Interlochen Alum Wins Best New Artist At The Grammy Awards

Chappell Roan, one of the breakout pop stars of 2024, capped her meteoric rise to success with a Best New Artist win on Sunday night at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards. As The Ticker reported last summer, Roan is an alumnus of Interlochen Center for the Arts, having spent a summer studying with Interlochen Arts Camp’s songwriting program back in 2014.

Roan went into Sunday night’s Grammy ceremony with six nominations, including nods in all four of the top categories: Album of the Year, Song of the Year, Record of the Year, and Best New Artist. The album nomination came for Roan’s 2023 debut, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, while the song and record nods were for the one-off hit single “Good Luck, Babe!”, which Roan took to number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 last year. “Good Luck, Babe!’ also earned song of the year honors in 2024 from publications like Rolling Stone, The Guardian, and NME. Roan was just the 14th person in Grammy history to secure nominations in all four top categories.

“I told myself if I ever won a Grammy, and I got to stand up here in front of the most powerful people in music, I would demand that labels and the industry profiting millions of dollars off of artists would offer a livable wage and healthcare, especially to developing artists,” Roan said during her acceptance speech, to big cheers from the crowd.

Roan signed her first recording contract in 2015, garnering the attention of Atlantic Records after uploading the song “Die Young” – which she wrote at Interlochen – to YouTube. But Roan’s early work, including the 2017 EP School Nights, failed to gain mainstream traction, and Atlantic ultimately dropped her from its lineup in 2020.

“Because I got signed so young – I got signed as a minor – when I got dropped, I had zero job experience under my belt,” Roan said in her speech. “And like most people, I had a difficult time finding a job in the pandemic, and could not afford health insurance. It was so devastating to feel so committed to my art and feel so betrayed by the system… Record labels need to treat their artists as valuable employees with a livable wage and health insurance and protection. Labels: We got you, but do you got us?”

Best New Artist ended up being Roan’s only win on Grammy night, with Album of the Year going to Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter, and rapper Kendrick Lamar taking home the trophies for both song and record of the year for his 2024 hit “Not Like Us.”

Notably, Roan isn’t Interlochen’s first Best New Artist winner. Back in 2003, Norah Jones won the same trophy in the wake of her smash debut Come Away with Me. Jones attended Interlochen Arts Camp during the summers of 1994 and 1995.