Chappell Roan, a self-described thrift store pop star, will transform Soundwell into her “Pink Pony Club” on Thursday, March 9, 2023 in support of her sold-out Naked In North America tour. Tickets may still be available on the secondary ticket market. 

Roan skyrocketed to success in 2022 with a series of hit singles. Her first release, “Naked in Manhattan,” channels Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl,” and adds an early 80s new-wave disco-pop beat. On “My Kink is Karma” she delights in the malicious joy of watching an ex-lover struggle post-breakup. She sings “People say I’m jealous, but my kink is watching you crashing your car, you breaking your heart, you thinking I care. People think I’m jealous, but my kink is karma.”

She teed up her latest single, “Casual,” on TikTok ahead of the song’s release to create a viral buzz. It worked. Her song about the pitfalls of a “situationship” made Billboard’s list of top 100 songs of 2022. With a sold-out tour, four well-received singles, and a full-length debut album due out sometime in the spring, Roan is riding a wave of success she’s been carefully building over the past few years. 

“Die Young,” an original composition she posted on YouTube when she was 17, went viral and landed her a recording contract with Atlantic Records. Then she left her rural Missouri home for Los Angeles to pursue a pop music career. Despite her powerful vocals, the melancholy ballads on her 2017 EP School Nights just didn’t find her audience and in 2020, Atlantic Records ended their affiliation with her just as she started to fine-tune her sound with “Pink Pony Club,” a catchy number with all the camp you’d expect from a song about a go-go dancer at a gay West-Hollywood cabaret. 

Cut loose from Atlantic Records, Roan found herself adrift just as the global pandemic took hold. Without the moorings of a major record label team to guide her, Roan needed to figure out how to proceed as a Do-It-Yourself, independent artist. She found herself back where she started as a teenager–on the Internet–trying to gain a following on TikTok and other platforms. The Atlantic Records experience brought talented people into her orbit like Grammy-winning songwriter and record producer Dan Nigro. Writing songs with Nigro helped Roan build on the success of “Pink Pony Club” and find her independent voice. 

From a period of darkness and uncertainty, Roan emerged with what she calls “slumber party pop.” She blends color, campiness, and pageantry into her infectious disco-pop sound. I plan to catch this rising star when she brings her Naked In North America tour to Soundwell on March 9, 2023. I’m looking forward to the glitter and glam. 

Who: Chappell Roan

What: Naked In North America tour

Where: Soundwell

When: Thursday, March 9, 2023

Tickets and info: https://soundwellslc.com, www.postfontaine.com

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If you want to know how the current Dawes album, “Misadventures of Doomscroller,’ is different from the band’s previous seven albums, think about comparing Frank Zappa to the Rolling Stones or R.E.M.

“I think so much, especially with our kind of music, our scene, there’s all this talk of restraint and there’s all this talk of economy,” Dawes singer/guitarist and main songwriter Taylor Goldsmith observed in a recent phone interview. “Sometimes you’ll hear these records by these monster guitar players or monster musicians and there’s no evidence of that. While I really applaud that when the song calls for that because I think that’s the height of taste, I also think when you can, cut loose, I want to hear it.”

Dawes doesn’t sound like the Rolling Stones or R.E.M. – and no one has ever sounded quite like Zappa. But especially like R.E.M. (a band Goldsmith considers a major influence), Dawes on album has kept songs concise and saved the soloing and improvisation for their live shows.

But when the pandemic hit, Goldsmith and his bandmates, drummer and brother Griffin Goldsmith, bassist Wylie Gelber and keyboardist Lee Pardini, decided for “Misadventures of Doomscroller” to throw out their rule book and take musical liberties they had always eschewed on earlier albums.

“I think a big part of it was just the pandemic shutting everything down and us feeling like who knows if tours will ever come back. If that’s the case, let’s make sure to make the music on our terms,” Goldsmith said. “So we felt we should start embracing this part of us that we maybe felt like we weren’t allowed to express (on studio albums).”

Then there was also the Zappa factor.

 “I think a big discovery for me right before we recorded this album was Frank Zappa, and that, I think was a big catalyst for making this possible in my own brain,” Goldsmith said. “I felt like I was given permission…In listening to Zappa, oh, he’s doing everything he wants and everything he can and he’s really exploring the instrument and experimenting himself and it’s so fun. He’s taking excellence to the extent that he’s capable.

“Now it’s like instead of doing the least amount possible to see if it works, let’s do the most amount possible and see if it still works,” he said.

The seven songs on “Misadventures of Doomscroller” work well indeed. The album opens emphatically with the near-10-minute opus “Someone Else’s Café/Doomscroller Tries To Relax.” Greeting the listener with a snazzy chiming guitar hook, the song features an instrumental segment that moves from jazz-tinged edginess into a fluid guitar solo that introduces the downright pretty second half of the track. Far from feeling jammy, every note of “Someone Else’s Café/Doomscroller Tries To Relax” feels intentional and integral to a song that earns its generous length. The same can be said of other lengthy songs: “Everything Is Permanent,” “Ghost in the Machine” and “The Sound That No One Made/Doomscroller Sunrise.”  

Dawes certainly had built up enough experience playing together and exploring various sonic directions to make good on the ambitious plans for “Misadventures of Doomscroller,” which has recently gotten the deluxe reissue treatment with a full live performance of the album.

Dawes grew out of the post-punk-leaning band Simon Dawes after the 2007 departure of Goldsmith’s songwriting partner Blake Mills. As Dawes, the group pivoted to their familiar folk-rock sound with their 2009 debut album “North Hills.”

The band continued to develop their sound over the next three albums, before taking an adventurous sonic turn on the 2016 album “We’re All Gonna Die.” With Mills producing, the band incorporated a variety of synthesizers and other synthetic elements into the songs, bringing more of an edgy pop-rock accent to their songs without losing their signature folk-pop sound. The 2018 album “Passwords,” continued in a similar vein before the band returned to a more organic sound on the 2020 album “Good Luck With Whatever.” 

Dawes certainly had built up enough experience playing together and exploring various sonic directions to make good on the ambitious plans for “Misadventures of Doomscroller,” which has recently gotten the deluxe reissue treatment with the original album supplemented by a full live performance of the album.

“We’ll definitely go deep into our catalog,” he said. “Not that we’re some big famous band with a bunch of hits, but if we were to play lead singles from all of those albums, we wouldn’t have time for anything else. Inevitably, we would just be playing more or less the very same show from night to night. And we have fans that travel. We have the kind of fans that will come to one or two or three shows in a row. I feel like the only way to help cultivate that and also to help us to stay thrilled on stage is to kind of bounce all over the place. And obviously, we want to play songs that are familiar, and we always do. But instead of playing all five of the most popular songs, we’ll play one or two a night and make sure we’re getting into some songs that we never play for anyone else so that each city feels like we had a moment.”

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Could it be that Andy Frasco is maturing? He’s returning to touring this winter, and fans can expect Andy Frasco & The U.N. to still bring the party on stage (or somewhere in front of the stage when Frasco is crowd surfing). But the singer/keyboardist is toning down the partying and other shenanigans that typically happened on and off stage on past tours. Andy Frasco & The U.N. are coming to the Commonwealth Room on March 3, 2023, and he sat down with Salt Lake magazine’s Allan Scully to talk about his new direction and the upcoming album Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

“I’m doing it for my liver,” Frasco said when he phoned in for a recent interview. “I’m turning 35 this year, I’m 34 (now). I’m all about the party, but I want people to know that I’m a songwriter, too. So I’m just really dialing in my songwriting, really dialing in my musicianship, so I know I can’t blame my partying for my sh***y songs…I love partying and I love giving the people their entertainment, but I also want to give them something to think about.”

The fact is, by the time the pandemic hit in the spring of 2020, Frasco was not in a great place. He’d been drinking too much and doing cocaine and finding his life-of-the-party behavior had left him wondering who his friends were and battling some genuine bouts of depression. 

No one wanted the pandemic, but being forced off of the road gave Frasco the much-needed opportunity to take a hard look at himself, figure out how to get his life in a better place and decide if he still truly loved writing music and going on tour.

“I was just very selfish,” Frasco said, citing one of the contributing factors to his emotional issues. “I was like doing things and not thinking about others. All of a sudden people wouldn’t start calling me back. I was realizing maybe it is me. I always blamed everyone else that I am on an island. But maybe I’m putting myself on an island. So I had to like figure out the (situation) and realize what was making me sad. 

“Before the pandemic, I didn’t want to be there. And I was faking a smile because I was just too depleted,” he said. “I had to look at myself in the mirror, like what are you doing this for if you’re not going to wake up? You preach happiness and you’re not even happy, so why do you keep (doing) it?” 

One significant change was to kick his cocaine habit. He also cut back on drinking, although he admits he still enjoys his beverages. But the supply of Jameson liquor is lasting longer these days, as he and his band have moderated their intake onstage these days.

“There’s still drinking. I’m not going to lie to you there,” Frasco said. “But it’s definitely more toned down. We’re drinking half a bottle of Jameson a night, not the full bottle.”

The changes in behavior won’t surprise those who’ve been paying attention. Especially on the 2020 albums Keep On Keeping On and Wash, Rinse, Repeat., the album that arrived last April, it was clear Frasco wasn’t just offering escapism in his music.

That was a main theme for Frasco after he founded Andy Frasco & the U.N. in 2007, began touring and released the first of eight studio albums in 2010. 

One look at song titles like “Mature As F***,” “Blame It on the P***y” (from 2016’s Happy Bastards) or “Smokin’ Dope n Rock n Roll” and “Commitment Deficit Disorder” (from 2014’s Half a Man) and it was obvious that Frasco and company were bringing the party with funny, sometimes bawdy lyrics, a disregard for rules, decorum (and sobriety), and a rowdy sound that mixed rock, funk, blues, soul and pop.

The approach generated a good bit of popularity, as Frasco and the U.N. began what became a consistent routine of playing roughly 250 shows a year—a pace that continues to this day. Along the way, the band especially caught on in the jam band scene and festival circuit.

But especially with Keep On Keeping On, Frasco started to shift the narrative of his songs to more thoughtful subject matter, a direction that continued on Wash, Rinse, Repeat. Frasco still kept the tone of the lyrics light, while the music on these two most recent albums stayed buoyant and catchy as ever. But Frasco’s lyrics now wrestled with topics like getting older, maintaining his mental health, finding happiness, being considerate and appreciating life as it happens.  

Keep On Keeping On arrived shortly after the pandemic hit, and with touring halted, Frasco didn’t worry about taking the next musical step for quite a while.

Instead, he took to social media. He hosted a video “I Wanna Dance With Somebody” Dance Party and started an irreverent variety show podcast series he called Andy Frasco’s World Saving S***Show. But much of his podcasting work was devoted to a series he calls Andy Frasco’s World Saving Podcast. It features interviews—some of which get downright deep—with musicians and other celebrities, commentary and comedic bits. The series has gained considerable traction and Frasco, who is frequently joined by co-host Nick Gerlach, will continue doing these podcasts even as he returns to a full schedule of touring, songwriting and recording.

With all of this activity, it wasn’t until about six weeks before he was due to return touring in 2021 that Frasco realized he wanted to have new music for the upcoming shows and charged into making Wash, Rinse, Repeat.

He traveled to several cities—Nashville, Charleston, S.C., Los Angeles and Denver—to write and record with other songwriters, a process that helped him sharpen his songwriting chops as the album took shape.

“It was basically like going to songwriting school,” Frasco said. “Like I wrote with 20 different songwriters and I wrote with like 15 different songwriters in Nashville, and I wrote with a couple of guys in Charleston and a couple of guys in L.A., and instead of like the mental state of ‘I know everything,’ I went in there with my mental state of ‘I don’t know anything.’ It kind of helped me grow into the next phase of my career.”

Feeling he was in a creative space, Frasco spent a chunk of last year making a new album that’s now finished and is targeted for release before this summer. The new album reflects a new development in Frasco’s life.

“I think it’s a love album. I finally committed to someone and I’ve been writing about her,” Frasco said. 

The songs, though, aren’t all about romantic bliss.

“It’s scary as hell. I’ve never had a relationship,” Frasco revealed. “I don’t even know what the f*** I’m doing. That’s what I’m writing about. Like is this OK?”

Some of the songs from the next album are popping up in set lists on Frasco’s current tour with his band, along with material from Keep On Keeping On, Wash, Rinse, Repeat. and older fan-favorite songs. 

“We’re testing out the new songs we just wrote to see how they fit with our live show,” Frasco said. “I have two different philosophies when I write songs. Sometimes I write songs for the record and sometimes I write songs for the (live) set. And these new songs, I was really focusing on trying to write it for both. It’s been really nice. It’s given me confidence that I can write songs for both the (album) and for the live show.”

• Who: The Motet with Andy Frasco & The U.N.
• When: Mar 3, 2023
• Where: The Commonwealth Room
• Tickets and Information: thestateroompresents.com

See more music coverage from Salt Lake magazine.