As soon as President Biden dropped out of the 2024 race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as his heir apparent, an urgent question presented itself.
What would Harris choose as her campaign song?
Something by Beyoncé? Taylor Swift? Billie Eilish?
Singer-songwriter Rachel Platten responded on social media with a gif. It was the one of a wide-eyed Homer Simpson backing slowly into shrubbery. As in, Please, please forget I’m even here.
An understandable request.
Platten’s breakaway 2015 hit “Fight Song” — you know the one: “This is my fight song, take back my life song, prove I’m alright song . . . ” — was Hillary Clinton’s campaign anthem. It roared through the Wells Fargo Center in Philadelphia as Clinton took the stage in suffragette white at the Democratic National Convention in 2016.
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For Platten, a native of Newton who now lives in Los Angeles, the attention was complicated. She had reached a level of prominence that had previously seemed unimaginable. But it also inextricably tied her chart-topping single to Clinton’s campaign to become the first woman president, with all of its hope and history-making symbolism. At that moment in time, Clinton’s victory seemed assured, inevitable — until it wasn’t. Then, to some, the song was the sour sound of an election — and a milestone — lost.
As Business Insider recently put it, “Young Democrats are still emotionally scarred from ‘Fight Song’ by Rachel Platten.”
“Fight Song” wasn’t just co-opted by politics — for better and worse — in the years after its release. It was everywhere.
It became a score for cancer telethons. It was in a Ford commercial I remember well — one that showed a woman in a blazer driving confidently through a city. The spot was so effective that for at least 30 seconds at a time I was pretty sure that buying a 2015 Ford Edge might make me a better feminist.
A few years after the song was released, I went to a women’s conference where between sessions, when everyone had to run to the bathroom, organizers played “Fight Song” throughout the building. I developed a Pavlovian response that day. Hearing “Fight Song” meant I was a woman to be reckoned with, a leader in my field, but also that it was probably time to pee.
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I’ve always been curious about how it feels to have a song you wrote take on such a life of its own — outside of your control. So, almost a decade after the release of “Fight Song,” I reached out to Platten.
I wanted to talk to her for three big reasons: 1. She’s been on my mind during election season; 2. It’s about to be the 10th anniversary of “Fight Song” (it came out in February 2015); and 3. She just released her first album in seven years. For a recording artist, that’s a long time between albums.
We met twice — once on Zoom, and a second time in New York City, a day after she performed two new songs on the Today show.
She told me I was interviewing her at the right time. Now at age 43, after wild swings in the music business and life, she’s finally feeling like herself.
PLATTEN HAS — and I don’t mean this as an insult — youth pastor energy. She is sunny. She smiles a lot. She is earnest the way “Fight Song” is earnest. She seems so genuine about her hope for happy things in the world that I’m still surprised she was raised in Massachusetts, a place where, based on my experience, even the nicest people spend a good amount of time rolling their eyes.
Platten went to Buckingham Browne & Nichols School; Mindy Kaling was a classmate.
She started her first band while she was a student at Trinity College in Hartford, after a study abroad trip to Trinidad. That’s when she began to shape her sound, which is warm, feel-good pop, what I think of as Obama-era “it might all be OK” music. Put it on a playlist with Jason Mraz, Gavin DeGraw, and Andy Grammer.
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After college, Platten moved into a tiny fourth-floor walk-up on Manhattan’s MacDougal Street, where artists including Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix once played in small clubs. Platten got by balancing day jobs with late-night gigs for the better part of a decade.
Those 10 years of mild success (a single here, an almost-big contract there) are part of why I find Platten surprising. I first met her in 2016 — many months before the election — at the now-closed Hanover Mall. At the time, “Fight Song” was starting to play everywhere, and because she had local roots, we figured we should get her in the Globe. She had already performed the song onstage at a Taylor Swift concert, which meant fans had flocked to the mall to get selfies.
It wasn’t until I saw her that I realized I was expecting the woman behind such a massive first hit to be in her early 20s, maybe even her teens — because so often people have a big pop hit at the start of their careers or not at all. But no, Platten was an adult woman in her 30s then, already married, with a decade of hustling behind her.
The other reason I thought she would be in her early 20s was because of the tone of “Fight Song.” It’s so . . . uncynical. So hopeful. She exuded those good vibes that day at the mall, and she does eight years later — even after some major battles.
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But we’ll get to those.
During one of our conversations, Platten told me about the day she wrote the chorus of what would become “Fight Song.” She was hitting a wall after so many years of trying to make it as a singer-songwriter.
“I had been crying that day,” she says, “because I was always crying, because I was exhausted and I was feeling hopeless.”
She was living temporarily in LA then. The whole point was to go where she’d have the chance to work with producers who could help her make a hit song.
But after several years — no big hits. “I had nothing to show for all the work I’d done,” she says. “I had all these songs that weren’t going anywhere.”
She did hear a hook in her brain, though. Major key. Big pep-talk lyrics.
“I didn’t have all the words at once, but I did have ‘fight song,’ and I did have, ‘I don’t really care if anyone else believes . . . I still got a lot of fight left in me.’”
“Keep writing it,” her manager told her.
But she left Los Angeles without the finished single. “I went back to New York. I missed my husband. I had nothing really to show for it, except my publisher kind of whispering in the back of my ear: That song, that song, don’t give up on that song.”
She continued to work on it in New York, and soon enough, she hit another hurdle: Actually recording the song the way she wanted to was going to cost money. A lot of money.
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Then, when Platten’s grandfather died, he left her some money. Her dad wanted Platten and her husband, Kevin Lazan, to use it for something practical, like a down payment on a home. But Lazan made the case that they should use it to hire a producer. “My dad was like, that is insane,” Platten recalls. “But Kevin said, ‘Look, I cannot have the love of my life never having really tried.’”
At first, they got crickets from record labels.
But then . . . a slow burn. The song is featured on Pretty Little Liars — in the 2014 Christmas episode, specifically. (Those who watched PLL know its cultural power!) The song also got play as part of a breast cancer awareness weekend in Baltimore, and people started Shazamming it. That’s when the labels came running.
It ignited.
In 2015, Platten appeared with Taylor Swift on The 1989 World Tour. “Suddenly everybody is singing this song,” Swift shouted from the stage in Philadelphia. When Platten stepped out on stage, the crowd roared.
AFTER “FIGHT SONG,” Platten’s label, Columbia, wanted her to put out music as quickly as possible to build on the enthusiasm.
Platten released the album Waves in 2017 with a lead single called “Broken Glass.” It was . . . fine. She liked the songs a lot, but something was off.
Now she can say that she wasn’t ready to release the music with confidence. It was too fast, and her label was marketing her as something she wasn’t. Platten’s mom, Pamela Platten, says even the video for “Stand By You,” the single that followed “Fight Song,” is “not Rachel.” Lots of lace. Big makeup. Barely any trace of Platten’s signature simple look, which on any given day is much more Sheryl Crow circa Tuesday Night Music Club (pardon my Gen X references).
“I’m proud of the girl that pumped it out on demand, and I’m proud of the songwriting,” Rachel Platten says of Waves. “But was it me, necessarily? I don’t know if it was as deep as I would have liked to go.”
The album debuted at 74 on the Billboard 200, compared with 2016’s Wildfire, which debuted at No. 5. Platten and her label ultimately parted ways.
What happens after is a bit of a blur. Platten and her husband start having kids. After she has her first daughter in 2019, she feels off. She experiences insomnia and anxiety. Then the pandemic hits, and with it comes isolation and confusion.
At some point during that time, Platten — who’d sung the anthem of hope for so many — didn’t know how to keep fighting. She didn’t feel capable.
She wondered about her career. She wondered about everything. She was eventually diagnosed with postpartum depression. It scared her husband, who’d never seen her like that.
“When somebody’s got a broken leg or something like that, people can see it,” he says, but with mental illness, “it’s not a visible malady.”
Platten decided to tell the world about what she was experiencing. She posted on social media — something she’d learned to embrace — and said it all.
In 2019, she wrote on Instagram, “Here’s the thing . . . post partum is very real. And very mean. And it somehow makes you forget all of your tools.” She was recovering.
But it wasn’t so simple. Nearly three years later, when she had her second daughter, she was transparent again, giving herself more room to be a work-in-progress.
“[H]ere it is,” she wrote. “i have postpartum anxiety again. I thought, I’ll share about it when I’m ‘better’. I’ll have a really powerful story about how i overcame it. And everyone will think oh she’s so strong bla bla. But [expletive] that . . . this can be hell if you think you’re alone.”
Sharing helped. So did therapy, medication, spending time in nature — and making new music, right when she was at her lowest. She’d try to tell the story of her journey, even when there was shame about it.
That’s how, after seven years, Platten has an album she loves so much she named it I Am Rachel Platten — because, she says, this one feels like her.
It’s the one where she reveals some darker fears and emotions. She makes it clear she isn’t sure about what the exact path to happiness is, but knows she’s looking for it, always.
With I Am Rachel Platten, the music is now a family business. Lazan, who’d left law in 2006 and had been working as a management consultant, joined Team Platten full time. They created their own label, Violet Records, which means that all responsibilities, from booking to publicity, are on them — but so are the profits.
By the way, I did ask Platten whether “Fight Song” made her a gazillionaire. Basically, it helped her buy a house, it will pay for school for her daughters, and it will keep her comfortable. She says she thinks it’ll always be some kind of passive income. That makes it easier to enjoy putting out new songs without so much pressure.
“We’re fine because of ‘Fight Song,’” she says. “‘Fight Song’ is always an annuity that we can fall back on.”
She also says it’s why she can go out on her own.
“I’m not an emerging artist,” she says. “I have my fan base. I don’t need to have another humongous hit in order to have a significant income from music.”
The album was released in September.
Even though some of the songs are about depression and moments without hope, it’s still that signature Rachel Platten earnestness. She believes there is goodness. There’s no eye-rolling in any of it.
One thing that occurs to me about her new songs is that unlike in the “Fight Song” era, when I assumed she was 22, these songs are clearly written by someone in her 40s. She sings about middle-aged happenings. Like loving her husband — a guy she’s been with forever. Happily.
She laughs. “We’re boring, right?”
Sure, but I kind of love it.
I ask Platten whether it’s a career hindrance — for Billboard purposes — to be a grown-ass adult singing about a love that’s spanned decades, or about how a person feels after having two children. I mean, she has a new song, “Caroline,” that she performs with Michael Bolton. That is a middle-aged thing to have! I don’t think they’ll be using that song on whatever teen show has replaced Pretty Little Liars. (For the record, it is my favorite song on the album.)
But Platten tells me, actually, that the youngest “Fight Song” fans, even if they’re in their 20s now, are already telling her they can relate to lyrics about expectations, depression, and crawling out of misery to find hope again.
“I thought that it might be too old for a younger audience, because of the content and because of how intense the emotions are,” she says. “But unfortunately, I think the youth — this younger generation — has experienced incredible pain, trauma, anxiety, and depression way earlier than we ever did. Because of phones, because of our world, because of whatever’s going on.”
The reach of these songs has been slow but steady. As of last month, “I Don’t Really Care (Set Me Free),” a confidence-boosting anthem, had more than 400,000 views on Platten’s YouTube channel. Also chugging along, still, is “Fight Song.” If you put on any local adult contemporary radio station for a while, you’ll still hear it.
Steve Salhany, vice president of hot adult contemporary programming for Audacy, which runs 106.7 and 104.1, says “Fight Song” is still on radio playlists, despite its age. “Close to 500 spins last week,” he says, after checking the data. “That’s pretty big for a song that’s 10 years old.”
I will admit that while prepping for this story, I listened to “Fight Song” with friends in Wellfleet, by the water. I experienced a full circle of emotions with it in the first 20 seconds. First, I was comforted by the piano at the beginning. Then I was tense, remembering the election. Then I found myself appreciating the simplicity of the “We can do it!” message. Then I felt cringey because I appreciated it. Then I came full circle with the chorus because I forgot how much she nails it with that hook.
Honestly, would it be so bad if I were a little less cynical?
Looking back, Platten says the success that came with the pervasiveness of “Fight Song” was weird. It made her start to think about the wrong things. “I used to care so much and be so people-pleasing and look so hard for approval,” she says. “I just reached this point with kids, going through a severe mental health crisis — it’s just not my priority anymore. My relationship with my family, my children, my best friends, my band — that’s what matters. That’s what matters to me. I feel like maybe it’s turning 40 or something,” she says. Now she has “less [expletives]” left to give.
Now she’s doing publicity for an album she loves, planning a tour for 2025, and parenting — all without losing herself in the process.
It took time and lots of work, but now when she sings “Fight Song,” the lyrics feel true again.
Meredith Goldstein is the Love Letters advice columnist and a features writer for The Boston Globe. Send comments to meredith.goldstein@globe.com.