Her kink is… country?
Chappell Roan went from the “Pink Pony Club” to the country club on “Saturday Night Live,” surprising fans by going country in look and sound for her second song of the show, premiering a brand new song, “The Giver” . ”, that C&W marries LGBTQ+.
“I get the job done,” Roan sang in the chorus of the new song, which shares a theme with “Femininomenon” and makes the argument that pleasing a woman is sometimes (or always?) a task best done can be left to a fellow woman.
“All the country boys who say you know how to treat a woman right,” Roan said during a spoken word aside to the song, “Well, only a woman knows how to treat a woman right.” She gets the job done.”
In this second appearance late in the show, Roan was still wearing the big red wig with white stripes that marked her initial look when she previously performed her signature song “Pink Pony Club.” Other than that, everything was different, right down to Roan’s backing singers and all-female band switching to old-fashioned denim and western shirts, while Roan reappeared in a gingham halter top, shorts and boots that looked almost straight out of ‘The Dukes of Hazzard ‘ can come.
Only ‘duckes’ didn’t have much to do with it: Roan was clearly celebrating the Duchesses of Hazzard, with some fairly risqué lyrics about partners giving and receiving and the assurance that ‘it’s just in my nature to look at it as a taker’ and “You don’t have to rush.”
Cartoon bears and other animated woodland animals watched as Roan’s sudden violin-driven band drove the country banger home.
Although the song’s title was unknown prior to its debut on “SNL,” and fans guessed it was called “She Gets the Job Done” based on the chorus, NBC subsequently posted part of the performance on social media with a caption that revealed it’s called “The Giver.”
This past week, Roan posted a photo of herself holding the LP cover of her debut album and suggested in the caption that it was about to be replaced with a new one, although no indication of a timetable for its recording or release was given . (“The album has come out a bit, but it’s time to welcome a new, new bombshell to the villa,” she wrote, using a catchphrase from the TV reality series “Love Island.”) But her producer/co-writer, Dan Nigro , gave clues as to how the second album is going in a recent New York Times interview, saying they’ve made five songs so far — and noting that one of them is a “fun, up-tempo country song” featured “a fiddle…a new version of Chappell.”
Previously on “SNL,” Roan sang “Pink Pony Club” and the microphone went off for the final pre-chorus so the studio audience could sing it on her behalf. Perhaps the show’s audio engineers turned up the ambient noise louder than normal, but it sounded like the entire audience was made up of die-hard Roan fans based on the volume of the sing-along noise coming through the television speakers.
At the end of “Pink Pony Club,” Roan shouted, “Live from New York!”, repeating the show’s traditional cold-open catchphrase—the only time in my memory a musical guest has done that—in what felt as a spontaneous exclamation of triumph over how exciting the performance had been, or even scene-stealing chutzpah.
Roan’s appearance on the show was 13 years in the making, or at least the dreaming. On her social media earlier this week, she posted a screenshot of a Facebook post she made in April 2011, when she would have been 13 years old, under her pre-stage name, Kayleigh Amstutz, in which she prophetically read: “I am determined to on SNL.”
Roan’s move towards country is likely a one-off and not a significant change of direction, as Nigro indicated in his New York Times interview that only one of the songs they worked on for the second album was a country song. (She’s also used concerts to premiere another new song, “Subway,” which isn’t in the country style.) In any case, she’s one of several major pop artists to emerge in the genre, with Beyoncé. and Post Malone both released country-themed albums this year, and Lana Del Rey has been at it for a while.
Roan’s new song is of course not the first lesbian country song. Among them is the Highwomen’s “If She Ever Leaves Me,” and points of comparison in this burgeoning subgenre could become a talking point when Brandi Carlile moderates a conversation with Roan and Nigro in Los Angeles this week.
Now the big question: Will Roan be invited to finish the job with a Grand Ole Opry performance?