Today, 18-year-old singer-songwriter sensation renforshort releases the Mike Shinoda mix to her frenetic power-pop anthem “i drive me mad.” Shinoda gives a fresh take on the production of the personal track, written from ren’s own experience with the suffocating chokehold of anxiety.
The collaboration came about after Shinoda heard the track on a new music playlist he follows, and it immediately stuck out to him, “the dynamics of the song—the production, her voice, and the way the song speeds up into the chorus—all those things felt exciting to me,” he shares. “I also connected with the lyrics, the idea that you make yourself a little crazy. I’m pretty sure she’s the first person I’ve heard use the term “pre-traumatic stress!”
He then added it to one of his public playlists and posted it to his Instagram story. Ren ecstatically DM’d him and after a few messages back and forth, Mike was on board to mix the song.
Of creating the mix, renforshort remarks, “The process was really cool. Mike sent me a couple versions and we just sent notes back and forth until it was perfect! It was really cool to hear my song be given a different life completely, it’s a very strange cool thing!”
The release follows renforshort’s genre-spanning debut EP teenage angst, released on March 13, 2020 via Interscope Records. The EP was praised by TIME Magazine as, “intimate, catchy bedroom pop with a punk edge,” and NYLON proclaimed, “it hits how it sounds: seven potent tracks distilling adolescent turmoil into pop anthems with a gritty punk edge.” The rising star has used her time in quarantine to write and record several new tracks, expected to drop throughout the year, as she continues to polish her ever-evolving sound.
