Eden Rain makes sure you’re okay with “Text Me When You’re Home Safe”

When Eden Rain released her single “Sugar Baby,” she celebrated, according to her Instagram, by “eating a tin of chickpeas.” While it might be a bit harder to imagine what she might do to celebrate her newest track “Text Me When You’re Home Safe”, which explores the trials of being a woman alone in a big city, there’s something comforting about imagining her celebration being exactly the same. She can joke about her feelings, or spill them all out with harrowing intensity, but there is an inherent eccentric edge to her music and attitude that is always present.

Rain, like many of her alt-pop contemporaries, finds comfort in that spectrum of emotional breadth, perfectly willing to span and slide between self-aware kitsch and heartfelt sincerity with complete ease. And “Text Me When You’re Home Safe”—her follow up to “Sugar Baby”—is certainly the latter of those two moods.

“I originally wrote it about my friend,” she comments, “never knowing where home was as she always moved a lot as a child.” But the meaning of the song has shifted a bit since then. Considering recent events in London, as well as Rain’s own experience moving to the city herself, the track grew to encompass multiple meanings regarding women’s safety and mutual care. It’s a song full of love, for friends, and for women.

“I combined with the phrase that we have been saying to each other and all our other friends since we were 15- ‘text me when your home safe’. Unfortunately, most women and girls know the importance of a ‘home safe’ text, and although this song started as a song for my best friends, after recent cases in the news and moving out of my family home and to London on my own, it sadly felt more relevant and important to release it than ever.”

The mostly piano-based ballad is minimalist in comparison to the more saturated string of singles she released in the last year. Like other alt-pop female singers, such as New Zealand’s BENEE, or America's Remi Wolf, Rain is an artist of pastiche, mixing, imitating, and weaving together a variety of musical styles and genres with ease, but always maintaining a level of catchiness. Whether it’s a track rife with silly jokes or an earnest air of concern like this one, she is always accessible.

That’s exactly what this song is doing lyrically - Rain wants to make sure you’re okay and she’s only a text away. It’s as personal as it is general, and it’s radically vulnerable. In her own words, “There’s a lot of other feelings tied up in the song for me, so it’s hard to pinpoint an exact meaning, but I wouldn’t want to either - I hope whoever listens to it draws their own associations and it reminds them of their own people that they love.”

“The song really is about sisterhood and keeping each other safe and that if you can’t figure out where physically feels like home, sometimes you find people that do.”