Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive show news, updates, and more!
The Meaning Behind Chappell Roan's Rousing Hit Song "Good Luck, Babe!"
The singer was on a mission to create a "big anthemic pop song," and that's exactly what she did.
Chappell Roan’s rapid rise to fame will be studied one day in history books. She’s your favorite artist’s favorite artist, she puts on magnetic live shows, and she’s behind banger after banger, from “Pink Pony Club” to “Good Luck, Babe!”
In the past year alone, the singer, whose real name is Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, performed in a now-viral Tiny Desk Concert, which she called her “Super Bowl,” and opened for Olivia Rodrigo's Guts World Tour. She created an infectious TikTok dance for her song “Hot to Go” and performed at Coachella and Lollapalooza, where she amassed one of the festival’s largest audiences of all time. She also performed at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards and appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
RELATED: Olivia Rodrigo Talks Her Friendship with Chappell Roan, Who Sang Backup on GUTS
At just 26 years old, Chappell Roan is clearly unstoppable, and she’s not even close to slowing down. On November 2, Roan will make her Saturday Night Live debut as the episode’s Musical Guest, with John Mulaney as the Host.
Roan has a growing catalog of hits, but one that shot to the top of the charts at record speed is her 2024 single “Good Luck, Babe!” Since its release, the song has been celebrated as an LGBTQ+ anthem, and Roan has talked about how it came to be. Read on to learn all about the meaning behind "Good Luck, Babe!," how it almost had a different name, and why Roan is inspired by the song's success.
What is Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” song about?
As Roan revealed in an April 2024 interview with Rolling Stone, "Good Luck, Babe!" is about “wishing good luck to someone who is denying fate.”
The song’s title nearly called out a specific woman’s name. In a September 2024 interview with French media outlet Konbini, she explained that “originally it was not called ‘Good Luck, Babe!’, it was called ‘'Good Luck, Jane!’”
“But my co-writer and I kept getting in arguments about it, so it became ‘Good Luck, Babe!’” she added. “I wrote it because I fell in love with this girl, and she started dating this f*cking loser of a guy and I was like, ‘Ok, b*tch! Sure, you’re not gay. Like good luck with that!’”
“Then it turned into like, ‘Oh I think this is a story about me.’ Especially the bridge,” Roan told Konbini. “Like only dating men prior to the past couple years, it would have been horrible to wake up in the middle of the night and being like, ‘Oh my God, what have I done?' And thinking about that girl that I fell in love with. It's just a huge statement of like, ‘I told you so.’”
Indeed, the song’s bridge paints this very picture: “When you wake up next to him in the middle of the night / With your head in your hands, you're nothing more than his wife / And when you think about me all of those years ago / You're standing face to face with, ‘I told you so.’”
This message is conveyed in the very first verse of the song: “It's fine, it's cool / You can say that we are nothing, but you know the truth / And guess I'm the fool.”
And again in the chorus: “You can kiss a hundred boys in bars / Shoot another shot, try to stop the feeling / You can say it's just the way you are / Make a new excuse, another stupid reason / Good luck, babe.”
“I was just wanting to write a big anthemic pop song,” Roan told Rolling Stone, adding that she wrote it in just three minutes with songwriters Justin Tranter and Dan Nigro. “The song was a b*itch to write … I felt so much anger. I was so upset...It was a perfect storm.”
RELATED: Chappell Roan Belts "Good Luck, Babe!" After a Hysterical Tonight Show Interview
“Good Luck, Babe!” is part of a new chapter
Roan declared in an April 2024 TikTok that “Good Luck, Babe!” is the “new theme song of the next chapter” following the mega success of her debut album The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess. She later confirmed on Elton John's Rocket Hour that the song is part of a “new series of work.”
“I’m just gonna try to write songs that I absolutely love, but I don’t have a plan,” she told Elton John with a giggle about an upcoming album.
In October 2024, Roan teased fans that new music is on the way with a reference to Love Island. "Album kinda popped off imo but it is time to welcome a hot new bombshell into the villa," she captioned a post on Instagram that featured photos of her with a microphone and holding her first album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess.
RELATED: You'll Play Kelly Clarkson & Miranda Lambert's Chappell Roan Cover Over and Over Again
Chappell Roan is inspired by the success of “Good Luck, Babe!”
"Good Luck, Babe!" has reached over 400 million listeners on the radio and has been streamed more than 887 million times on Spotify. The song's popularity only continues to grow and in a June 2024 interview with Australian TV program Triple J, Roan said she plans to use the organic process that created “Good Luck, Babe!” as a “blueprint” for future songs.
“Really what I did with ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ is I just wrote a song that I loved and put it out and that is going to be the blueprint for everything else,” she shared. “So it inspires me to be like ‘Oh, I can have success with something that I love' … It’s really sick."
