Renée Rapp Recalls How Traumatic Drugging Experience Inspired Her Song ‘Snow Angel’
Reneé Rapp has revealed that the title track on her new LP, Snow Angel, was inspired by a traumatic experience where she was drugged and went “missing for seven hours.”
In an interview on Jay Shetty’s On Purpose podcast, Rapp recounted how she had a night out with a new group of friends in early 2022. She said her old friends warned her about them, but decided to go out anyway because she had just gone through a break-up and wanted to feel a sense of freedom.
“I really let my judgment go when it came to the people that were around me,” Rapp 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.”
She continued, “I had blood on my pants, and I was just so caught off guard… I was completely alone in a bathroom stall and I looked down at my phone and it was 5 in the morning, and I was like, ‘What happened?!’ I had missed two texts from two people I was with from 10 p.m. the night before.”
Despite the trauma of the situation, Rapp wasn’t sure how to process it. “I was drugged and I had just been missing for seven hours,” she told Shetty. “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.”
After trying to repress what had happened, the musician eventually realized she needed to write a song about it. She paired up with her friend and co-writer, Alexander 23, a.k.a. Alexander Glantz, and “Snow Angel” is what emerged.
“We started writing it, and it was just the two of us. And the entire time I was writing it, I felt nothing,” Rapp said. “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.”
She added, “I still don’t know how I feel about it. I just know that I feel weird and very resilient.”
Rapp released Snow Angel, her debut album, last month. She recently spoke to Rolling Stone about her career and touched on “Snow Angel,” saying the LP reflects a sense of honesty. “It is the most intense interpersonal relationships and experiences that I’ve had over the last five months, whether they be good or bad,” she said. “And all of them are bad.”