Renée Rapp is speaking out about the scary 2022 incident that inspired the urgent title track to her Snow Angel album. The former The Sex Lives of College Girls star recently released her debut full-length album on Interscope — with the title song serving as the first single — and in a new interview with On Purpose podcast host Jay Shetty she revealed that dramatic song was inspired by a traumatic experience last year in which she was drugged and lost nearly an entire night.
“I was drugged, and I had just been missing for seven hours,” Rapp told Shetty about a night out in 2022 when she went to a party with a new group of friends after a breakup. “I really let my judgment go when it came to the people that were around me. 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 said when she woke up alone in the bathroom stall early in the morning she had no idea what happened and saw that she’d missed two texts from people she’d started hanging out with the night before.
“First to arrive, last to leave/ What’s misery without company?/ It’s hard to laugh when it’s hard to breathe/ It’s white outside, but red underneath,” she sings in the opening verse of the song before dipping into the pre-chorus, “Feel the tip of my nose/ It’s burning, but it’s ice cold.”
Rapp said when she woke up the next day she saw blood on her pants and had no idea what happened during that lost time. “I was drugged, and I had just been missing for seven hours. I stopped being friends with those people and stopped doing as much partying as I was doing,” she said. “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.”
It was hard to process the night at first and she couldn’t wrap her head around what happened for several months. But once Rapp started working with the song’s co-writer, Alexander “23” Glantz, they found a way to turn the scary event into a moving song.
“‘I really want to write a song about this,’” she said of the incident she turned over-and-over in her mind, telling the story to a number of friends who didn’t seem to be comprehend what she was saying. “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.”
The good news is that Rapp, 23, said she’s cut ties with those people, but she still doesn’t know exactly how she feels about it. “I just know that I feel weird… and very resilient,” she said. “I was just like, ‘I don’t care what you know or what you claim to know or don’t know.’ I just want to let it go.”
Rapp wil kick off her Snow Hard Feelings Tour in Houston, TX on Sept. 15.
Watch the “Snow Angel” video below.
