Renee Rapp, a rising pop star who is taking over the music scene, recently released her first full-length album titled “Snow Angel.” Its tracks cover a wide range of topics and emotions such as trauma, loss, regret, longing and insecurities. In this article we will take a deep dive into some of the deepest lyrics on this album.
In the track “I Hate Boston,” Rapp describes a relationship she had with a Boston native while she was visiting the city, and how the whole experience has now made her hate the place. In the first few verses she says, “Why’d we have to cover so much ground, you showed me around. As far as I’m concerned they should just burn the whole city down.” This implies that because she supposedly went to so many places around the city with him, all her memories of the place are now contaminated with the memory of him and his presence. She is no longer able to think about Boston or any specific place there without thinking about him and the things he put her through. This is made even more clear when in the chorus she says, “How’d you make me hate Boston? It’s not his fault that you don’t love me.” In the very last line in the song she says, “And you’re all over every single street.” It feels almost like she’s describing this person as a ghost that’s haunting the entire city, which is similar to something she did in her EP when in the song “In The Kitchen” she says, “So I’ll dance with your ghost in the living room.” It describes a feeling of not being able to fully move on and move past it because her mind is too haunted by them.
In the title track for the album, “Snow Angel,” Rapp goes extremely deep in describing the experience of going through something traumatic. The song “Talk Too Much” very flawlessly describes the feeling of always feeling anxious and second guessing yourself and everything that you say, especially when you’re around someone that you like. In the song “I Wish,” Rapp very beautifully describes the experience of losing someone you’re close to at a very young age and the lifelong effect that this can have. Especially with the lyrics, “How can the person who taught me to breathe take their last breath right in front of me? I know too much now.”
And although is isn’t from the album, (it’s okay to bend the rules when they’re your own,) I also want to touch on her song “Bruises.” This song does a very interesting job of depicting the hurtful and harmful effects that cruel comments can have. She compares getting verbally hurt to getting bruised and uses some somewhat graphic language like, “you could flip me inside out and they would show.” The video takes this a step further and shows her getting knives stabbed into her chest as a symbolic image.
All in all, music has a unique ability to portray things and make us feel things in a way that other art forms rarely can, and Renee is one of those artists with a strong ability and talent for using lyrics and imagery to the fullest extent.
