Rachel Platten opened up to American Songwriter about her new music as we sat in her San Fernando Valley backyard studio for a long talk about songwriting and all the life changes since her last album Waves, released in 2017.
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On October 25, Platten’s new full-band version of “Girls” dropped. The original version was released last Mother’s Day as it was the song she wrote about the greatest transformation her world experienced —the joyous addition of her two baby girls: Violet Skye in 2019 and Sophie Jo in 2021. While indeed glorious events, motherhood is an adjustment and for someone like Platten it requires a tender balance.
“The way it affected my creativity was interesting,” she confides. “On the one hand it made me much more protective of my former self, my non-mother self, my creative artist self, and on the other hand, it blended in this beautiful way where it was so integrated that I didn’t even realize. And not just in how I wrote or what I wrote about, but it brought a maturity in the songwriting and gave me a feeling that I know who I am. I think as a mother, we really learn to trust our own gut.”
Platten found she had to learn how to set boundaries, aware that her girls, her husband, her business, and her “little inner artist” all needed attention. It became important to know how to say, “No, mom is in the studio. I have a job just like daddy and when my door is closed, it doesn’t mean that people can come in; it means that I’m creating.”
On January 24 released her second song, “Mercy,” reflecting the artist’s reclamation of her power after struggling with insecurity and fears.
“I feel brave,” she admits. “It’s quite a statement and different from anything you’ve heard from me before. I’m very excited to stand by it and sing it and own it, and own that pain and own that way that wrestling your demons can turn into the most incredible art.”
“Mercy,” a song she wrote entirely by herself, came through in 15 or 20 minutes, Platten reveals, “because I was in such a desperate need for music to save my life again and I knew immediately what I had, that I hit that songwriting lottery.”
Many songs are written to her inner self, her inner child, to protect her, nurture her, and enable her expression.
“They’re not outward directed, even though they may sound that way. It’s easier to sound like they’re written about someone else, but I take my inspiration from what I’ve been going through and what’s learned; the journey I’ve been on, and some of the lowest lows I’ve ever seen.”
She says people think she was hatched when “Fight Song” came out, but they don’t realize she spent 15 years in New York City paying her dues, touring in a band, and playing clubs from 1:00 a.m. to 4:00 a.m. She was songwriting every day and she says, “I’ve been basically writing this album for the last 20 years. This is the album I would have made if I had had the skills back then to write the songs that I’ve written now.”
But she didn’t have the skills, and she hadn’t yet had the experiences, the confidence, the maturity – what she calls “the hero’s journey: the leaving home, the searching, the ultimate defeat, falling to your knees, battling your demons and raging against what is and then realizing that the raging isn’t going to help, the surrender is what you need.
“It’s the softening and then after the softening and giving it all up, you find the light again and you find joy and you return home wiser and more mature having seen it,” she explains. “And that’s the journey the album goes on. And there’s no way I could have written that in my 20s.”
The first song she ever wrote was when she was about six-years-old growing up in Newton, Mass, called “Shady’s Waltz,” after her dog, named Shady. She was taking piano lessons at the time and her mother had the piano teacher write the song out on music paper, which she framed.
It wasn’t until she was around 16 or 17 that the music of such artists as Tori Amos began to inspire Platten to want to play and sing at the same time. The stirring need to write about her experience while interning at a recording label during a college trip abroad to Trinidad could not be denied.
Feeling alone and isolated, with the compassionate heart of an artist, the writings about systemic racism and the awareness of how unfair the world is were deep.
“It was like someone turned the faucet on and finally allowed this inner artist to come out,” Platten says.
She might have become a diplomat if the creative part of her hadn’t taken over. Nonetheless, the depth never left her work.
After her 2011 album Be Here failed to make enough noise to earn a living, Platten wrote music for film and television, for such shows as Pretty Little Liars and Finding Carter. She looked at it as a way of “honing my songwriting skills and craft.” She attended the summer camps her publishing company Sony held and took them very seriously. The songs were assignments and she found the process a lot of fun, learning to write with boundaries, structure, and rules.
But normally, Platten is not that disciplined. Although she tries to be, it doesn’t always happen that way. She has notepads all over the house, and even next to her bed, for when an idea might hit. Sometimes a song pours out, but sometimes it can be a challenge. It took a year and a half to write “Fight Song.”
“I was struggling to be heard. I was desperate to be taken seriously, I wanted the respect of my peers, but I also wanted the respect of myself. I wanted to understand that I’m not an imposter; that I belong here. ‘Fight Song’ was 15 years in the making, of all of that struggle,” she says of the #1 iTunes song that became Hilary Clinton’s campaign anthem. “There were so many songs before that saying similar things that just didn’t make it, weren’t good enough. ‘Fight Song’ was probably the 100th saying, ‘Please listen this time,’ and I was imploring myself to keep going.”
On this album, she feels her songwriting has returned to her roots (pre-2017’s Wildfire which contained “Fight Song” and “Stand by You”) with very little co-writing and lots of autonomy, a full measure of expression, sitting at her piano or with her guitar and then the band and her in a room making music together.
The release of the album in May coincides with the tenth anniversary of “Fight Song” when she was close to giving up, but prevailed because she was—and is—a fighter.
“I might be down, but I will not stay down,” she declares. “I will find a way back up. You can never bet against me because of my own work ethic, my own skill, my own drive, and the talent that was there initially, that I fostered for 20 years. You can’t bet against that.”
Photo by Jess Hess
