Chappell Roan's Hair Was the Main Character in “The Subway” Music Video

Chappell Roan's long, curly red hair is both envy-inducing and one of her biggest identifiers. So it made perfect sense that the artist decided to make her long locks central to the plot of the music video for her most recent single, “The Subway.”

More than a year after Roan debuted “The Subway” at multiple festival performances, fans were finally able to listen to the mysterious song in full after snippets went viral on TikTok. On August 1, Roan released the highly anticipated song with a music video to match the New York City theme.

In the lyrics of “The Subway,” the singer laments about a breakup and seeing reminders of her ex on the subway and around the city. The song opens with a hair-themed lyric: “I saw your green hair/ Beauty mark next to your mouth/ There on the subway/ I nearly had a breakdown.”

In one scene, Roan gets out of a yellow taxi as her dramatically long hair gets caught in the door. She is then dragged down the street wearing an oversized suit as her hair remains stuck in the door.

Toward the bridge of the song, in which Chappell Roan belts out: “She's got, she's got a way,” which turns into, “She got away,” the musician is shown on a windy New York City street emotionally singing the lyrics. In this moment, her long red hair is cut short to a cute bob — which is a very new look for Roan.

Roan shared some behind-the-scenes snapshots of the music video shoot on her Instagram, writing how “proud” she is of how it turned out. She also mentioned debuting the single at Gov Ball in New York last year while dressed in Statue of Liberty drag.

“Obviously not knowing this really chaotic year would follow the performance, it didn’t really leave me the time to build the world the song deserved,” Roan wrote on Instagram. “But finally we are here.”

She continued: “I def ripped my hair out trying to figure out the puzzle of how this song should feel musically and visually and emotionally, luckily there are some to spare.”

Chappell Roan worked with hair stylist Lacy Redway to create the extra-long mane of hair that is seen spilling down from a fire escape in New York — looking more like Rapunzel than Chappell Roan. Redway shared a video from the filming, writing that the process was a “labor of love.”