You may suppose you recognize Rachel Platten, the singer-songwriter behind the inspirational, never-give-up hit “Fight Song.” Since debuting a decade in the past, the catchy, upbeat tune has been a motivational anthem for everybody, from most cancers sufferers to presidential hopefuls.
However “Combat Tune” revealed only one aspect of Platten’s multidimensional persona—the “actually encouraging, empowered facet,” she says. Her latest album, I Am Rachel Platten, invitations listeners to get to know her on a good deeper, extra private stage, together with her struggles with “rage, jealousy, worry, grief and all of the issues that the human existence entails,” she says.
“I actually really feel prefer it’s my correct introduction to the world,” she provides. “This file was the primary time that I actually vulnerably shared these [other] elements of me…. It’s like I didn’t personal the shadow facet of me as a result of I used to be too afraid to be something however grateful and cheerful and empowered and excited. And I assumed that’s who I used to be purported to be as a result of I broke out with ‘Combat Tune.’”
Songwriting as drugs
Platten spent most of her 20s and early 30s attempting to make it as a musician, cobbling collectively a residing by enjoying late-night gigs, doing commercials, performing in cowl bands and touring in her mom’s automotive. Then, at age 33, she launched “Combat Tune.” It wasn’t an instantaneous hit, however when it lastly took off in January 2015, it catapulted Platten into the worldwide highlight virtually in a single day. She signed with a label—one thing each aspiring musician goals of—and even carried out on stage with Taylor Swift.
On the urging of her label, Columbia Data, Platten launched the album Waves in 2017. She’s pleased with Waves however, in hindsight, says she wasn’t prepared to supply new music so shortly. The album—and the best way Platten was being marketed—didn’t essentially really feel authentic, both.
Loads has modified since then. During the last eight years, Platten parted methods with Columbia Data, gave start to daughters Violet and Sophie, endured the pandemic, and began her personal impartial file label together with her husband, Kevin Lazan. Via all of it, Platten says she struggled to maintain her head above water, battling postpartum melancholy and anxiousness, in addition to power ache, insomnia and panic assaults that left her feeling disconnected from her physique. Songwriting—together with remedy, treatment, journaling and lots of different mental health strategies—helped her heal.
“These songs that I wrote for myself have been my drugs,” she says. “These songs saved my life.”
Take “Mercy,” for instance, which Platten says she wrote “in the midst of a breakdown” in late 2021. Her youthful daughter, Sophie, was only a few months previous and had been within the hospital with a excessive fever; her husband, in the meantime, was passing a kidney stone. And Platten was nonetheless within the throes of her personal postpartum psychological well being challenges. One night time, she fled, sobbing, to the recording studio within the yard of her Los Angeles residence.
“One thing in me broke,” she says. “I keep in mind feeling like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t take any extra. I can’t take yet another factor….’ And that wail of ache was a music inside 20 minutes…. In that second, when that music rushed by means of me and my ache was music—and exquisite music—it was virtually like a solution. ‘You’re going to be OK, and your songwriting is the best way out.’”
Different tracks on I Am Rachel Platten poured out in an identical approach, as Platten was wrestling together with her private demons. “Dangerous Ideas” is predicated on a mantra Platten repeated to herself time and again whereas affected by anxiousness after the start of her first daughter, Violet: “I’m larger than these unhealthy ideas.” She initially titled the music “Take heed to this when you’re having a panic assault” and included guided respiratory cues to re-center herself.
However a number of of the songs on the brand new album mirror Platten’s therapeutic journey as she overcame her struggles and gained newfound confidence in herself. She wrote “I Don’t Actually Care (Set Me Free)” about lastly shedding the people-pleasing tendencies she’d had since childhood. “Love me as I’m or don’t love me in any respect,” she sings defiantly. “I don’t actually care what you say, what you concentrate on me/ Nearly misplaced my thoughts attempting to make all people completely happy/ I do know who I’m/ I don’t care who you need me to be.”
Motherhood ‘ripped my coronary heart open‘
Her new identity as a parent additionally shines by means of. Motherhood “ripped my coronary heart open in probably the most lovely and ferocious approach,” she says, which led to an emotional depth in her songwriting and creativity she hadn’t beforehand been in a position to entry. She wrote the music “Ladies” as she mirrored on all the things she hoped and dreamed for her daughters as they grew up, like studying to belief themselves and never being afraid to make errors. “It was type of like a prayer over them, and, as I used to be writing it, I noticed it was additionally for me and my internal baby and for all the ladies and women that I beloved,” she says.
She additionally believes being pregnant, motherhood and the struggles she confronted allowed her to develop her vocal vary. “As a result of my voice has modified, how I wrote and what I do with my voice on songs is completely different,” she says. “There are such a lot of extra ballads on this file and so many extra lengthy, held notes the place I can form and bend the vowel and have enjoyable with it and play with it and actually specific, by means of my voice, ache and grief and worry and pleasure and lightweight. You may hear much more soul in my voice.”
Discovering her personal definition of success
I Am Rachel Platten is uncooked and deeply private. However, past the lyrics of her new songs, Platten has additionally opened up about her psychological well being struggles on social media and on stage. She desires different new mothers to know they’re not alone and that it’s OK to ask for assist. And, in doing so, she’s obtained a “humongous” quantity of affection, help and reassurance from her followers in return, she says.
“As a result of I used to be asking for assist, it was like a clarion name,” she says. “If I had stored that to myself, I believe I might’ve actually missed out on probably the most lovely connection that occurs once we are trustworthy about what we’re going by means of and are courageous sufficient to share.”
Her vulnerability and psychological well being advocacy has not gone unnoticed. In October 2024, the Nationwide Alliance on Psychological Sickness of New York Metropolis honored Platten with its “Voice for Change” award—a recognition that, she shortly realized, meant a lot greater than different types of validation she had been in search of.
“To be rewarded for this deeply internal work that I did to avoid wasting my very own life, it was so significant,” she says. “It actually hit me that that was what success was for me…. We should always all actually look at that definition of success and perceive what it means for us personally and never what we’ve been advised it’s. What’s it actually in your coronary heart, what actually lights you up, what’s actually going to make you are feeling fulfilled once you look again at your life?”
This text seems within the Could/June problem of SUCCESS journal. Picture by Jess Lynn Hess.
