The first time I saw her was at Tom’s diner on 112th street. It was Halloween, she was dressed as David Bowie on the “Aladdin Sane” cover, and all I could think was: “Who’s this girl with bright red hair, a painted face, and no clothes on?” Turns out, that bright red hair would become her trademark, her name was Reni Lane, and she would soon be one of the brightest, coolest, most talented people I knew (oh, and she was wearing clothes after all, but only a nude bodysuit).
Her stats may seem familiar: born in a small town in Virginia, went through high school knowing that there were bigger things in store for her, moved to New York, signed with a record label, attended school at Columbia (see? I told you she was bright). I remember I was skeptical at first—I wasn’t all too keen on pop music, and most people I knew weren’t, either. But that’s the thing about Reni Lane: she’s infectious. And I don’t just mean that her music is infectious (which it is), or those lyrics (which they are), but I mean her presence—she’s that kind of girl who can win you over to her side even if you don’t particularly want to be won over. How else can you explain how her fanbase manages to bridge the distance between Uptown and Downtown, and is miraculously made up of Columbia kids who refuse to listen to anything but television and downtown kids who swear by The Virgins?
I remember standing in a room once and seeing her up on stage playing “Even You.” She was talking to the audience a lot and laughing before the song started, but when she started singing, I swear that I was the girl she was singing about—or, I wanted to be, any way. “Everybody knows her, everybody likes, her, everybody wants her…even you,” the lyrics go, and it was later on, when the song refused to get out of my head, that I realized: Reni Lane is that girl.
The last time I saw Reni was at a diner again, except this time we were in the Lower East Side, she had just finished recording her album, and she seemed light years ahead of her time. She was talking to me about love and sex and then politics and some book she’d just read, and later on when I called up one of our mutual friends I told him, “I just saw Reni, and god, sometimes I feel like she’s a million years older than me even though she’s actually younger.” Our friend wanted to know why I would say that—he wanted examples. I couldn’t give him any. “That’s just how it is,” I found myself saying. “Talk to her for ten minutes, and you’ll see.”
- by Xiyin Tang, Refinery29
