FEATURE: Spotlight: Renée Rapp — Music Musings & Such

FEATURE:

Spotlight

Renée Rapp

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A lot of great upcoming artists…

released E.P.s or albums late last year. I think that this will translate to incredible success and growth this year. Among the artists I have included are a few actors-turned-musicians. Renée Rapp is an acclaimed actress but, at heart, music is her driving passion. I am going to comer to a few interviews from last year, as she released new music and put out the album/long-E.P., Everything to Everyone, in November. I think Rapp is going to be among the artists to watch closely this year. MTV provide us with some biography about Renée Rapp and a bit about her music:

“You might know Renée Rapp from her role as the iconic queen bee Regina George in Broadway’s Mean Girls musical or the affluent teen Leighton in the HBO Max series The Sex Lives of College Girls. Her acting gigs have given her the opportunity to perform on stage, but she yearned for the opportunity to sing her own songs to the world. “I have always known that this was exactly verbatim on what I was gonna do,” she said. “There was no question in my mind on whether I was gonna do it.” This past year, she debuted her first EP Everything to Everyone, composed of seven R&B cuts and pop ballads. And now, she is the MTV Push Artist for December 2022.

Born in Huntersville, North Carolina, and raised in Charlotte, Rapp fell in love with singing by listening to P!nk and Beyoncé. Queen Bey, in particular, became a major influence on her voice. “I still think she is one of my favorites, if not, like, god to me,” she said. “So I would basically listen to her on repeat and really try to sing like that. So I feel like, in a lot of ways, that taught me how to sing, looking up to a lot of really, really powerful female vocalists of the 2000s. It definitely shaped who I am.” At 7 years old, she delivered her first performance at her grandmother’s funeral. She jokes that she wished she was the real center of attention. “I was like, ‘I’m so sorry, can we make this about me?’” she added with a laugh. “I was so young, bro.” But she knows her grandma would’ve been proud nevertheless.

Rapp has always been writing songs forever, but growing up, she struggled to complete projects, never feeling her songs were good enough. She was unaware that she had undiagnosed ADHD, which she suspects may have been a contributing factor. “I was like, “Why can’t I get through a song? I must be a terrible songwriter,” she said. Upon entering the world of Broadway, Rapp was pressed to fit into its rigid body standards, which took emotional and physical tolls on her. “I became a lot like a mold that I should fit,” she revealed. “I got really sick. I had an eating disorder and I was like, ‘I gotta do this thing, and be this thing.’ It was a really terrible time for me mentally.”

Now, the pop-R&B singer knows all the negative things she thought about herself were untrue; writing and creating Everything to Everyone functioned as a healing form of self-reflection. “The EP was the craziest thing because I learned everything about myself,” she said. “I’ve taken seven moments where I feel like I’m at my lowest and turned those to the best moments of my entire year, which is so cool and I feel so grateful to be able to say that.” This is the first year when she’s felt she can truly be herself — “not dimming myself down to make anybody smaller or make somebody comfortable. I’m just really out here existing for me and solely for me.”

Shedding happy tears over how far she has come, she is overjoyed that there are people out there who want to listen to her music. “I feel like this is all I've wanted to do my whole life,” she said, “and I’m so excited that I get to do it”.

I’m just detouring slightly before focusing on her music. I was gripped by an interview from Glamour Magazine from November. It was a very honest and open interview from Rapp. There were some parts of the interview that were particularly striking and impactful:

“Male validation is like crack to me, and I hate it. I can be out and want nothing to do with men at all. But I still want that validation.” Like so many of us, she knows that this impulse runs deep, but is confident she can shift it with time.

“I don't know what I need to do to reframe my mind,” she says. “I think it'll help as I get older.”

Rene Rapp talks writing break up songs queer identity and fighting the patriarchy

Renée is also completely aware of the darker recesses of her mind, and the importance of looking after it. “My mental health was weaponised against me when I was a kid,” she explains. “The conversation surrounding therapy, it was shameful. I was always the emotional one, and got made fun of for it. I was never emotionally stable – people called me a ticking time bomb.”

After being diagnosed with a mood disorder and advised on ways to manage it, she describes feeling empowered by understanding her own mind better.

“I have reclaimed [my mental health] in the sense that I sought out help,” she explains, admitting she was afraid of medication for a long time, but now takes it when she needs it. “I go to therapy, I’ve figured out what kind of workouts calm my mind, and I honestly value having lots of friends and people in my life," she says.

"You literally are who you surround yourself with, but it’s always an ongoing journey with mental health.”

As she navigates both Hollywood and the music industry, Renée is insistent on commending the people who have fought for her generation to occupy space. But she is quick to point out the continuing problems with representation.

“I think a lot of people preach ‘we want inclusive casting, we want diverse companies, we want queer artists, we want Black artists, yada yada yada,” she says. “It’s very much preached, but I don't think it's necessarily practiced.

“It's still the same white 60-year-old men or women that are controlling the entire thing. So let that not be lost, that we still live in that – you know what I mean?”

Really, Renée Rapp actually does give a f*ck. About all the most important things, including – above all – her own heart and inner peace”.

I want to flip to an interview from InStyle from November. Although there is always emphasis on acting (as it is what Renée Rapp is best known for), it is clear that music is the most important to her. Her new E.P., Everything to Everyone, is a remarkable releaese. It made a big impression on me the first time I heard it:

“As someone with a large social media presence, how do you think this public acceptance of yourself has strengthened your relationship with your followers?

I feel like the reason that I started doing music and now acting is literally just because I wanted to make friends — I feel like I'm fans of my fans. We all just have this connective tissue in a way. Whether they're queer or not, there's something that we all just see each other on.

And I think, for me, I try to be very open about the fact that I’m imperfect, but not in the sense that people are like, "Social media is all perfect and frou-frou. Don't believe everything." No. The things I fucking preach are things I also need to be preaching to myself. I can be so publicly queer and so publicly not give a fuck. But those are also things I need to be doing in practice.

PHOTO CREDIT: Erica Hernández

Between singing and acting, is there one you prefer over the other?

Music is the only thing I’ve ever wanted to do. My two biggest insecurities growing up were, I thought I was a horrible songwriter and I thought I was a terrible actor. So, I don't think I ever thought about acting as being a feasible thing for me, really, so it wasn't really in my view. I thought, ‘OK, I'm going to have a music career and then hopefully it'll blow up and then one day I might do a movie.’

But music has always been the only thing that I love like that, so I don't even know if it's a preference. It's just more so what I am supposed to be doing and I'm very fortunate to also be able to act in that regard.

Which of your singles has been your favorite to release?

“In the Kitchen.” And it was also the one that I was most nervous for … my first song, “Tattoos,” had pre-saves already and had numbers and had done things that felt at least metaphorically tangible for myself and people in music, but I was really nervous for “In The Kitchen,” because it was my second single, and it didn’t have the same gusto around it online that “Tattoos” did, and I was genuinely fucking terrified of that.

But luckily, “In The Kitchen” is my most streamed song now. It's also the song that's so special and important to me because it's one of — I've said this so many times before, but I really still mean it just the same — that's the song that baby Reneé wished she could have written. It just has every facet of music that I love in it. It's really bittersweet lyrics that don't really lean too much into lending away power or power to the relationship, but it's just this very sweet, "OK, got it. Fuck you”.

I will finish off with an interview Rolling Stone. I am fascinated by Renée Rapp’s music. As I have said with other actors releasing music, I think they have an advantage in terms of the disciplines and skills they can bring into their music. That is definitely the case with Renée Rapp:

“Reneé Rapp is stressed. Her debut EP, Everything to Everyone, is out today, and she’s been worried “no one’s going to fuck with it.” “I had a nightmare that I was playing the Hollywood Bowl and when I came onstage, everyone left,” she tells Rolling Stone a few days before the EP’s release. “And the only people that stayed were my parents, my best friend, and my manager.”

Talking to Rapp, who joins a Zoom call in her PJs not long before Everything to Everyone is out, you understand why she’s hella nervous: Everything she’s done in her career — from skipping college and briefly joining a girl group to playing Regina George on Broadway’s Mean Girls and Leighton Murray on HBO’s Sex Lives of College Girls, the second season of which debuts next week — has led up to this moment. “Basically, my whole life has been scheming to be right here,” she says. “Music was all I ever wanted to do.”

Everything to Everyone serves as an excellent introduction to the complex inner workings of a young woman who finally has “something to say,” as she puts it. Now, fans get to see the person behind Regina and Leighton — and Rapp wants her listeners to feel something when they listen. In fact, she wants them to “be fucking wrecked.”

Lead single, “In The Kitchen,” puts Rapp’s powerhouse vocals on full display as she mourns lost love, and tracks like “Colorado” and “Too Well” are sonically upbeat but lyrically honest about her mental health and how she sometimes “can’t stop overthinking.” “Not that I would ever wish someone to be sad, but if you’re going to listen to my music, you’re either queer, sad, or both,” she says, describing the record as a “bittersweet hug.”

From her pinky promise with Tina Fey and Lorne Michaels to her love for Beyoncé, Rapp breaks down her swirling journey to Everything to Everyone.

How did you get into music?

Music was all I ever wanted to do. My two biggest insecurities, as a kid growing up, were acting and songwriting. I was like, “I can’t act, and I can’t write songs.” But I wanted to be Beyoncé. I used to watch the award shows for music, and just cry after, because it was the greatest night of my life. But I was also filled with such FOMO and envy. I couldn’t watch it anymore. I was that jealous. My mom would turn American Idol on, and I would get viscerally angry. I’d be like, “We can’t watch this. Because if I watch it, I’m going to be jealous.” Music was the only thing I ever wanted to do, and it was the only thing that ever made sense to me. And I don’t even know why.

And now we have this EP! What inspired it, and what was that songwriting process like?

I got out of a really tough relationship last December. And the first person I called when it ended was my manager, Adam. And he was like, “How are you?” And I was like, “This is going to be the best year of my life.” And he was like, “But are you good?” And I was like, “Honestly, no. But I can feel something in my body, that this was supposed to happen. And now I feel like my own individual and I don’t have to make myself smaller. And now I have something to say.” So the second that happened, I started writing in a different way and recording with a ton of people in January of this year.

Through all of it, I’ve been really trying to fix my mental health. Not fix it in the sense to make everything perfect. But “Colorado” specifically is a song that is only about mental health. And it doesn’t say, “I am sad, I am sick.” It’s like, “I want to fucking move to Colorado ’cause I want to literally get the fuck away from everybody, even the people who I love most and are so good to me. Because I can’t possibly be happy with myself right now. And I don’t fucking know why. So I’m going to move to a state where I no longer have a job like this.” So like that.

It wasn’t even until about a month ago, or two months ago, when I wrote the intro that I was like, “Oh yeah, this is what the project is.” I feel like I constantly am trying to be everything to everyone. And that doesn’t mean that I’m the perfect friend — half the time, I’m so unreliable it’s ridiculous — but that concept bleeds through the whole project.

Who were some of your inspirations in songwriting and sound?

So it’s interesting because my favorite artists of all time are Frank Ocean, Kacey Musgraves, and SZA. But my favorite singers are Jazmine Sullivan and Beyoncé. So in this last year, it was such a fucking weird process of finding my sound because I don’t make music like any of my favorite artists I listen to. But there’s nods to all of those people in my music.

Finding the sonic palette for this project was quite difficult. I think where we ended up is I just needed everything to feel good. So I don’t even know how to describe it. But I was an absolute cunt going through mix passes because I was like, “No, this has to be turned down and this has to be turned up.” I was just like, “I just know how this should feel on my body. And until it feels like that, it’s not right.” So we got the songs to a place that, for whatever reason, just feels good in every little fiber of me. I don’t even know if I can really describe it using words, except that they fucking feel good. Everything just ended up feeling like a hug.

I like that. It has to feel right for you in order for it to resonate with everybody else. Is there a song on the project you connect with most?

I think “What Can I Do” is the first openly gay song that I ever wrote. Though I’ve been out for many, many years, I never ever wrote songs about my queer relationships. I only wrote them about my hetero relationships. And it was wild because I really wanted to; I just didn’t know how. I honestly think, looking back, that’s a touch of internalized homophobia. But when I wrote “What Can I Do,” it was just about really, really, really falling super hard for a close friend of mine who is straight, but every now and again flirts with me and was in a relationship that was so not suited for her.

And so it was just me enviously and innocently watching her go through this relationship and not be treated properly. And selfishly, I was like, “I literally love you. I would never want you to feel like that.” It’s really just this feeling of yearning for somebody where you don’t know if you’re just friends or not. For me, that song is so important because it is the first queer song that I wrote that I was really proud of. And as somebody who’s bisexual, I think a lot of times it’s very easy for me to just exist in queerness as a bisexual person who only speaks on the hetero parts of my life. That song made me feel so good about the really colorful and gay parts of my life”.

I am really invested in Renée Rapp’s music, and I will follow her progress through this year. She is an incredible artist who I hope releases more E.P.s and an album. I hope you have learned more about Rapp and are compelled to check out her music. She is someone tipped for success and a lot of focus this year. No wonder! Everything to Everyone is an E.P. I have been listening to a lot recently. The North Carolina-born artist (and actor) creates…

SUCH amazing music.

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