Song Exploder - Rachel Platten - Broken Glass

Episode Date: November 8, 2017

Rachel Platten is a singer and songwriter who’s released four albums, including her 2016 album Wildfire, which went Gold. The lead single from that album, “Fight Song,” was used prominently by Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. For a normally apolitical artist, the sudden proximity to the election had profound effects, both positive and negative. In this episode, Rachel breaks down her song “Broken Glass," which was inspired by that experience, and written just days before the 2016 election. songexploder.net/rachel-platten

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Rachel Platten is a singer and songwriter who's released four albums, including her 2016 album Wildfighter, which went gold. In this episode, Rachel breaks down her song Broken Glass, which came out in August 2017. My name is Rachel Platten, and I'm going to be talking about Broken Glass today. But the story of Broken Glass really begins a couple years earlier, with another, track by Rachel Platten called Fight Song. Fight Song broke the top ten on Billboard's charts, but it was also used prominently by the

Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. After that, everything changed for Rachel. Honestly, I'm a little afraid of talking about it just because, I mean, I'll tell you some of the story that I haven't really told anyone. First, here's Mike Taylor from Hillary Clinton's campaign team. My name is Mike Taylor, and I was the director of special projects for the digital team on Hillary for America. Around the time that we were selected, music for the campaign launch. We had kind of pulled together everyone from the campaign to put in suggestions, and we looked for songs that matched Hillary's message, and Fight Song made that list.

Hillary Clinton's camp reached out to me a year before Fight Song started being used by her, and we kept saying, no, I was performing a lot in the middle of the country. I wasn't just performing in, like, Blue States. It wasn't like that. I wasn't an artist that wanted to be associated with only one side of this political spectrum. And I knew how emotionally just complicated that election was. So I was scared. Oh, God. I can't be making me talk about all this. It wasn't a political song. It was the song that I wrote in my bedroom because I needed a reminder to not give up by myself. That was it. So that's why I was so hesitant.

But they were trying for like a year. Hillary loved the song. And that was amazing to me. I was really proud when I first heard that. And eventually I was like, yes. Fast forward through to January 2016, going into the primary season, our slogan was fighting for us at that point in time. And so we started making it the music that Hillary walked on the stage and walked off the stage too at every event that she did. For us, this was a huge piece of the campaign. So by the time the DNC came around in July, it just, of course, made sense to have Hillary walk out to that song.

At the Democratic National Convention in July 2016, Secretary Clinton was introduced by her daughter, Chelsea. Ladies and gentlemen, my mother, my hero, and our next president, Hillary Clinton. I had no idea that my song was going to be on the stage then. I turned it on just to see her walking out to it. I'm like, I didn't really know who to call or what to do, and I didn't really know how to take it in. And then I just started crying. It was incredible. Watching the first woman nominee on that stage walk out to my song.

After the Democratic National Convention, I got so much hate. I got death threats over the summer. My Twitter feed was just filled with people telling me that they hated me. How dare I take fight song away from them. That it was their song. It healed them. And now they couldn't listen to anymore. And I was heartbroken.

The summer wore on, and the campaign season continued, Rachel started working on a new album, what would eventually become her 2017 album, Waves. But all of this had affected what she was writing about in her songs. I'd been writing for three months from my record so far and staying far away from the empowerment songs because I felt like I was getting pigeonholed as like the empowerment girl. And I took this empowerment song all the way,

and I got a lot of hate from people. So I think I was like, let me just stay away from that stuff. But I got into the studio that day. It was November 1st. And at that point, everything seemed to put. point towards a Hillary Clinton victory. So right now, as we are taping this in our polls-only forecast, the 538 model gives Hillary Clinton a 71.8% chance of winning Donald Trump 28.2. Polls plus.

I said, I feel excited. I feel like a woman might be president. That's incredible. It was the first time I was working with these two guys, Nate Seiford and Jared Rogers. And there was something about them that felt gentle and sweet and kind of safe. And I said, you know, I think I want to write something empowering today. I think I can do that again. So we started singing this song. I actually have the demo of it. So this is me trying to piece out this melody that I'm hearing in my head

and I can't, my fingers are not doing what they want to. But that's how I was hearing it first. So I was playing that and they were like, what should the verse be? And I was like, well, maybe this is the verse. It was going to be a song about me feeling brave enough to speak up and not let all of that fear that was happening over the summer with the hate I was getting on the internet.

I was just kind of say like, I'm good. I'm okay standing up and speaking my mind. So we have this verse melody, and then we were stuck on the chorus. And I have a title on my notes in my iPhone for a song that did not exist. The title is broken glass. And then I kind of realized,

well, maybe this is a song about the selection. Maybe this is about breaking the glass ceiling. And this is a song about women. And this is a song about us doing something that we thought was impossible. This is that moment in history, that moment where we were going to break that glass ceiling. And it felt right. So bring on the pain, yeah, I can take it. Stump on my dreams, yeah.

I'm not caving. I have been patient. But I'm not waiting anymore. Not anymore, no. I'm going to dance on broken glass. Hey, I'm broken glass ceiling crash. It wasn't just for the election, it was also just for women. I have struggled so much with using my voice and owning my power.

I'll often back down and defer to men around me who work for me. And I forget that I'm the boss. And I forget that actually I'm in charge of all of this. So this song was also about me owning that and saying, like, I've gone through an awakening too. And I get to write a song about that. Let's do this. So we're all gathered on the piano because we kind of made a decision, let's stay by the piano today.

So we stayed there as long as we could. It was probably like two and a half hours. And then I was like, no, this piano, I'm not playing piano. My show is anymore. I don't want this to be a piano-based song. Let's move away from the piano now. Let's get some synth sounds. Let's get some weird bass sounds.

The chords were feeling too happy. I was just kind of like, give me something deep and like resonant. So Jared went and he starts with this growly synth-based. And then put in the music. this really cool Caribbean kind of beat. He originally gave me that because I lived in Trinidad for a year and a half and I was telling him about it. I was in the Soka band and I toured with him and I would love to make a song that feels like that. That has some of that element. So he actually used steel drum. So one section's looping and gradually more and more things are added to it

and words start flowing that way. The words are I'm on a highway full of red lights. I've lost so many long nights. And I was picturing midnight, a solitary car on this highway, being stopped every hundred yards and being so frustrated. Jared took the thing that I was humming. He took my voice, actually,

and twisted it into that. The image that I had, that felt like the soundtrack to that. I wanted it to feel like there was a crowd of people, but they were kind of lost, not being heard. and they were kind of being suffocated. And Jared just found this thing that almost sounded like someone yelling out and then drifting like a little ghost or something.

So finally I got my haunting sounds. And I was like, now I can keep writing these words. So what? Still got knives in my back. So I'm tied to the tracks. Honestly, that was me imagining Hillary and me imagining how she might feel, how she was just taking attacks from, every single angle and how hard that must be. Everyone was looking at her as a public figure,

but not as a human being, just someone to attack and blame, and we still do it now. And I think I was just trying to understand how that might feel and getting a taste of it over the summer from just being associated with her just a tiny bit. I was just trying to understand how it might feel to shoulder all of that,

not just the little taste that my insigree. but the massive responsibility and the negativity that she was facing from every single angle. So that line was for her. So I still got knives in my back. So I'm tied to the tracks. So then election happened. I was in L.A. at the time. I had a session that day.

I came home. And yeah, like all of America, it was an emotional night. one or the other. There was some BuzzFeed thing that was going around like little girls crying, holding up posters. The next day I called my manager and I said, well, I'm not finishing that song. Forget about that song. And he said, are you kidding? You were just telling me how the little girls crying was affecting you and impacting you. You absolutely need to finish that song. This isn't for her. This is for those girls. This is so hard to talk about it because again, I hate inserting myself in this.

And I really am afraid that, like, talking about this, alienates fans who have every right to enjoy my music too, but things like this turn them off. It's scary to talk about because my experience last summer, honestly. But it also is just the truth of it. And I have been advised by so many people to not tell the truth about what it is about because they'll say, well, do you really want to deal with the repercussions? of that later.

But the honest truth is that it's kind of exhausting to keep coming up with new ways to spin how I wrote the song when the truth of is that I wrote it about something that I think anyone who's really listening could hear. So my manager's like, no, no, no, you definitely have to continue this song. Go back in the studio and finish it. I have a little

voice memo of how the bridge got made. To the other side, baby, I'll survive. Baby, I'm a fighter. That's tough. I'm a fight, I'm a fighter. There's a lot of me spitting things out that were probably bad, and then them interpreting them and being like, okay, Rach, I think what you mean by that is this.

They were really beautiful at doing that, Tate. The words are, through to the other side, I'll survive because I'm a fighter. Through to the other side, I'm a fight because I'm a survivor. And it's a chant. We envisioned a humongous group of girls, like a girl choir, stopping. singing it together. In reality, it's just me and Nate, but... To the other side, baby I'll survive, because you know I'm a...

To the other song, baby I'm a... And that came from a really raw place of, I need to believe this right now. I write those things when I need to believe them. I'm not always there emotionally when I write a phrase like that, but it's where I want to get to almost like an affirmation. So we finished the song on the ninth, and we were like, this feels great. I kind of watched my hands of it and was like, cool. going to move on. And then there was some discussion about, well, this could be the single.

This is a contender for the single. You know, that wasn't in my mind the single. That was just something that was special, that I was glad that I'd written. So it became a whole other struggle of like getting back into the mindset of being okay with being the girl with a fist in the air and opening myself up to that again. But eventually I said, okay, if this is going to be the single, then I want to really get this production perfect. And I don't feel like it's perfect right now. And I think I know who could make it perfect. Stargate is a duo from Norway. They are production badasses,

and they've done everything from Beyonce, to Katie Perry, Firework, Rihanna Diamonds, a ton of Cia stuff. They're incredible. So I approached Stargate about it, and by the way, I got met with like a lot of everyone telling me, no, it's never going to work. They're too busy.

They're not going to do this. I was like, hey, let's not say no before I ask, okay? So I approached Stargate. Stargates made up of Tor Hermanson and Mikkel Erickson. Tor was in another session, so it was just me and Mikel. So I played the song for him and he loved it. He said, of course, I would love to produce it. I'll do additional production on it.

And I didn't think it needed much. I just thought it needed like a couple tweaks, a little tightening. So I thought that that's what he would be able to do, was kind of thinned it out. But he did kind of almost a remix. He also sped it up. I came in and heard it. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, no, what the hell is going on. This is so fat.

It wasn't totally perfect. But he did something that was mind-blowing to me and took the drums completely out of the chorus. Okay, so if you go to the Jared version, there's drums in the chorus. So there's drums and it feels good. But you couldn't understand what I was saying. And the lyrics were the most important part of the song to me. And it just felt like a party. And I didn't want the song to just be a party.

I wanted people to hear what I was saying. So he brilliantly made it a drop. It does that drop. We had like six versions that we did. Sorry, Mikkel, that's a lot of work. But we finished June 28th. And when did it come out? August 20th.

And all of a sudden I realized that I was going to start turning outward again. And not only that, but with a song that could potentially be divisive. So I was scared. I was scared to release it. But I haven't gotten any backlash because I haven't talked about it politically. I have definitely avoided and skirted it.

I've done interviews, but I've really kind of avoided any questions about the election. But it hasn't been fun because it also doesn't feel good to not say what you really think about something. How people react to it is not under my control. And to not be able to tell the truth about where this song came from and its roots and who it's really for. That hurts too. And now here's Broken Glass by Rachel Platten in its entirety. For more on Rachel Platten, visit SongExplotor. You can see the music video for Broken Glass, and there's a link to buy the song.

I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length, and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that.

It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Rope. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Malina, Minjee. Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co. Or just go to songexploder.net slash live.

That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Coons, with help from intern Olivia Wood. Special thanks to Mike Taylor and Greg Hale from Hillary for America, and Jody Avergan from the 538 Politics Podcast, and Brian Yance and Julie Shapiro. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a curated network of extraordinary cutting-edge podcasts made possible by listeners like you. Learn more at Radiotopia.fm. You can find every episode of Song Exploder at SongExploder.net,

or wherever you download podcasts. You can follow the show on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram at Song Exploder. Let me know what you think of this episode. My name is Rishi Kesh, Hereway. Thanks for listening. I knew you're going to do one of those introductions where you're like,

Rachel Platin was in my studio and she was very hesitant to talk about this song. Here, we dive into broken glass. I'm going to be listening, you're like, mah, why did I tell him everything? Radiotopia.