The title and lead single of Reneé Rapp’s debut album, Snow Angel, was inspired by one of the most difficult experiences in her life that has since left her feeling “resilient.”
The singer, 23, recalled being drugged during a night out with friends on the Monday, September 4, episode of the “On Purpose with Jay Shetty” podcast. Fresh off a breakup in early 2022, Rapp said she began hanging out with a new group of cohorts.
“I had always had to, like, really nail myself to the ground, and I had always been just so incredibly nervous, and for the first time, I just didn’t,” she explained to host Jay Shetty. “And I really let my judgment go when it came to the people that were around me.”
Following multiple situations where the group proved to be “not trustworthy,” Rapp said she found herself “face-up, laying down in a bathroom stall in a hotel bar, just waking up at, like, 5 in the morning, completely alone.”
She continued: “I still have no idea what happened, no clue what happened, but I was drugged and just, like, missing for seven hours. And I stopped being friends with those people and stopped doing as much partying as I was and told my parents, told some of my friends, and just kind of explained it in a really matter-of-fact way. And they were all very concerned, and I didn’t even really understand what was happening, because again, I didn’t recall anything that had happened.”
It wasn’t until a few months after the incident that Rapp said she began to “deal” with the aftermath of it, noting, “[I] was just crying and so upset and very confused, and then resentful ‘cause it was friends that I was with.”
Rapp — who announced in June that she would be leaving Max’s The Sex Lives of College Girls during season 3 — felt inspired to write a song about the experience with producer Alexander 23 for her first full-length album, which was released on August 18.
“The whole time we were writing it, I felt nothing. Nothing,” she noted on the podcast. “I was explaining all this stuff, and I was like, ‘Yeah, and you can reference the snow as whatever you want to reference it as,’ and things like that, and I felt nothing at all until we had recorded the song, the whole thing was done and I played it for a bunch of my friends and my manager. And everybody was like, ‘This is insane.’”
The lyrics of “Snow Angel” seemingly detail her journey of overcoming trauma, as she sings, “I’ll make it through the winter if it kills me / I can make it faster if I hurry / I’ll angel in the snow until I’m worthy / But if it kills me, I tried.”
The Mean Girls the Musical star called 2022 her year of “inherent resilience,” as she told Shetty, 35. “Not only was I fighting through an experience I have no idea what happened to me, lost friends, felt like I couldn’t go out with anybody and trust anybody … but [I] was also afraid to be judged to have something like that happen to me but it’s also like, ‘What did happen?’ So, it was a whole thing up until we decided to name the album Snow Angel and have that be the song, that to me was all resilience.”
At the end of the day, Rapp said she still “doesn’t really know how to feel about it,” but she does “feel weird and resilient.”
