Like the drag performers who inform her visual presentation, Chappell Roan knows that playing to the rafters is sometimes the best way to get at something deep and true. Think of how the schmaltzy hook of “Pink Pony Club” accentuates its camp fantasia, or how the bravura vocal theatrics of “Good Luck, Babe!” make its narrator’s best wishes feel like a matter of life and death. At first, Roan’s new single “The Giver” appears far less weighty—a jaunty ditty about knowing you’re the only one who can really satisfy your lover—but it tells us more about her than almost any of its predecessors. “I can’t call myself the midwest princess and not acknowledge country music,” Roan said in an interview on the Amazon Music Country Heat Weekly podcast. “That’s what’s around me in grocery stores. That’s what is playing on the bus.”
And “The Giver” is unapologetically country, complete with banjo, rollicking fiddle leads, and barroom singalong “na-na-na”s. Roan cited Big & Rich’s “Save a Horse (Ride a Cowboy)” and Alan Jackson’s “Chattahoochee” as influences, but what I hear is Shania Twain—debuting the song on Saturday Night Live last year, Roan even offered her own take on the “This is what a woman wants” ad-lib from Twain’s 1995 single “Any Man of Mine” (this, sadly, didn’t make it into the studio version). A great country song uses a set of pre-established codes and signifiers in hopes of telling a new story, and “The Giver” proves Roan can do it handily. “Ain’t got antlers on my walls/But I sure know mating calls,” she sings over production from Dan Nigro that chugs like a train and revs like a pickup truck. “I can close my eyes/And have you wrapped around my fingers like that.” Don’t call it a crossover; just call it another genre conquered.
