Renée Rapp reveals drugging experience that inspired song ‘Snow Angel’
Renée Rapp has opened up about the drugging experience that inspired her recent song ‘Snow Angel’.
The track appears on the US actor and singer’s debut studio album of the same name, which was released last month.
During an appearance on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, Rapp reflected on a traumatic experience in which she was drugged and went “missing for seven hours”. The incident occurred during a night out with a group of new friends in early 2022.
Her close friends and family had warned her about these new friends, but Rapp explained that she was enjoying a newfound sense of freedom at the time following a break-up.
“I really let my judgment go when it came to the people that were around me,” the 23-year-old star of The Sex Lives Of College Girls said.
“We were all out, and it was just situation after situation where they were just not trustworthy, and then the next thing you knew, I was face up, laying down in a bathroom stall in a hotel bar, just waking up at 5 in the morning, completely alone.”
Rapp told the podcast’s host that she woke up confused with blood on her underwear and had two missed text messages from people she had been out with the night before. “I was drugged, and I had just been missing for seven hours,” she continued.
“I stopped being friends with those people and stopped doing as much partying as I was doing. I told my parents, told some of my friends. I explained it in a very matter-of-fact way, and they were all very concerned and I didn’t even understand what was happening.”
Rapp said she didn’t begin to process what had happened to her for a couple of months, and eventually decided to write a song about the experience. She then penned the ‘Snow Angel’ title track with her friend and co-writer Alexander 23 (aka Alexander Glantz).
“We started writing it, and it was just the two of us. And the entire time I was writing it, I felt nothing,” she remembered.
“Until we recorded the song, and the whole thing was done and I played it for my friends and my manager and everybody was like, ‘This is insane’. But for me, that whole year of my life was inherent resilience.”
The piano-led song includes the lyrics: “Smiles hide what secrets keep/ Can’t tell a lie if you never speak/ Look in the mirror, she looks like me/ But half-alive and twice as weak.”
Speaking to NME earlier this year, Rapp said her music – which she described as “stripped-back pop” – contained lyrics about “all the shitty things that have happened to me”.
The post Renée Rapp reveals drugging experience that inspired song ‘Snow Angel’ appeared first on NME.
Tom Skinner
NME
