Chappell Roan’s first feature rewrites Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘expectations’

Chappell Roan had never been a featured artist on anyone else’s song, and her first time is on Olivia Rodrigo’s “expectations”. The remix keeps Rodrigo’s list of the men she will no longer put up with and adds a second verse in which Roan points the same standards at a woman, one who promised to call and never did.

Rodrigo has described the original as “a mantra song”: a set of rules for dating in Los Angeles after a breakup, with no more passive men and no more guys with fake jobs. It sits as the twelfth track on You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, her third album, and debuted at No. 20 on the Billboard Hot 100 when the record came out. Roan replaces none of it. She takes the second chorus and sings the same lines from a woman-loving-woman perspective, switching only the gender, and in the final chorus she lays her own line over Rodrigo’s complaint about passive boys.

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Her verse is a short story: a front-row concert date, a night that gets physical, a promise to call later and three weeks of silence. Roan told Zane Lowe on Apple Music that none of it happened. “That was made up,” she said. “Most of my song is more like a fantasy.” Her defence of the song’s premise was simpler: “To have expectations of people is so valid.”

Rodrigo was just as direct about why she wanted Roan on it. “I was really inspired by Chappell and the attitude and swagger that she had,” she said in the same interview, calling Roan’s yes “a dream come true.” Roan put the occasion plainly: “This is obviously my first feature. I’ve never done this before, so it feels perfect to me.”

The pairing has a long run-up. Roan opened for Rodrigo on both the Sour and Guts tours, before her own songs made her a headliner, and both artists work with producer Dan Nigro, who produced the remix and turns up in its video.

That video, directed by Bardia Zeinali, is a parody of retro television game shows. Several Rodrigos compete on The Big Expectations Show!, hosted by a Johnny Johnson played by David Byrne, who covered Rodrigo’s “drivers license” earlier this year, and a Family Feud-style round sets the two singers’ families against each other. On the OliviaRodrigoVEVO channel it passed four million views in less than a day.

The remix arrived on Thursday, October 15, through Interscope, as the fourth single from an album that opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 in June with 485,000 first-week units, the biggest solo debut of 2026. Limited 7-inch vinyl, CD and cassette editions are on sale through both artists’ stores. Rodrigo is in the middle of the sold-out Unraveled Tour, which has passed a million tickets, and she has been closing most of those nights with “expectations”.

Every one of those shows now ends on a list of what Rodrigo will no longer accept. The one thing the remix has not settled is whether Roan ever walks out to sing her verse of it.

Tags: pop, Olivia Rodrigo, David Byrne, Dan Nigro, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, Chappell Roan

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