World-historic lines come around every now again in pop music—lines that distill the magic, hysteria, horniness, and melancholy of the genre’s most frequent and sacred subjects: the crush and its tragic relative, unrequited love. “You’d have to stop the world just to stop the feeling” is one such line. 

One way to read it is pretty straightforward. It’s a big feeling, and pop is all about Big Feelings. But another way to read it is that desire can be a force intent on destroying the world that would deny it its proper flourishing.

Jack taught me how to appreciate pop even more than I already did. With my whole body, with a lot of sweat, with drama, respect. I am thinking of what he’d say if he saw me earnestly writing this about him, about Chappell Roan, about “world-historic” lines, about the abolition of an unjust world, about the burning calamity of a futile crush. He’d say, Oh Astrid. 

Oh, Jack. I love you!

There’s no deep reasoning behind choosing ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ to be a part of this concert. The repertoire for Wild Combination was always meant to be a celebration of Polyphony and our strengths as a community, and to highlight all the things that we do best: creating long and captivating medleys, arranging music few choirs would dare to touch, and performing hyper-mainstream songs by LGBTQ+ icons with aplomb—all with no sheet music, so that you can see every emotion on our faces as we look out over our audience.

It was a given that Polyphony would sing a Chappell Roan song. The only questions were “When?” and “Which one?”. After I moved to London in July 2024, Jack had promised me that so long as I wanted to be involved with Polyphony, I could be. He said that he wanted the next concert to be fun. This song had been a major hit during the UK summer, so it just seemed an obvious song to pick.

Then summer was over, and in October the colder weather came, and Jack left. The grief of losing Jack sucked the colour and joy from everything and I didn’t want to work on the arrangement. The studio recording of ‘Good Luck, Babe!’ sounded too polished, overproduced, and uninspiring. Eventually, the live performance from the 2024 MTV VMAs reignited my interest, as I watched Chappell perform with a similar expressiveness and realness that I experienced when I sang with Polyphony.

Chappell’s voice is strong, but it catches when she can’t keep up with the lines; she inhales audibly and her eyes squeeze shut as she belts out that cathartic “I told you so!” at the climax of the song. She has a sense of ease as she moves around the stage, and you can tell that she loves to be there. It’s not a perfect vocal rendition, and neither are the performances that Polyphony puts on, which might be why I love the live version more than the studio version.

In recent years, putting on Polyphony shows hasn’t always come with ease, and finally I knew that I would try my best to reintroduce that feeling of ease to the choir through my arrangement. I hope the choir has found enough space in the song that they are able to enjoy every moment of performing it to an audience. Not everything needs to be an extreme challenge, especially after the year that we have had as a community.

“You’d have to stop the world, just to stop the feeling.” This line has haunted me as I’ve applied it to so many different aspects of my life in the past year. You’d have to stop the world to stop me missing Jack, the choir, and everyone and everything at home in Sydney. You’d also have to stop the world to stop me feeling so proud of everyone for coming together as a community, and finding love and comfort in singing with each other.