Reneé Rapp is opening up about the traumatic experience she endured that led to the creation of her title track, “Snow Angel,” off her recently released studio album.
The actress and singer recently sat down with Jay Shetty for a new episode of his On Purpose podcast, which dropped on Monday, and she recalled a time several years ago when she went out partying with a group of friends, and things took a serious turn for the worst.
After a night of partying at a club, Rapp recalled waking up several hours later in a bathroom stall at a hotel with no memories of the past several hours and more questions than she could truly wrap her head around.
“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?!'” Rapp said. “I had missed two texts from two people I was with from 10 p.m. the night before.”
“I was drugged, and I had just been missing for seven hours,” Rapp said. “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 that she didn’t really begin to process the experience for several months, choosing to ignore the reality of what happened. But then she began to really dig in to try and find answers or at least closure. She wanted to deal with it by writing a song.
“I had been saying… ‘I really want to write a song about this.’ I recounted the situation so many times, and after the 10th time of telling a group of people that, you know, that you were drugged, and have no idea what happened… [and they just seem shocked or uncomfortable] then you kind of stop wanting to write that song.”
However, Rapp’s friend and co-writer, Alexander 23, encouraged her to get the ideas out and to pen the tune.
“We started writing it, and it was just the two of us. And the entire time I was writing it, I felt nothing… 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,'” she said. “But for me, that whole year of my life was inherent resilience.”
“I still don’t know how I feel about it,” Rapp said of the traumatic experience. “I just know that I feel weird… and very resilient.”
Rapp added that she “Stopped talking to that group of people.”
“I was just like, ‘I don’t care what you know or what you claim to know or don’t know,'” she explained. “I just want to let it go.”
Rapp’s album Snow Angel is available now. She’s set to kick off her Snow Hard Feelings Tour on Sept. 15 in Houston, Texas. The tour is set to go through March 4, 2024, with a final show in Dublin, Ireland.
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