” she said earlier this year. “Now I identify with country music in such a different way. I think it’s so camp and fun.”