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.
