Always show up for the opener at your local all-ages club. You might see Chappell Roan.

Chappell Roan played The Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis in 2018. I caught up with the kid who covered it for Reflektor Mag.

Regular readers of this newsletter have likely noticed I don’t have much of a relationship with pop music. When an artist hits a certain echelon of fame, I just start to tune out. It isn’t as if I’m impervious to the charms of a masterfully crafted pop song, it’s just not the kind of art I typically engage with.

To be clear, I recognize that’s on me, not the pop stars.

I just love an underdog. I can give you a coherent radio interview about an underappreciated record from Bloomington, Indiana in 1973. But I have had almost no relationship with any act in the Top 40 for roughly the last 15 years. And that’s fine.

Call it hipsterdom. Call it snobbery. Call it whatever you want. On some level, I like to feel like my support has made a tangible difference for the artists whose records and concert tickets I purchase. Taylor Swift is doing just fine without me. Good for her. Get it, Taylor.

Few moments in music over the last decade have made me feel less in touch with the zeitgeist than the colossal crowd Chappell Roan held in her palm during her set at Lollapalooza in Chicago in 2024. The audience hung on every word, singing and dancing in unison. Just watch her perform “ HOT TO GO!” from her 2023 breakthrough The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess on Island Records.

The performance had a Tik Tok element to the dance instructions that was tough for me to wrap my head around. I’m not judging. I just don’t use that app. The Lollapalooza set was my introduction to Chappell Roan. For fans, it was the culmination of a meteoric rise.

One person following that rise was Carmel, Indiana native, fellow musician and occasional music writer, Maxwell Denari. Recently, I learned through a tweet from my dear friend and Indianapolis music writer Seth Johnson that Denari reviewed Roan’s set at Indy all-ages venue Hoosier Dome alongside British singer-songwriter Declan McKenna for Reflektor in 2018. As someone who has attended shows at Hoosier Dome, this was mind-blowing information. I was struck by the prescience of Denari’s review.

“The young singer-songwriter crafts all of her songs with the acuteness of a veteran,” he wrote at the time. “Explaining things we all tend to go through but… in such a heavy, descriptive and gut-wrenching ways. Surrounding her vocals with beautiful guitar work and piano melodies, which provides such deep extravagant, emotive qualities to her songs.” Not bad for a 21 year-old Ball State student.

Roan’s tour was in support of her 2017 School Nights EP, released on Atlantic Records. Atlantic would drop her after the modest response to the release, constituting one of the biggest flubs from a major label in recent memory. If only they had read Denari’s review, maybe they would have recognized the breakthrough talent they were sitting on.

For his part, Denari doesn’t give his younger self too much credit. He was there in a journalistic capacity, in large part to cover McKenna. He just happened to get his socks knocked off by the opener. “Declan McKenna, even in 2018 playing a 150-capacity Hoosier Dome room—that was pretty insane too,” Denari said. “He had that big song Brazil that came out in 2014, and that song was massive.”

“I didn’t think I would ever see somebody before they got absolutely massive in the way she has done in the last twelve months, specifically,” Denari said. “Everyone has one of those stories about an artist they saw before they exploded. Mine isn’t any more unique than anyone else’s. It’s exciting for me, just as a music lover. I do think she’s very talented, and I’ve thought that since the beginning.”

Denari’s lesson from this experience is simple: Always show up for the opener.

“You never know who’s gonna be there. You never know who’s gonna play, even if people don’t get uber famous like [Chappell Roan],” he said. “Her music now is different and better, most would say, you could see some very interesting ideas. You can hear the changes in her voice. There were some things that were developed, but not changed, that came through as she got older and found out what she wanted to do.”