You may assume you recognize Rachel Platten, the singer-songwriter behind the inspirational, never-give-up hit “Battle Track.” 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 “Battle Track” revealed only one side of Platten’s multidimensional character—the “actually encouraging, empowered aspect,” she says. Her newest album, I Am Rachel Platten, invitations listeners to get to know her on a fair deeper, extra private degree, 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 aspect 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 ‘Battle Track.’”
Songwriting as drugs
Platten spent most of her 20s and early 30s making an attempt to make it as a musician, cobbling collectively a dwelling by taking part in late-night gigs, doing commercials, performing in cowl bands and touring in her mom’s automobile. Then, at age 33, she launched “Battle Track.” It wasn’t a right away 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 desires 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 happy with Waves however, in hindsight, says she wasn’t prepared to supply new music so rapidly. The album—and the best way Platten was being marketed—didn’t essentially really feel genuine, both.
Quite a bit has modified since then. Over the past eight years, Platten parted methods with Columbia Data, gave beginning to daughters Violet and Sophie, endured the pandemic, and began her personal unbiased file label along with her husband, Kevin Lazan. By means of all of it, Platten says she struggled to maintain her head above water, battling postpartum despair and nervousness, in addition to continual ache, insomnia and panic assaults that left her feeling disconnected from her physique. Songwriting—together with remedy, remedy, journaling and lots of different psychological well being methods—helped her heal.
“These songs that I wrote for myself had been my drugs,” she says. “These songs saved my life.”
Take “Mercy,” for instance, which Platten says she wrote “in the course of a breakdown” in late 2021. Her youthful daughter, Sophie, was only a few months outdated 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 evening, she fled, sobbing, to the recording studio within the yard of her Los Angeles dwelling.
“One thing in me broke,” she says. “I keep in mind feeling like, ‘Oh my God, I can not take any extra. I can’t take yet another factor….’ And that wail of ache changed into a tune inside 20 minutes…. In that second, when that tune rushed by me and my ache changed into music—and exquisite music—it was virtually like a solution. ‘You’ll 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 along with her private demons. “Dangerous Ideas” is predicated on a mantra Platten repeated to herself over and over whereas affected by nervousness after the beginning of her first daughter, Violet: “I’m larger than these dangerous ideas.” She initially titled the tune “Take heed to this should you’re having a panic assault” and integrated guided respiration cues to re-center herself.
However a number of of the songs on the brand new album replicate 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 consider me/ Nearly misplaced my thoughts making an attempt to make all people blissful/ I do know who I’m/ I don’t care who you need me to be.”
Motherhood ‘ripped my coronary heart open‘
Her new id as a mum or dad additionally shines by. Motherhood “ripped my coronary heart open in essentially the most stunning 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 tune “Women” as she mirrored on every thing 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 sort of like a prayer over them, and, as I used to be writing it, I noticed it was additionally for me and my inside little one and for all the ladies and women that I cherished,” she says.
She additionally believes being pregnant, motherhood and the struggles she confronted allowed her to increase her vocal vary. “As a result of my voice has modified, how I wrote and what I do with my voice on songs is totally 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 categorical, by my voice, ache and grief and worry and pleasure and light-weight. You’ll be able to 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 needs 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, assist 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 feel I’d’ve actually missed out on essentially the most stunning connection that occurs once we are trustworthy about what we’re going by 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 rapidly realized, meant a lot greater than different types of validation she had been searching for.
“To be rewarded for this deeply inside work that I did to save lots of 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 study that definition of success and perceive what it means for us personally and never what we’ve been instructed 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 while you look again at your life?”
This text seems within the Might/June problem of SUCCESS journal. Photograph by Jess Lynn Hess.
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