"IN THE KITCHEN" BY RENEÉ RAPP (2022)
or, "how to write a perfect pop ballad"
Reneé Rapp is on the cusp of something big.
I first learned about her in 2019 when she was cast as Regina George in Mean Girls on Broadway straight out of high school. Her 2018 Jimmy Award performance — at the national high school theatre awards, a thing that exists — is the stuff of legends among musical theatre fans, and bootlegs of Reneé as Regina circulated widely online. I saw Mean Girls on Broadway with the original cast (brag) and found it to be very much okay, with the strongest storyline being Regina’s, a revision that offers a peek behind the movie version’s evil mask. I loved the original Regina, played by Taylor Louderman. As the character with the most vocally challenging songs, Taylor delivered each octave-shattering ballad with poise and grace, as Regina stood at the center of the bare stage, belting in stillness, reminding the entire theatre why Regina is that bitch.
The beauty of theatre is that each actor gets to put a unique stamp on the characters they play. At the ripe old age of 19, Reneé was faced with an immense challenge — while most of her senior class went off to college, she prepped for her Broadway debut.
What Reneé brought to Regina was a soulfulness that turned her shallowness into something more sinister. With unreal vocal control and indomitable range, Reneé made her mark on the character and became an online fan favorite, and recently announced that she’ll be reprising her role in the upcoming Mean Girls musical movie.
There’s people who are technically great singers and there are people who are emotionally compelling performers — Reneé is both.
Now, most know Reneé for her role as Leighton on the HBO comedy The Sex Lives of College Girls, but she’s also pursuing a solo music career, one I’ve followed in the peripheral through social media for awhile now. I'd often watch short clips of her doing crazy riffs or covering Beyoncé on TikTok, and always rooted for her success.
As I mentioned in the intro to this newsletter, I’ve found it difficult to engage with new music lately. So when Reneé started releasing music last year, I didn’t really pay attention. But I recently watched this clip of one of her first live shows in Los Angeles, and I was awestruck — not only by her voice, but her commanding and emotional performance.
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“In the Kitchen” is a straightforward pop ballad. It’s the type of song that everyone tries to write. And while many people can do it, it’s really hard to do it well. Sad, heart-wrenching piano ballads often have cliché lyrics or rely too much on sparse instrumentation for dramatic effect; elevating this form requires a feather-light touch on your emotions, pushing your own buttons just slightly enough that the pain is extracted into honest, delicate poetry.
Reneé’s lyrics say the quiet part out loud — instead of a laundry list of heartbreak excuses, Reneé plays delicately with metaphor and imagines her former lover in the kitchen they once shared, phantom limbs brushing against warm skin, like the solo slow dance in Lorde’s “Liability.” What makes “In the Kitchen” unique, however, is that Reneé has such precise control of her voice that she’s able to roll in and out of riffs, her mix, and her falsetto to accent her lyrics. If voices were crayons, Reneé is shading in shadows, creating depth and texture within the confines of black lines, while all the rest of us are simply coloring.
“So I'll dance with your ghost in the living room
And I'll play the piano alone
But I'm too scared to delete all our videos
'Cause it's real once everyone knows.”
This is my favorite moment in the song. When Reneé sings “once everyone knows,” every syllable is accented by drums. Up until this point, the song has only been piano — the drums appear like a punch in the gut, and Reneé’s voice gets aggressive as well. It’s the stomach-dropping pain of telling everyone you know that the love you wanted to last simply did not, packed neatly in one line of an incredible pop song.
From this moment on, the song’s instrumentation becomes more complex. We hear horns, drums again, echoes, light synths — it’s the perfect concoction to compliment her voice, like a broken heart rebuilding itself piece by piece, finding strength in familiar sounds that got lost in the silence of losing.
I mean, you just have to listen to it, right?
When writing the song, Reneé said she was inspired by “Camera Roll” by Kacey Musgraves, and said she aimed to “say the quiet part out loud” to find that “sweet spot” of depicting something “so gutting, without feeling like there is a victim.”
And I could feel that urge before even hearing this interview. It’s almost crystal clear by the final line of the chorus:
“Falling in love, no it ain’t for the weak
So don’t try this at home.”
It’s a paradox, isn’t it? The riskiest things are so tempting, and attempting them in your own home feels like the safest place for anything to go wrong.
Vulnerability becomes your shelter, but sometimes the call is coming from inside the house.