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 both look and sound for her second number of the show, the premiere of a brand new song, “The Giver,” that marries C&W with LGBTQ.
“I get the job done,” Roan sang in the refrain of the new song, which shares a theme with “Femininomenon” in making the argument that pleasing a woman is sometimes (or always?) a job best left to a fellow woman.
“All you country boys saying you know how to threat a woman right,” Roan said during a spoken word aside in the song — “Well, only a woman knows how to treat a woman right. She gets the job done.”
For this second appearance late in the show, Roan was still wearing the large red wig with white streaks that marked her initial look when she earlier performed her signature song “Pink Pony Club.” Apart from that, everything was different, all the way to Roan’s background singers and all-female band having switched to old-school denim and Western-wear shirts, while Roan reappeared in a gingham-style halter top, short-shorts and boots that almost could have been right out of “The Dukes of Hazzard.”
Except “dukes” didn’t have much to do with it: Roan was distinctly celebrating the duchesses of Hazzard, with moderately risque lyrics about partners giving and receiving and the assurance that “it’s just in my nature to take it like a taker” and “you don’t need to hurry.”
Cartoon bears and other animated forest animals looked on as Roan’s suddenly fiddle-powered band drove the country banger home.
Although the song title was not known prior to its debut on “SNL,” and fans were guessing from its chorus that it was called “She Gets the Job Done,” NBC posted a portion of the performance on social media afterward with a caption revealing that it is called “The Giver.”
This past week, Roan posted a photo of herself with the LP jacket of her debut album and suggested in the caption that it was about to be supplanted by a new one, though no hint of a timetable for its recording or release was offered. (“Album kinda popped off imo but it is time to welcome a hot new bombshell into the villa,” she wrote, riffing on a catchphrase from the TV reality series “Love Island.”) But her producer/co-writer, Dan Nigro, offered clues to how the sophomore album is going in a recent New York Times interview, saying they’d done five tracks so far — and noting that one of them was a “fun, up-tempo country song” that includes “a fiddle… a new version of Chappell.”
Earlier on “SNL,” Roan performed “Pink Pony Club” and went off-mic for the final pre-chorus so that the studio audience could sing it on her behalf. Perhaps the show’s audio technicians turned the ambient sound up more than normal, but it sounded as if the entire audience might consist of die-hard Roan fans, judging from the volume of the sing-along coming through 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 memory a musical guest has done that — in what felt like a spontaneous exclamation of triumph over just how rousing the performance had been, or even scene-stealer chutzpah.
Roan’s appearance on the show was 13 years in the making, or at least the dreaming. On her social media earlier in the week, she posted a screenshot of a Facebook post she made in April 2011, when she would have been 13, under her pre-stage name, Kayleigh Amstutz, prophetically reading: “I am determined to be on SNL.”
Roan’s move toward country is probably a one-off and not a significant change of direction, since Nigro indicated in his New York Times interview that only one of the songs they were working on for the second album was a country number. (She has also used concerts to premiere another new tune, “Subway,” that is not in a country vein.) Either way, she’s one of several major pop artists who’ve dipped their toe into the genre as of late, with Beyonce and Post Malone both having released country-themed albums this year and Lana Del Rey having been at work on one for some time.
Roan’s new song is not the first lesbian country song, of course. Among them is the Highwomen’s “If She Ever Leaves Me,” and points of comparison in this burgeoning subgenre could come up as a topic of conversation when Brandi Carlile moderates a discussion with Roan and Nigro in Los Angeles this week.
Now, the big question: Will Roan be invited to get the job done with a Grand Ole Opry appearance?
