Chappell Roan – The Subway

I don’t know what it is, but I know that we must blurb about her…

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Nortey Dowuona: …is a foul and beautiful place to be.
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Claire Davidson: Despite its status as a beloved staple of her live shows, Chappell Roan was reluctant to release a formal recording of “The Subway,” fearing that the studio environment would compromise the spacious stage atmosphere that accentuates the song’s wistfulness. Fortunately for us all, she had no reason to fear, as the song’s official release comes about as close as possible to evoking the bittersweet, lovelorn melodrama that made the track so irresistible in the first place, even in bootleg form. The guitar melody, bright even while cloaked in reverb, gives Roan a perfect sonic mirror for her talent of infatuation with an enigmatic city girl, which, despite their brief interaction, leaves her engulfed in fantasy about what might have been—a dynamic that feels as fraught with bliss as it does pain, knowing that they’ll likely never meet again. What makes the track’s distraught pining feel earned, though, is Roan’s emphasis on just how lonely the experience feels: even as she has sex with other partners, she still can’t help but envision this girl, painting a vivid picture of their life together that always reveals itself to be a mirage. (In that sense, she was right to compare it to “Casual.”) When the heady swells of vocal harmony on the chorus give way to the agonized, chill-inducing belting on the outro, you can practically see the tears streaming down Roan’s face as she laments her choice not to pursue this girl—”she got away-ay-ay-ay“—bursting the bubble of her imagination into a very real, very overwhelming heartbreak. I don’t say this lightly for an artist as accomplished as Roan: “The Subway” is her best song to date.
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TA Inskeep: An almost painfully well-written song, reminiscent of mid ’70s Elton John in its bigness and its production. Roan continues to show off her vocal chops, too.
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Holly Boson: “Find a second decade,” I complained, and the monkey’s paw curled; now we’re all in an endless early 90s supermarket. Her lyrics never looked good on the page, but now they don’t scan on a melody either, and while she tones down her kamikaze nodule-begging yowling, she comes off as if she has no idea what a song might ask her to do instead. Giving it one point for the change in setting from the trailer park to the big city, a subtle allusion to the life-ruining instant megafame that has no place in the endless heartbreak fantasia that people expect of her.
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Jel Bugle: Mature new sound! Cool video about Cousin Itt! It’s nice, innit? 
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Alfred Soto: Not bad as a Voices from the Beehive number.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Not nearly annoying enough.
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Andrew Karpan: Cocteau Twins-playlist core taken to surprisingly majestic, even opulent, heights. Yet ultimately revealing about the limitations of its form; when the song kind of goes nowhere, it sputters like mournful subway doors.
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Julian Axelrod: “The Subway” has existed for so long (one year) in so many forms (live performances, bootleg clips of live performances, etc) that it almost feels miraculous to have it out in the world. Its protracted birth makes it feel like a relic uncovered in the archives, but it also just doesn’t sound like any other song out right now. It stays in a Sixpence None the Richer sway for two whole verses, switches into a lower gear as it tiptoes through the hushed bridge, then uncorks that massive chorus almost three minutes in and rides it into the sunset. The nearly a cappella outro recalls the 90’s alt-rock glory days — partly because it sounds like the end of the Cranberries’ “Dreams,” and partly because that was the last time a pop star could be a normal person. Congratulations to anyone who already owns property in Saskatchewan.
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Ian Mathers: I’m very mildly irked that I heard this described as “shoegaze” before I heard it, because that sounds great to me and “The Subway” probably fills that brief less than, I don’t know, some of the versions of “Casual” I’ve heard. None of that is the song’s fault, and as someone who still loves every song on the debut (including the ballads! “California” might be my favourite song of hers right now!) the fact that the three songs we’ve got since have all been that level of quality and have been as varied as the debut was seems like a very, very good sign to me. And yes, as a known ambiguous lyrics pervert, I love the sliding between “she’s got a way” and “she got away” during the end.
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Joshua Lu: When Roan performed this live, the dominant emotion she presented was frustration. It was a choice that made sense for festival crowds — people love screaming and screaming angrily — but the studio version’s turn to resignation feels more genuine to the song’s nature, as if this was how it always existed. Roan is arguably the most distinctive songwriter in the zeitgeist right now, able to wrap her signature frank sexuality (“break routine during foreplay”) and out-of-left-field humor (“moving to Saskatchewan”) in this pensive sadness. This natural finality is presented gently, progressing like a fading sunset or a rotting fruit as she waits for the strength to move on. Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
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Will Adams: What I wrote about the “The Giver” mostly applies here: Chappell has constructed a dream pop costume, albeit the most ornate, detail-oriented dream pop costume you’ve ever heard. The references are clear, the vocals are splendid, and the lyrical conceit is tried and true. But somehow I don’t get the same blissful rush from “The Subway” as I do from not only the cited reference points, but from contemporary acts like Hatchie or Vitesse X or Pearly Drops. Maybe it’s the bridge spelling out its “she’s got a way”/”she got away” wordplay, or that I can’t fully relate to the sentiment because I live in a city with a meager subway system. (There’s a line that will eventually be extended to where I live in the westside… in 2027, if that.)
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Hannah Jocelyn: It takes a LOT for me to forgive bad production, to forgive vocals mixed as strangely as these — those piercing overtones at 3:08 are inexcusable for a major label release from the biggest and best pop star to emerge in the last few years. The lo-fi effects that were endearing in “Good Luck, Babe” (apparently an artifact of running the drums through an early sampler) is unbearable here. What happened to the low end? What happened to making a big song actually sound big instead of a Danish hypnagogic pop album cut? And yet, the song itself is the best ballad she’s ever made, miles beyond “Picture You” and even “Casual” in how impassioned and sincere it is. No winks, no sexually explicit love affairs, no camp; she’s just heartbroken, and even the Saskatchewan line isn’t delivered like it’s funny (though yeah it obviously it is). I’ve heard enough sapphic breakup songs from my time in the NY singer-songwriter trenches to have heard lines like “somebody wore your perfume… I had to leave the room” done better — if you’re curious, my favorite example is Belle Shea’s lyric “I had to leave the synagogue, I couldn’t bear to hear your name”, on a song called “Leah”. Roan sells it anyway, and honestly it’s refreshing to hear a sapphic torch ballad done this well after the year’s been dominated by boring men and the big-ticket queers have often disappointed me. Also, it used the “Somewhere Only We Know” chord progression, and as someone who swoons every time she hears a “Chasing Cars” cover by a woman, [8] is the floor. But I hope she ditches Dan Nigro. She has the potential to do something truly insane and I don’t think she’ll get there with someone whose signature sound is deliberately chintzy. I can’t resist a Billy Joel reference, especially when it’s a deep cut.
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Dave Moore: About twenty years ago, my partner told me that she couldn’t eat Subway sandwiches because all of the elements of the sandwich tasted the same. It bothered her that she was technically eating bread, meat, cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, but the only thing that registered was “food-like mush.” I never ate at Subway again. 
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