Chappell Roan reflected on how growing up with country boys shaped her personality and she learned to speak up for herself.

The 27-year-old popstar, who just released her first country song, The Giver, paid tribute to her Missouri background in the track.

In an interview with Apple Music, the Grammy-winner shared, “you know who has treated me the best and the worst? Country boys.”

“They treated me the nicest and they’ve also treated me the worst because—this is in high school—and that’s what I grew up around,” she added.

Revealing the reason for her confidence, she said, “Those are the boys I grew up around and that’s how I learned to stand up for myself, because you’re not going to look at me and be like, ‘Shh, shh, shh.’”

Growing up in an environment like that, Roan said, she learnt “that I am never going to have this done to me ever again,” and was “never going to have someone put their hand up and say, ‘Stop talking.’”

“I learned from a lot of the boys that I grew up around who were influenced by their fathers, and how these roles as, like, ‘I’m a man, so you speak after me.’ I began my confidence in feeling kind of inferior to a lot of the boys around me growing up.”

Referring to her incident with the photographer at the 2024 MTV Video Music Awards, she said, “And so whenever I pointed out at that photographer on the red carpet at the VMAs, I heard boys at my freaking high school telling girls to shut the… up.”

The Good Luck, Babe! hitmaker went on to say that she had to learn to respond to misogyny, and now, “I don’t care that I was raised to be ladylike. I don’t care. I don’t care about being trashy. I don’t care about looking sexy. These are all things I had to unlearn.”