One thing to know about Reneé Rapp? Delusion is her best friend. “When I say delusion, I mean that no matter how much I doubt myself in something (and trust me, it’s a lot more than I lead on), I’m going to f*cking do it. I don’t know how, why, or when, but I will. That, to me, is delusion. It’s an innate belief in myself and a hunger to do something that I love so much,” she says in an Interscope Records press conference ahead of the Aug. 18 release of her debut album Snow Angel. The album is Rapp’s latest addition to a resume of impressive debuts: first on Broadway as Regina George in Mean Girls: The Musical, on TV as Leighton in The Sex Lives of College Girls, and soon to be on film reprising her role in the movie adaptation of Mean Girls: The Musical.
But for Rapp, music was always the goal. Snow Angel’s sonic palette is a fusion of every genre that’s inspired her career, like pop, R&B, and theatrical ballads. “If I put every genre that I am obsessed with … and then spit it back out through my ears, this [album] would be that,” she asserts.
Songwriting is a process of self-discovery for Rapp. Snow Angel’s tracks are a raw look into how Rapp processes everything from her ex’s future daughter to the city of Boston. By the time she finished writing the album, she says, “The only answer I came away with is that I am always going to have more questions about myself.”
One of the most personal tracks on Snow Angel is the sob-inducing “I Wish.” Rapp explains, “It’s about my parents and my first understanding of mortality when I was 10 years old. It really haunted me there for a while.” Given her penchant for dramatic storytelling, Rapp says she finds it easier to express herself in sad songs, but that doesn’t mean they’re all slow. For example, the uptempo, electro pop beat in “Pretty Girls” masks lyrics about the uncomfortable flattery of being hypersexualized by a straight woman (the songstress openly identifies as bisexual).
Rapp uses the first track on Snow Angel to break the sad girl music sound she established for herself with her first EP, Everything to Everyone. “Talk Too Much” is an overthinker’s pop-rock theme song. An edgy guitar riff backs a chorus that starts with the lyrics, “I’m here again / Talking myself out of my own happiness.” It’s a bare confession veiled in confident vocals, which is quickly becoming Rapp’s calling card.
Rapp worked closely with her best friend, director Alyah Chanelle Scott (who plays Whitney in The Sex Lives of College Girls), on the song’s poker-themed music video. She admits that the video was “super, super fun, but it was a mindf*ck to figure out.”
The pair struggled for months to decide on the creative direction they wanted the video to take. “We were in constant communication about this f*cking music video,” Rapp recalls. “The day before the eve [we shot the video], we were scouting an entirely different location. Alyah was at the Staples Center; we were talking about doing something like a basketball game. It was just absurd, but that’s what you get when you have two best friends who can do anything they want with a corporation backing them.”
Rapp also had unlimited creative freedom in the recording studio — which she enjoyed a little too much. She rewrote the hater anthem “Poison Poison” three different times in three different ways, mostly to scale back the blatant drags in her lyrics. After listening to the final cut, it’s easy to imagine how the first few versions could have spiraled so deeply into hater territory. The song makes Taylor Swift’s “Better Than Revenge” sound like a feminist paean with its brazen lyrics, including an outro in which Rapp sweetly croons, “You’re the worst b*tch on the earth / I hate you and your guts / I think you should shut the f*ck up and die.”
Rapp stands by her brutal honesty; it’s how she approaches life. She’s currently “100% in a ‘So What Now’ era. [The song] is basically about your ex being in the same city that you live in. It’s like, yes, you did grow up here. Your family is here. You were born here. I don’t give a f*ck. Why are you here?”
Rapp is no angel, and she isn’t trying to be. Snow Angel puts the outspoken authenticity Rapp preaches into practice through its candid lyrics, production, and quotidian storytelling. As for how she hopes it’ll be received? “Damn, I hope good.”