How Young Women Became the Music Industry’s Most Powerful Collaborators
Chappell Roan can’t remember if it was 2020 or 2021 when she saw a cowgirl-themed collage on her Instagram Explore page and started following its creator, Ramisha Sattar. By then, Sattar had been crafting and collaging for years, contributing to Rookie Mag as a teen, and incorporating animations into her designs while studying at the University of Texas at Dallas. “After following each other for a couple of years, we started working together on some merch—stickers, tattoo sheets, T-shirts, and key chains,” Sattar, 25, says. Today, she is the platinum-selling pop star’s creative director and best friend.
Roan and Sattar make up just one of many such pairings in contemporary pop, where rising female stars are opting to work with friends as creative collaborators. Running down the list of the most talked-about projects released by women last year—from Charli XCX’s Brat to Gracie Abrams’s The Secret of Us to Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet to Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal—one commonality emerges: the presence of young women in the room during the making of them, from songwriters to sound engineers, and the level of familiarity between the artists and their chosen team.
While vastly different, both sonically and aesthetically, all of these projects share an irresistible mashup of humility and wit—and undeniable success, both critically and commercially. It would seem that in today’s oversaturated pop landscape, the one thing capable of breaking through the noise is unadulterated authenticity, and these stars’ intimate collaborations just might be the secret sauce to achieving it.
“There’s something about the nature of these relationships that feels very different because they’re set up to affirm what the musician wants to project rather than what a producer or label might want them to project,” says Sophie Gilbert, author of Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves. She cites a moment in a recent interview between Jessica Simpson and Ashlee Simpson Ross in which the sisters described the early aughts pop world as being full of “so many men in suits telling you what you’re supposed to be.”
Ramisha Sattar and Chappell Roan at the 67th Annual Grammy Awards
Such a scene couldn’t be farther from the working relationship described by Sattar and Roan. “When we’re in person, it goes like lightning,” Roan says, adding that they made her album cover for The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess “in like two hours at a coffee shop in L.A.” The word “fun” comes up a lot (32 times in my 20-minute conversation with Sattar). But for Roan and Sattar, “fun” is pretty much the entire point. “She has become a creative mentor to me because she’s so in tune with what is fun and silly and what honors her inner child, which is really what I am trying to do,” Roan says of Sattar. “She’s been there for me through thick and thin, and it’s been a hell of a ride.” On social media, the two seem inseparable, posting ASMR videos on the way to the Grammys and daily renditions of “The Giver” TikTok dance. Roan adds that she was grateful Sattar joined her for her Paris Fashion Week debut last month: “I would have crumbled without her.”
Sattar and Roan at the McQueen fall/winter 2025 show
Likewise, fans of Abrams are no doubt familiar with Audrey Hobert, the singer-songwriter’s best friend and writing partner (who, incidentally, has been teasing her own music on TikTok in recent days). Their sisterly bond is apparent whether they’re making silly TikToks or cracking up while describing the “very vulgar” version of “That’s So True” that they wrote on Electric Lady’s rooftop after a few drinks.
During the making of her 2024 album, The Secret of Us, Abrams lived with Hobert, whom she’s known since childhood. Writing with her had a freeing effect. “I always struggled going against the grain of how pop music should be structured and the seriousness with which people approach writing sessions in Los Angeles,” she told Spin in May of last year. “But writing with Audrey, we were just talking shit every day, lighting a joint with tears in our eyes from laughing. We know each other so well. We kept each other honest.”
Close-knit collaborations are also carrying over into more traditional creative pairings. While a few years ago, a budding songwriter might have churned out a demo and then shopped it around, or, in some cases, collaborated directly with a pop star for a one-off writing session, today, many are creating lasting bonds with artists over several years, getting to know their idiosyncrasies and deepest secrets. See: Amy Allen’s Instagram gallery of behind-the-scenes snaps from the making of Sabrina Carpenter’s Short n’ Sweet album, expressing gratitude over “gaining a new sister in the process.” The result: chart-topping songs that break through because of their non-formulaic specificity, honesty, and, at times, odd singularity. (Hello, “that’s that me espresso.”)
Often times, the fragile yet powerful dynamic of female friendship will play out in the songs themselves, whether it’s Charli XCX and Lorde’s sincere, soul-healing exchange for their “Girl, So Confusing” remix or the campy body-horror video for Carpenter’s “Taste” (a song she wrote with Allen and Julia Michaels), which acknowledges—then takes the piss out of—female rivalry.
Amy Allen and Sabrina Carpenter at the Billboard + NMPA Grammy Week Showcase in February 2023
Another artist who has mastered this melding of vulnerability and dark humor with the help of female collaborators is Doechii—and the 26-year-old is doing so in hip-hop, a genre that, like most, has historically been seen as difficult for women to break into without a male mentor. While the self-dubbed Swamp Princess has received copious co-signs from powerful men in the music industry, she consistently shouts out her female collaborators from award stages. During a poignant acceptance speech for Best Rap Album at the Grammys this past February, she thanked God, her mom, her label, and then her engineer, Jayda Love “for everything she did.” The two have been working together since the summer of 2021, when Love happened to be the engineer on call at the Los Angeles studio where Doechii's team had reserved time. Love was instantly impressed with the young rapper and wound up becoming one of her most consistent collaborators and fiercest supporters, defending Doechii’s vision for her breakout mixtape, Alligator Bites Never Heal, when label reps suggested altering its chronological narrative sequencing.
Love also pushed Doechii to be as raw as she needed to be to tell her story on standout tracks like “Denial Is a River.” This March, she and DJ Miss Milan were called upon to present Doechii with the Woman of the Year award at Billboard’s Women in Music event. “She brings out an amazing sense of honest sisterhood in everyone she works with, encouraging us all to stand out in our own ways,” Milan said of Doechii. “My girls,” Doechii commented on a video of the presenters, adding a heart-eyes emoji.
Jayda Love and Doechii at the 2025 Billboard Women in Music event
It’s no surprise that today’s female artists are demanding more autonomy over their careers. After all, many of them grew up absorbing cautionary tales of oppressive management and Svengali-type relationships, and they’re aware of the various forms of exploitation in the music industry that persist to this day. “Stars are a lot savvier now,” Gilbert says. “They’re mindful of how rife abuse has been in music. It’s impossible not to be—we’ve had so many stories come out, even in recent months.” Plus, she adds, they’re also protective of their image, and determined to dictate their own public personas. “The women of contemporary pop have grown up with social media,” Gilbert continues. “They understand that it’s the predominant 21st-century art form in a lot of ways, and they’re good at it.”
This expertise and hypervigilance is apparent in every aspect of their visual presentation. While in theory, the videos for Christina Aguilera’s “Dirrty” (directed by David LaChapelle) and Miley Cyrus’s “Wrecking Ball” (directed by Terry Richardson) follow the same trajectory of, say, Sabrina Carpenter’s “Bed Chem” performance at last month’s BRIT Awards, mainly in their attempt to shed their respective stars’ Disney image for a more adult one, the latter just feels different, Gilbert says: “Sabrina Carpenter is so self-aware. There’s an irony in the tongue-in-cheek aspect of her outros,” the one-off innuendo-filled last lines of her song “Nonsense” that she changes up at live performances. While some (namely, Sinéad O’Connor), worried Cyrus was allowing herself to be “pimped” with regards to the suggestive “Wrecking Ball” video, few seem to be questioning who is calling the shots when it comes to Carpenter’s image. “She’s sexy, and she’s sex-positive, but it’s in this way that is very much defined by her,” Gilbert says.
“By working with other women, they can take authority of their sexuality in a way that they maybe couldn’t if they were working with male producers.”
Gilbert posits that this could be another consequence of choosing young female collaborators. “By working with other women, they can take authority of their sexuality in a way that they maybe couldn’t if they were working with male producers,” she says. For example, Doechii can tell Jayda Love that she wants the beginning of “Fireflies” to sound “like a vagina opening up,” and Love will know exactly what she means. “If you said that to a man,” Gilbert adds, “they’d interpret it completely differently.”
As more stars refuse to play by the old rules, it’s becoming clear that when visionary young women are allowed to steer their own ships—including in the high-stakes world of big-budget pop music—everyone wins. While the most recent USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative study showed little improvement in the number of female artists and women working behind the scenes in the music industry, next year’s report could indicate a bump. At the Grammys this past February, for instance, women took home awards for Album of the Year (Beyoncé), Best New Artist (Chappell Roan), Songwriter of the Year (Amy Allen), and Best Rap Album (Doechii), among many others. And the fact that the three headliners for this year’s Primavera Sound festival are women (Chappell Roan, Charli XCX, and Sabrina Carpenter) also feels like a victory.
Doechii and Abrams at the 2025 Billboard Women in Music event
Almost a decade ago, Sage Adams was a 19-year-old poli-sci student at Howard University doing “art stuff” on the side as a founding member of the Art Hoe Collective when she came across a picture of SZA while scrolling Instagram. “I had never seen her before,” Adams says. “I just really liked her outfit.” She thought, “If I had access to all the fashion shit I wanted, this is an outfit I would wear,” and left a comment saying as much. At the time, SZA, then in her mid-20s, was scouring social media for people to cast in one of her videos, and something about Adams caught her eye. “She messaged me and was like, ‘Hey, I like your outfits too, what’s up?’” Adams remembers. The video never happened, but they started talking and connecting over difficult things they’d dealt with as children and the resulting anger and drive to prove the naysayers wrong. “I feel like, if people were made in factories, our factories would be in the same neighborhood,” says Adams, who uses she and they pronouns.
At some point, SZA asked Adams if they’d like to come to California to help her put together the visual elements of her debut album, Ctrl. “She sent me a file of 500 images and was like, ‘This is the vibe.’ I just went through and sorted the images and decided on treatments,” Adams says. “I would describe it as the easiest job I’ve ever had, but it’s always so easy to ideate with her. She knows what she wants, which is awesome.” Adams wound up shooting the album cover, filming the video teasers, designing stages, and sitting in on meetings for every music video. “I was mainly just trying to advocate for my friend,” Adams says. “When you’re that young, and someone takes a chance on you—it just made me really motivated for people to believe in her as much as she believed in me.”
Their friendship made the collaboration flow easily, but it also added pressure. “It’s like when your friend has a baby, and they leave you with the baby, and you’re like, ‘I cannot kill this thing.’” She laughs, but then doubles down on the weight she felt as a 19-year-old creative director, crafting the visual identity of an album that would exist long after she was gone. “It was more than just doing a job. It was like, ‘This is my friend’s baby, and we’re going to make sure it’s raised right.’”
While Adams wouldn’t go so far as to say that her 2010s work with SZA laid the groundwork for collaborations like Roan and Sattar’s, she is very happy to see it happening. “I love when artists are open about having a creative director. When women have that title, it changes their position and leverage in the community and in business and production and all of those things,” she says. “It’s all really beautiful to me, and wildly different and revolutionary. When I was younger, I wasn’t really aware of many other female creative directors, only Diane Martel,” the choreographer for R.E.M.’s “Shiny Happy People” and the legendary music video director behind Aguilera’s “Genie in a Bottle,” Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop,” and Addison Rae’s “Obsessed.”
When Gilbert thinks about Sattar and Roan’s relationship, it reminds her of 1980s and ’90s zine culture, when “young women were expressing themselves through music and lyrics, but also through these zines that were very visual and very decorative,” she says. “They were sort of punchy and powerful and ferocious in the same way that Chappell Roan’s music is, but they were also glittery and covered in stars, and it was very much about self-expression that was not caring about what anyone else thought.”
When I spoke with Sattar in mid-February, the L.A.-based artist and designer was putting the finishing touches on promotional materials for Roan’s rollout of her recent campy country hit, “The Giver.” (Maybe you’ve seen the VHS infomercial/lyric video she creative directed, or the accompanying billboards, featuring Roan roleplaying a variety of vocations, complete with wink-wink catchphrases, i.e., “Dental dams aren’t just for dentists.”)
Like Adams, Sattar is mindful of the resonating effects of the art she’s helping create. “I grew up as a fan of many different musicians, and I connected with the visuals Katy Perry or Lady Gaga put out when I was growing up. Getting to play a part in some of the iconic moments that people are going to look back on as the music that came out in 2025 is just really fun and super special.” For Roan’s part, while she feels creatively aligned with her current team at Island Records—shouting out the label’s VP of marketing and creative strategy, Natasha Kilibarda, as a “queen”—she’s been in situations previously where the vibes were off and everything fell apart. “That’s why I am so adamant about keeping my closest creative friends on board,” she says. “Because I trust them and we make the best art together, quite frankly.”
She and Sattar are still hard at work, dreaming up what Roan’s next era will look and feel like—a vision only the two of them could conjure. Says Sattar, “I’m just super grateful to get to do it with my best friend.”
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