Reneé Rapp is inspiring fans to get tattoos — all before releasing her 1st full-length album

Reneé Rapp represents a lot to a lot of people. To some, the 23-year-old is Regina George from “Mean Girls” on Broadway. Others know her as Leighton Murray from HBO’s “The Sex Lives of College Girls.” And then some remember her as the voice behind the song “Tattoos,” which went viral on TikTok months before it was officially released.

Now, she’s a pop star about to embark on tour and release her first studio album, “Snow Angel,” a follow-up to her seven-track EP “Everything to Everyone.”

For the hundreds of fans who filled the TODAY plaza on July 28 for her Citi Concert Series performance, it felt like they were on the ground floor, watching a star on the rise of her early career. Many attendees were in line as early as 3 a.m. in the middle of a heatwave, with temperatures eventually reaching 90 degrees in New York City.

In her sea of fans waiting outside to watch her show, there’s a clear impulse to find a connection to her.

“She’s, like, one of us,” Kristina Diodati, 23, tells TODAY.com.

“We’re growing up together,” she adds. “She’s our age, so it’s cool that we’re experiencing our 20s together and everything that comes along with that.”

Diodati and her friend Alessandra Bologna are both from Hudson Valley, New York and live near Vassar College, where exteriors for “The Sex Lives of College Girls” were filmed. Bologna is set to see Rapp on tour later this year and attend a meet-and-greet. When she meets the singer, she plans to say, “You’ve been on my street before. You drove past my house.”

Geraldine Puerto, 28, first learned about Rapp because of the HBO Max show.

“As a queer person, I definitely relate with Leighton on the show,” Puerto says. Rapp also identifies as queer.

Puerto then started listening to Rapp’s music and says it just feels “real.” While Rapp is set to leave “The Sex Lives of College Girls” and only appear in a few episodes of Season 3, Puerto says she’s excited to see what’s next for the singer.

Another concert attendee shares that by coincidence, she and Rapp have the same tattoo on their middle fingers — a tiny filled-in star located right in the center. The fan says she likes to think she was Rapp’s “muse.” Midway through the show, she showed Rapp her own star, and they held their fingers out side-by-side.

After her performance, Rapp cites this interaction as one of her favorite shared moments with a fan, noting that her star has always been her “favorite tattoo.”

My own link to Rapp goes back a few years when I watched her perform at a high school theater competition in 2018, the Blumey Awards in Charlotte, North Carolina. After winning at the Blumeys, Rapp advanced to the national competition, the Jimmy Awards, which she also won.

If it wasn’t obvious by now, Rapp’s fans are dedicated and, in her own words, “crazy.”

“You could play one or two notes of any of your songs, and every single person in this audience breaks into song,” Hoda Kotb observes from the plaza.

Rapp’s fandom has plenty of inside jokes, the most prevalent of which is the identifier “young ex-wife,” — which she sings about in one of her more upbeat songs, “Colorado.” In the lyrics, Rapp muses about starting over by making a home in the western state, doing karaoke and meeting “some young ex-wife / We’d start a brand new life.”

Bologna recalls how at one of her concerts last year, fans held up signs that read “Young Ex-Wife” featuring arrows pointed at themselves. The label has morphed into inspiration for merchandise, an official fan account for the singer and most recently, an event for the most dedicated fans to meet Rapp and listen to the album early.

“She’s very interactive, loves talking, loves joking, loves calling people out,” Bologna says of Rapp’s behavior at her concerts. “(‘Young ex-wife’) is always a sign, and she cracks up about it.”

But the relationship between Rapp and her fans involves — like any good friendship — a fair bit of teasing, too.

Some fans came to the plaza armed with cut-out images zoomed in on the singer’s face. The most popular hard copies feature Rapp’s character Leighton, grinning widely at the camera with an intense, almost devilish expression.

Rapp takes the teasing in stride. At soundcheck, she spotted the picture of her face and shouted into the mic, “Can I see one?” She then strolled down the catwalk to pick up the sign and pose with it for pictures.

“She’s so unserious,” Jadah Ownby, 21, says.

Rapp’s social media is hilarious and honest. Just hours before her TODAY concert, she tweeted, “can’t sleep y’all are gonna have to sing for me start doing your best mi mi mi mi mi mi miiiiiis.”

Rapp says fans should expect a similar “little giggle” from her first album, with cheeky lyrics like, “I just want some recognition for having good tits and a big heart.”

“I think people will laugh — also cry — but laugh,” she says.

Rapp first went viral for her ballads, including “Tattoos” and “In the Kitchen.” She’s a Pisces moon, after all.

“If you’ve heard any of my songs, you’d probably know that,” she says.

Marina Guimaraes, 21, says her favorite song is “Don’t Tell My Mom,” a song about hiding emotions from parents to spare their feelings, with lyrics like, “Don’t tell my mom, I’m fallin’ apart, She hurts when I hurt, my scars are her scars.”

In November, Guimaraes saw Rapp on TikTok and discovered her music, which she says provided comfort after losing her own mom. “Don’t Tell My Mom” and its complicated portrayal of the parent-child relationship made Guimaraes feel “understood.”

In May, Guimaraes got a tattoo of Rapp’s face, appropriately captioned “young ex wife.”

“Renee just changed my life so much that I had to get her tattooed on me,” Guimaraes says.

“Snow Angel” promises even more introspection and emotional tracks. Before releasing the album’s titular single in June, Rapp shared with fans that the idea for the song came from a “traumatic experience.” She wrote “Snow Angel” in May, and her team started “changing everything” about her first album.

The inspiration for these ballads is kind of just there, she says.

“I’ve tended to, like, bleed out my whole life and just be like very open, feelings on the surface, so it’s actually just nice because it’s very cathartic,” she says.

But because of her widespread audience, she says she’s “conscious” of what she’s putting out there.

“It can’t just be stream of thought,” she says. “And then if it is, then sometimes it’s good, and sometimes I do way too much, and I need to rewrite songs — which we did on this album.”

Compared to her initial EP, Rapp says “Snow Angel” brings out a more “authentic version” of herself.

“I’m a little bit more unapologetic,” she says. “I also just didn’t listen to as many people this time.”

She trusts herself “100%.” As to where the confidence comes from?

“Delusion,” she says.

This article was originally published on TODAY.com