Even though the video for Chappell Roan‘s new song, “The Subway,” is set on the New York City subway — and the U.S. city with arguably the most famous subway is New York — Chappell says the song isn’t about the Big Apple at all.
Speaking to Apple Music Radio from the company’s new studio in Los Angeles, Chappell told Zane Lowe, “I actually wrote it about LA, but ‘The Subway’ is just so much more romantic. But it was actually about me hiding in Los Angeles from someone who I was deeply in love with.”
“But we weren’t on bad terms, it was just kind of trying to avoid the coffee shops that we went to and parties,” she told Lowe, according to a press release. “And so that’s where it came from, was, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know how to exist in this city.’ I felt pretty lonely there for many years.”
As for why she announces in the song that she’ll be moving to Saskatchewan if things don’t change, Chappell said, “Because it rhymed. I can’t remember. There was other options, but … we’d already used Boston in [my song] ‘Femininomenon.’ I was like, it needed something ‘on.'”
Regarding her next musical steps, Chappell told Zane, “I just think that ‘The Giver,’ ‘Good Luck, Babe!,’ ‘The Subway,’ they’re all kind of so different, so that’s why I’m just like, ‘I have no idea what the next era is.’”
“That’s the scary part of putting out new music and then people not liking it because it’s not like the music you made before, and so it makes you scared to release stuff. Because you’re like, ‘Well, people aren’t ever going to like it as much as the first one’ and that’s the risk you take every single time.”
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