How Chappell Roan’s “Good Luck, Babe!” Came to Life

When it comes to pop music, Justin Tranter has the Midas touch. The former Semi Precious Weapons lead vocalist has penned chart-topping smashes for a litany of artists, from Reneé Rapp to Miley Cyrus, Sam Smith, and Kim Petras. Do the albums Chromatica (Lady Gaga), Thank U, Next (Ariana Grande), or Future Nostalgia (Dua Lipa) give you goosebumps? Tranter had something to do with those, too. But despite decades spent writing some of the catchiest hooks, bridges, verses, and melodies of recent pop history, 2024 was a marquee year for Tranter thanks to the breakthrough artist on the tip of every music aficionado’s tongue: Chappell Roan. 

After co-writing “My Kink Is Karma” off Roan’s 2023 debut album, The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess, Tranter reunited with the pop icon-in-the-making for “Good Luck, Babe!,” the April ‘24 single that ignited like wildfire just before festival season and ultimately earned them a 2025 Grammy nomination for Song of the Year, a Recording Academy honor specifically awarded to songwriters. (Daniel Nigro wrote the hit alongside Roan and Tranter.) 

So what’s it like to get a Grammy nod? “It feels amazing for two reasons: One, ['Good Luck, Babe!' is] very possibly my favorite song I’ve ever been a part of in my whole career,” says Tranter. “Two, it’s really fucking hard for pop songwriters to get nominated for Grammys. I do not take this lightly.” Ahead, Tranter pulls back the curtain on how the song came together. Ahead of Music’s Biggest Night, I’ve got just a few words of encouragement for them: Good luck, babes!

You first learned of Chappell Roan when she was unsigned, after Atlantic Records dropped her. What made you want to work with her?
I pressed play on “Pink Pony Club” and was like, She can have the biggest record deal, the worst record deal, no record deal—I don’t care. Let me work with this brilliant, brilliant, brilliant woman.

What’s the inspiration behind “Good Luck, Babe!”?
Chappell was telling me about this girl that she was in love with who was clearly in love with her, but the girl wasn’t ready to accept that. That is such a common queer experience that I went through in my teens and probably four times in my 20s…I could relate to that deeply. It’s hard to remember the writing sessions because things just start happening so fast, but the first lyric that I remember being like, Okay, we have something, is, “You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling.” That set the stage for the whole song.

What is it about Roan as an artist that immediately struck you?
“Pink Pony Club” is such a bold masterpiece, which I can say without any fear because I did not write the song. It starts and feels like something the Gershwins [jazz-age songwriters George and Ira Gershwin] could have written, and then, all of a sudden, it goes into that synth drop and it’s like, Oh, fuck, we’re in 2037! The first chunk of the song feels like it’s 1932 and then all of a sudden we’re in 2032. It’s a masterpiece. I really appreciate when you can hear high-level musicality but it’s still catchy enough to be a pop song, and she does that so well.

Many songs are written by literally dozens of writers, in part because decades-old samples are included and producers shop parts of a track around to different artists. Yet Roan’s music songwriting credits are so tightly edited, which is impressive and unique.
It’s really just about the preferred process. Someone like Chappell just wants to get in a room with the people that she knows and likes to be present for every single piece of the process. No way of doing it is more valid than the other—it’s just how the artist prefers.

How long was the songwriting process for “Good Luck, Babe!”?
For the initial session, which was verse, pre-chorus, chorus, verse, pre-chorus, chorus, I was probably with Chappell and Danny for five, six hours. She went back on tour and then [she and Danny] were finishing other songs and then they reopened it a couple of times—that’s what they’ve told me and what they’ve mentioned publicly, too. The range on that song is like a three-octave vocal range, so to try to figure out what key to put her in, they opened it up a lot more in terms of tweaking the vocal, the production. And then she wrote that brilliant bridge all on her own on a day that I was not there.

The bridge beginning with, “When you wake up next to him, in the middle of the night…”, right?
She says she wrote that bridge in a good five minutes—it fell out of her. My job as a songwriter, since I’m not the producer or the singer, my job was done in five hours. It’s the best bridge of the millennium.

So when did you first get to hear the finalized version of your song?
The song didn’t make her debut album, so I just thought, Oh, I guess that song just didn’t make sense. I had no clue they were working on it to release right before she did Coachella. I was excited about that! She texted me and said, here’s “Good Luck, Babe!” [When my team heard it], they were like, Holy fuck, this song is amazing. Oh, my God! This is the song that’s going to break her, holy fuck. When we wrote it, it was just a couple of chords and voice notes. She didn’t record it that day, so I never had a rough bounce, just very faint memories of the song because I didn’t have a demo. A year-and-a-half later, to get this amazing mix… the slow-down at the end, and her vocal performance, and that fucking bridge that I had nothing to do with. I was just like, Oh, shit! 

Can you share a funny in-studio anecdote or Chappelism fans would appreciate?
About a month after the song came out, someone sent a Tina Turner drag-a-gram—a Tina Turner drag queen showed up to the studio to congratulate us on having a hit song. It wasn’t a hit yet, but we could tell it was going well. So there was a Tina Turner drag queen that showed up to the studio the first time the three of us got back together since the song came out. It’s such a sacred, beautiful thing to write a song with someone, especially something that’s vulnerable.

How has TikTok changed the music industry?
TikTok has made executives care about lyrics, which has been fantastic. Clever lyrics, bold lyrics, crazy lyrics—love it. I’m in this to tell stories. That can be a story as goofy as DNCE’s “Cake by the Ocean” or as vulnerable as “Lose You to Love Me” by Selena Gomez, or it can be a story as powerful as “Good Luck, Babe!” All stories are valid, but I would like to tell them at the highest level I possibly can.

Sonic trends are evident on TikTok. Artists like KATSEYE, for example, have such short songs. I love them, but they’re so short!
I wrote “Tonight I Might” by KATSEYE. I love them and I have another song coming with them in a couple months that I am so proud of and I’m so excited about. It’s a song, song, song, song. There was a bridge to “Tonight I Might,” though, and that bridge was deleted, which is fine, it might not have been a good bridge. Everything serves its own purpose. KATSEYE’s out to take the fuck over. The song of mine they’re doing is one of my favorite lyrics I’ve ever written—ever. For a girl group that dances their ass off and looks this fierce to do such a high-level lyric, I’m like, Oh, shit, they’re gonna go.

Back to your “Good Luck, Babe!” Grammy nomination. Some artists claim not to care about Grammy trophies. As someone deeply embedded in the music industry, what does a Grammy signify to you?
My favorite artists of all time, Tori Amos and Ani DiFranco, I could be wrong, but I don’t think they’ve ever won Grammys. Ethel Cain is my favorite new artist, by far, without question, of the last 10 years. These people have never been nominated for Grammys—or maybe they have, but they definitely haven’t won. I could be wrong. But the music that I deeply, deeply love and listen to for my personal enjoyment, the Grammys don’t even know exists. In some ways, the music fan in me doesn’t give a shit. The person who spends every single day inside of the major label music business… I want a fucking Grammy! Knowing how hard it is for songwriters to win Grammys, if I can actually fucking eek one out, that will be awesome. 

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