Chappell Roan and Olivia Rodrigo producer Daniel Nigro on the secret to ‘overnight’ success

Songwriter and record producer Daniel Nigro knew that Chappell Roan’s song “Good Luck, Babe!” was finished when he started to hate it.

It was the production on the chorus that did it—the ‘80s drums, the synth layers, the soaring soprano of Roan’s voice as she sings to a lover who won’t acknowledge her own queerness, “You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling.” Nigro—who has also produced both of Olivia Rodrigo’s albums—was in agony. He began to feel anxious just listening to it. He’d put the track to bed, go back to his family, wake up, go back to the studio, and beat his head against the wall again. Days went by.

“My test is always the fresh ears in the morning test,” he says. Tired ears lead to harsh overproduction. Finally, he just sent it to Roan and their respective managers, who quickly approved it for mixing. Only Nigro didn’t believe them. “It turned out they were like, ‘No we’re just really happy with it and we want you to be finished with the song.’” How do you know something is complete? You call it done and send it off.

For Roan, born Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, finishing the song—her first top 40 hit on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart—was a little more poetic, despite the hassle of having to record it in four different keys to find the right one. “I knew [it] was done when I got butterflies, and that’s how I usually gauge every song, every look,” she says. “If I get butterflies then I know it’s done and it’s correct.”

The success of “Good Luck Babe!” has tipped the scales of Roan’s slow but steady ascent into main pop girl stardom alongside performances at Coachella and NPR’s Tiny Desk. Her album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, peaked at No. 8 on Billboard’s Top Album Sales chart. It’s her moment — and her success has helped cement Nigro’s status as a producer with a golden touch.

In May, Nigro and Rodrigo won the ASCAP Pop Music Songwriter of the Year Award. Roan presented him the award at the ceremony in New York, lauding him for putting out “work that he believes in all with a ‘hey go fuck yourself’ attitude from Long Island.”

But like 26-year-old Roan—whose career started when Atlantic Records signed her a decade ago and was cast into doubt when the label dropped her in 2020—Nigro’s ascendancy has taken time. He’s worked steadily over the past 20 years, first as the frontman of 2000s emo band As Tall as Lions, then as a collaborator with some of the most influential alternative and pop artists of the 2010s and 2020s — Sky Ferreira, Caroline Polachek, Carly Rae Jepsen, and Rodrigo among them.

The long nights in the studio, the perfectionist tendencies turned collaborative spirit, have all been building to this—helping two up-and-coming pop star leap headlong into the mainstream. Roan’s long-gestating overnight success is Nigro’s journey in microcosm. “Things take time,” he says. “It’s a reminder that there’s patience involved in releasing music.”

Nigro grew up in Massapequa, Long Island, in the ‘90s with a mom who forced him into piano lessons and a middle school love for music that was unlocked with Nirvana and Green Day. His dad restrung an old Teisco Del Rey electric guitar and gave it to him for Christmas when he was around 12 years old, alongside a $20 amp; the first song he learned was Nirvana’s “About a Girl.”

His love of grunge and pop punk brought him friends with similar taste, with whom he formed a cover band of Canadian alt rockers Our Lady Peace. The cover band became As Tall as Lions, which got signed to Triple Crown Records when Nigro was about 19, leading him and his bandmates to drop out of college. Though they enjoyed some success after their second album especially, he says by the end, it was just time to move on after making music for over 12 years together.

“Relationships get a little fraught and a little intense,” he says. “It was hard for any one individual person’s ideas to fully get seen-through because we ran the band as a democracy. By 2008, 2009, there was a lot of tension in the band. I was feeling really unhappy and looking for a way to exit.”

After As Tall as Lions broke up, he moved to Los Angeles and reunited with childhood friend, the producer Justin Raisen, who’s worked with Charli XCX, and Angel Olsen, but was then an early career songwriter and producer. Raisen untangled the convoluted industry for Nigro, explaining the process of writing a song, making a demo with one singer, selling it to a different singer entirely. He started having fun with music again.

“When you’re an artist you’re always thinking about, how does this reflect me? What do I wanna say? Who am I?” he says. “There’s this deep-seated feeling of wanting to feel like you’re saying something that is important or special. When I was in a band I took myself a little too seriously in a way that is a little cringe now when I look back.”

He and Raisen would write what Nigro calls “song starters,” little seeds of ideas that they would send to another friend, Ariel Rechtshaid, who was working with Sky Ferreira at the time. They landed on a hit: the lush, yearning, “You’re Not the One.” It felt like a turning point in Nigro’s career.

“This is a little corny, but it felt like a ‘big song’ when we made it,” Nigro says. It was his first “real single” as a songwriter with another artist. It was also the beginning of people reaching out to work with him. He’d go on to write with Caroline Polachek, Conan Gray, Roan, and of course, Rodrigo.

At the ASCAP awards, Roan jokingly played up Nigro’s past as a jingle writer for various fast food chains. Though he says her delivery “[made] it seem like a way bigger thing than it was,” there’s more than a nugget of truth to this bit of his lore. As he was getting his songwriting career off the ground in the early 2010s, he attempted to write music for a pizza franchise and instead found himself in a one-second acting role playing the drums to someone else’s music in the ad. He’s parlayed that knack for commercial work and popular storytelling into a simultaneous role as creative director for Heavy Duty Projects, a production company founded by Rechtshaid that works with brands on advertising campaigns, among other film and social media endeavors.

Roan’s ASCAP speech about Nigro may have exaggerated his resume, but if there’s one thing Roan knows how to do, it’s build a rich mythology around a character people gravitate towards because of the music. Onstage, she’s channeled the Statue of Liberty (complete with green skin), and drag queen Divine. Offstage, she’s put years of work into her songwriting craft with Nigro at her side.

“I was so convinced of [her success] for so long,” he says. The two first met in October 2018, and Nigro can still remember their first writing session in detail — how Roan sat quietly at first, listening as he played a couple ethereal guitar chords…is she into this? He couldn’t tell. The next day they wrote “California,” and the session after that, “Pink Pony Club”—a streak he calls “one of my favorite little combos of songwriting with anybody I’ve ever had in my life. I was just so enthralled [with] what she was creating and what she had to say.”

Even when Atlantic Records dropped Roan, Nigro saw her uncommitted status as an opportunity to bring both of them some more creative freedom. He started his own label, Amusement Records, in 2023, working with Island Records to sign Roan as his first artist. It gave the two full control over the creative and promotional process for her debut album, which came out last fall. Now, Nigro is taking his time finding new acts and looking for a long-term business partner.

Meanwhile, he’s continuing to work with both Roan and Rodrigo, and he says the collaborative process with both is more or less the same; both are highly concept-driven artists, both are open to music discovery and building out the world of an album or song together, and crucially, both know what they like (and what they don’t).

“Dan is an amazing producer who understands my interest in exploring different genres,” Rodrigo says via email. “He gets me and realizes where I want to take the music sonically. For GUTS there was a familiarity and comfort there that in turn supported the creative process and my confidence as a songwriter.”

Pop music loves its producers—Max Martin and Shellback, Timbaland, Mark Ronson, Jack Antonoff, Pharrell Williams, to name a few—and fans tend to have strong opinions on their beloved pop star’s choice of colleague. Producers can bear the brunt of criticism without the acclaim; a bad song is the fault of the collaborator, a good one the hard work of the artist. Stay too long with an artist without innovation (or without hits), and fans will clock it. But Nigro’s journey from buzzy frontman to hitmaker has taught him that a creative partnership changing isn’t the end of the world.

“At the end of the day I’m serving the artist and I’m here to do the best job for [them],” he says. “I always want the artist to feel free enough that if they feel like they’ll be getting creative input better someplace else, they should be doing that. I would hope that it’ll feel like a natural thing to go, ‘Okay cool, yeah we’re good!’”

Roan says that’s unlikely to happen anytime soon. “I’ve been working with Dan for six years and it’s grown to such a lovely creative relationship and friendship,” Roan says. For now, Nigro is content taking a private victory lap that his instincts about Roan were right.

“[I feel a] deep sense of fulfillment,” he says. “I wanted nothing more than for people to listen to Chappell. I’ve been shouting it from a mountain for years—‘Please listen to this, I promise!’”