On Keke Palmer’s latest episode of her podcast, Baby, This is Keke Palmer, Renee Rapp spoke about her career transition into music and how she learned to “dive in” to her songwriting without judgment.
LISTEN NOW: Baby, This is Keke Palmer | The Music that Shaped Us with Renee Rapp
Though you’d never guess it, fellow actresses and singers Renee Rapp and Keke Palmer met for the first time when recording their podcast episode together. The two have striking similarities -- Palmer began her acting career at the age of nine, and Rapp recalls singing in musical theater beginning around the same age. And even though she went on to land a lead in the Broadway show Mean Girls just 4 months after her high school graduation, Rapp revealed she didn’t feel “cut out” for a life on Broadway. Rather, she explained that it was the music that had kept her going. “When acting became a kind of gateway into music for me, I then found a love for acting,” she told Palmer. “But it’s always been, it’s always been music for me.”
Since leaving Broadway and her MAX original show, The Sex Lives of College Girls, in pursuit of her music career, Renee revealed that she hasn’t slowed down for a second. “I don’t have any f***ing balance in my life, in anything. I feel incredibly off balance at most times, it is a seesaw and I am just holding on,” she chuckled to herself. “But right now, I am at the point where I just love it, so I don’t even really care.” In response, Palmer called her experience “true passion” and Rapp agreed, saying she feels “hungry and excited” in her career, especially on the cusp of her debut album release.
Her first studio album Snow Angel was released barely two weeks ago and has since grown to be the largest female debut in 2023. “It feels like my little, coming-of-age thing,” she told Keke on the podcast, as each of the 12 songs is specific to her growing up. When writing the songs, Rapp revealed that her creative process starts with her “rambling” in her phone notes app about her emotions, thoughts, or problems. Only when one of these ramblings becomes a potential lyric, she says, does the music get involved. Rapp explained, “The song ‘Tummy Hurts’ started because I just wrote down like, ‘My tummy hurts, he’s in love with her.’ And I was like, this was cool because it was like this childish [expression]. And then ‘he’s in love with her’ is like this mature thing that happens later in life. So usually, [songwriting] happens because I’ll write something like that and go, ‘Oh ok, here we go’ and then find music and dive in.”
This method of creating specific lyrics first and music second resulted in the album being, as she called it, “really raw” about her emotions. “I spent a lot of my life criticizing myself for my feelings and how I handled situations,” she said, “and I’m now getting to the point where I’m able to process things and let it slide off a little bit.” Whether or not she thought she should feel a certain way, Rapp explained that she would write anyway. She continued, “I think this album as a collective is that attitude, toward every situation. So, I think it’s much more honest.”
Renee Rapp is already on tour for the Snow Angel album, and at the time of writing, she has sold out half of her shows. Dates and locations for the Snow Hard Feelings tour can be found here, and you can listen to the full podcast episode above on the free Audacy app.
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