A Campaign-Song Nightmare

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Just a quick note. This episode contains some cursing that you may not usually hear on this show.
tell me if this analogy is right because i was like i was thinking the metaphor

is like if you bought a dress that you loved and then you wore this dress to a party and then something unexpectedly terrible happened at the party, you weirdly would hate the dress. Like it's not the dress's fault, but you would kind of be, you would like be angry at the dress.
I was wondering

if that's, that's the, that's the reaction people had to the song. I mean, that's a pretty, like,

that would be a pretty, um, fair or unfair. Well, I think it's a little dumb to be mad at a dress.

Right.

Like a small boat on the ocean. This is Radio Atlantic.
I'm Hannah Rosen. Every four years, the music world and the political world interact, and weird things happen.
DNC, turn out for what? This election year, there's been the DNC roll call featuring Lil Jon. There's also the rumor that Beyoncé was going to show up at the DNC, which she never did.
Kamala Harris is brat, Swifties for Kamala, and then on the Republican side, a less cute kind of relationship with the music world. A federal judge in Atlanta has ruled today that former President Donald Trump and his campaign needs to stop using the song Hold On, I'm Coming.

Swedish pop group ABBA is the latest musical group to object to the Trump campaign. Singer Celine Dion is criticizing former president Donald Trump's campaign for playing her music at political rallies without her permission.
Dion says the campaign has played My Heart Will Go On at these events since last year. But even when a musician agrees with a politician, like is wholeheartedly down with the mission of the campaign, there can be dangers.
One musician has gone on this journey in the most crushing and public kind of way. Her name is Rachel Platten.
When did the term fight song occur to you? Do you even remember anymore? Yeah, no, I do. I do.
It was very clear. I was at a college football game.
I'm kidding. Get out of here.
I'm fucking with you. Totally.
I was like, this is not going to be this. Wouldn't that be amazing? I was like, I was at Ohio State.
It was loud. It's not going to be this literal.
Yeah. Rachel is the artist behind Fight Song.
It was a little bit more wordy when I wrote it. It was like, this is my fight song, time to take back my life song, time to prove I'm all right.
Anyway. Fight Song was also the song that, for better or worse, became synonymous with Hillary Rodham Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign.
Let's stand up for the future that we want together. Thank you all so much.
Fight song played and played and played over and over and over again at 10 million campaign rallies until my friend and political reporter Olivia Nuzzi tweeted that summer, quote, But here's the first heartbreak. Initially, Rachel didn't even want the Hillary campaign to use the song at all, because Rachel was having her first real brush with fame and success after more than a decade of hustling in the music industry, and she didn't want to risk it.
So when the campaign first called, Rachel was like, no. No, no, no, no, no.
I was afraid. Ah, even then.
I did not want that to happen. And I was trying to stall my answer.

Interesting.

I remember saying a gentle no, a respectful no for a couple months. Why? Because if you go back to the me that was there and had just had everything come after 13 years and was trying to shift and bend and shape myself into someone that I thought could keep this, I did not want to do anything divisive.
And I was scared to be on any side of anything. And the song was resonating deeply with kids in the hospital and with cancer patients and with sports teams and with people overcoming horrible things.
And so to all of a sudden be asked to put my song as something that would stand for only one group was the opposite of what I believed. No matter what I personally believed, I didn't want my music to do that when I saw how healing music could be.

Right. Just to enter any kind of arena of like—

Divisiveness.

—one versus another.

Yeah. That's not what I stand for.

And it's not what I'm interested in or passionate about, though I understand how important it is in every other aspect of life.

For me, as an artist, it's not what I'm here to do. Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm. So how did that shift? Well, I think it got kind of hard to say no.
Mm-hmm. You know, I think it just, it didn't make that much sense to say no.
Because? I was on Columbia Records, and I am married to a man that's very interested in politics, and I have a family that's very interested, and, like, I had people around me very excited about the possibility and who didn't understand this, like, somewhat naive but tender artist heart that I had that was scared. You know, everyone was just like, what are you talking about? Who cares? Like I don't care if you're scared.
This matters. This fucking matters.
You have to do this. And I felt that in my soul too.
I felt like, you know, all right, okay, I'm a girl's girl. I'm a woman's woman.
I, as a woman, I have to allow this woman who is going to possibly be the first official nominee.

Like, I have to let her use it.

I can't say no.

Who am I to say no? After the break, why Rachel maybe should have said no. Like a small boat on the ocean.
Fight Song was already a hit, but it cemented its status when a version premiered at the 2016 Democratic National Convention, a montage of celebrities sang along in front of bright, colorful backgrounds. The vibes were, we are hopeful.
This is good. Also, we were still really into acapella back then, post-pitch perfect and all.
I may only have one match.

But I can make an explosion.

The first time I heard it used in the context of her campaign was the DNC.

And it was on TV. It's night two.
Who's pumped up? And caught, like, my husband being like, dude, turn it on. He was in New York, I think.
And I remember I was, like, in my towel with wet hair, alone in a small little, like, bungalow in Venice, totally caught by surprise. Like, I knew she was going to, but I think it hadn't been officialized or something.
Like, we didn't know if she'd actually use it for the DNC. For some reason, it might be dumb of me, but I didn't know that I completely expected it.

And so hearing it was exciting.

And it was beautiful.

And it was, I had tears in my eyes and I was proud.

And it was amazing.

It was amazing.

That seems uncomplicated. Yeah, that seems uncomplicated.
Regardless of what I believed, it was a very special thing to hear a song that I wrote for myself. It was uncomplicated and it made me really proud.
Mm-hmm. And did it remain that way? No.
No. You know what happened.
I mean, no. I mean, it wasn't just her losing.
It was the political pundits, these poor people who had to hear it over and over and over. My God.
Like, anything you hear over and over is so annoying. You hate the song that's the most played song.
It's so fucking annoying. And so, of course, Fight Song became annoying.
And, like, I just, I felt bad for them. I felt bad for my song.
I felt bad for me. I felt bad for all of us.
It's just like, I don't want you to have to hear my song that much. And you don't want to hear my song that much.
I did not agree to appear in this. I was just told to wait here with these things on my ears.
No one mentions this is part of a weirdly earnest acapella song for Clinton. Awful.
Again, I did not agree to be part of this. This song is going to irritate people.
And it became complicated and hard because there was a lot of tweets making fun of me and impersonalizing it. Like, you know, and I, Kevin, my husband, is, like, follows all of that.

And so he was aware of what was happening and showing me if it maybe had been up to me, I wouldn't, I kind of would have just tuned it out or tried to. But he is obsessed with Twitter and the news cycle and like always updating.
And so he was seeing all of it. And these people that he followed and kind of admired and looked up to were like making fun of his wife daily.
He was just like, he was like, that's not good.

And it didn't feel good.

It was confusing.

And it was, and I felt misunderstood.

And I was taking it personally when it was not personal at all.

It wasn't personal.

It was, there's a naivety about the song if you don't know the artist behind it.

And there's a simplicity about the song if you don't know me and you don't know my story and you don't know what happened to me and why I wrote it. And maybe there's a simplicity regardless.
But, yeah, to be made fun of was really, it sucked. It sucked.
did it make you feel um i don't know i'm guessing here but like ashamed of the more naive parts of you or like what was the part because sometimes you can you can say like fuck you twitter and sometimes it hurts you know i've been there i never could say i could never until now until i turned 40 had kids went through a severe mental, I don't give a shit. I mean, like, I understand what matters and, like, who I really am and what, and I derive my sense of worth from my own heart and from my family and friends.
But at the time, like, newly famous, I was very, I did not feel like, fuck you, Twitter. I felt like, oh, my God, I must be, like, there must be something bad about me or my writing me or my writing or like it must be dumb and then I would it was conflicting because at the same time I was still getting thousands and thousands of messages from people telling me that it was healing them from cancer or their battle cry or you know the thing that saved their life so I also felt protective of the people who were being moved by it and so that was a confusing feeling.
I kind of want it to be like, I wish that all of you could see the person in the hospital, or maybe it's your mom or your sister or your brother. I wish you could see what I see and experience how this has healing power too.
And how anything massively popular, there's going to be people's positive reactions and negative reactions when it becomes so big. And I think that it was hard to stomach and it was confusing and yeah.
Did it make you question any parts of yourself or the way that you were? Yeah, I think that my relentless positivity that I was promoting because I thought that that's what I was supposed to do as the singer behind Fight Song, it wasn't necessarily who I am. It was one part of me.
Like, yes, I am a hopeful person to my core, but at the same time, I'm someone who has had trauma and faced pain and felt deep fear.

And I didn't think that that was who I was supposed to be. Someone who has had trauma and faced pain and felt deep fear.

And I didn't think that that was who I was supposed to be in the public.

I didn't think that was who anyone wanted to see sing the fight song.

Of course, we all know what happened next.

Hillary lost.

Last night, I congratulated Donald Trump and offered to work with him on behalf of our country. I hope that he will be a successful president for all Americans.
This is not the outcome we wanted. With Hillary's loss, Fight Song took on a different kind of feeling.
The annoyance about the overexposure and its relentless optimism curdled into something meaner. It was no longer the anthem of the first female presidential campaign.
It was a reminder of its failure. In 2020, Matt Miller of Esquire wrote this, quote, Even four years later, it's impossible to to separate that mindless cloying chorus with the crumbling of our nation's pride.
Do you remember when she lost? Like, were you at a party with your friends like a lot of people? I was unfortunately in a fitting because I had like some, the American yeah the american music awards i think i had a fitting so i was it was so stupid i was in a gown i was like trying on gowns and i was very frustrated because i remember feeling like this is so dumb what have i i've made the wrong life choices that i'm being stuffed into like a shiny sequin thing when this humongous thing is about to happen. And it was panicky.
And we were all like, someone was like hemming the dress and like, you know, it was one of a classic movie moment where she, I think, pricked me and I was like, ah! None of us were feeling great. And all of us were anxious.
And yeah, it felt so stupid and superficial to be doing that. I remember looking around like, what am I doing?

And when she lost, then did something change around the song for you or for the song?

Like, then what happened?

Because that's like a whole other layer of meaning that you didn't ask for.

You know, it's interesting.

People, it changed for people in the political spectrum.

And I'm sure people in the public, if they didn't know the song in any other context, I'm sure it changed in that way.

But not for me personally, no.

And I think that's a good thing. people in the political spectrum and I'm sure people in the public if they didn't know the song in any other context I'm sure it changed in that way but not for me personally no I mean I was still touring to like 15,000 20,000 people at a time who were screaming it back to me with tears in their eyes and so like it wasn't really changing for me in that way unless I looked on my phone and there it was changing or at whatever the, or like, you know, whoever was interviewing me and being told, oh, your song is actually representing failure now, or like being made fun of in a worse way.
I was like, okay, right. I understand that.
And yet, I'm touring and this is what's happening in my actual life. So what am I supposed to pay attention to? So you're like headlining and the people are responding to the song and then the narrative somewhere out there is like, oh, now...
Somewhere out there are people that hate it and hate me and hate what it means. Or not hate's a strong word.
That's what I felt. That's a young part of me that felt that way.
So that's probably why I said that. But there's a whole other group of people that are collectively maybe rolling their eyes or frustrated or feeling whatever way they are feeling.
And yet there is a massive amount of people that I'm seeing in front of me that are feeling quite differently. And also people online that are also still sending me those messages.
And the song is still number one. So it's like, it's a little confusing, right? Knowing what you know now, would you still let the Hillary campaign or any campaign use your song? Did you see my post on X? They were like, I think Matthew Iglesias was like, all right, pop stars, let's go.
Kamala's running. Where are you? Taylor, Selena.
And I posted a meme of Homer Simpson, like, retreating into the bush.

I was going to say, like, if another artist came to you and said, hey, like, Kamala's campaign wants to use my song, like, what would you say?

I would say, I think I'm good. I think I'm good.
I love you. Bless you.
I think I've done my part in that way. And yeah, I think a kind, a kind hell no.
Would you advise anyone else to do it? I don't know. I don't know.
I mean, on one hand, look, I had to go through all of that to be where I am today. Interesting.
I don't regret it. I don't look back and like feel dumb or feel hurt anymore about it.
I feel a sense of understanding and, like, kindness towards the Rachel that in that moment made that decision.

And I love her, and I wish I could put my arms around her and say, this is going to suck.

But what you're going to learn from this experience is, whew, it's so good.

And I don't want to rob you of that experience.

So, girl, get your armor on. Get your big girl's panties on.
Let's go. This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Janae West.
It was edited by Claudina Bade,

fact-checked by Steph Hayes,

and engineered by Rob Smersiak.

Claudina Bade is the executive producer of Atlantic Audio,

and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

By the way, Rachel has a new album out.

It's called I Am Rachel Platten.

I'm Hannah Rosen, and thank you for listening.

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