
International Relations or International Popstar? (with Rachel Platten)
Subscribe to Lemonada Premium for Bonus Content
While in college, Rachel Platten was on the path to a career in international relations. But then she decided to switch course and swap a semester abroad in Spain for a semester abroad in Trinidad where she fell in love with music. She now has a song that has been streamed more than a billion times (Fight Song) and a new album “I Am Rachel Platten” out at the end of the summer. Rachel talks to Sam about the impact postpartum depression has had on her music, how she loves having bossy friends, and how sometimes music can save you when nothing else can.
Keep up with Samantha Bee @realsambee on Instagram and X. And stay up to date with us @LemonadaMedia on X, Facebook, and Instagram.
For a list of current sponsors and discount codes for this and every other Lemonada show, go to lemonadamedia.com/sponsors.
Transcript
SPEAKERS
Samantha Bee, Rachel Platten
Samantha Bee 01:33
Look, if you have listened to the show before or heard me talk literally ever, you probably have a pretty good understanding that I have no love lost for how we handle women’s health care and the USA, it’s like basically a supreme court mandate that it doesn’t matter if women live or die in this country, their words, not mine. One thing that particularly galls me, though, is how we treat or actually how we don’t treat new mothers. I have spoken at length here before about abortion bans, childcare crisis, but today I have some pretty serious choice words for something that has had a stigma attached for too long, postpartum depression and how there is so little we do for new moms who suffer from it. Having a baby of course, it should be joyful, but it can also be incredibly isolating and a physical and mental challenge. It can be confusing to one day be meeting your friends out for dinner, and then the next night, providing breakfast, lunch and dinner from your body for a person you just met. It’s hard, even under the best circumstances, and postpartum depression does not care if you had an easy pregnancy, a good delivery, all the help in the world, or the healthiest food it can come for anyone, and it’s just one of the many things that women are expected to suffer in silence. In fact, 70% of US counties lack enough maternal mental health providers, which means if you are struggling postpartum, you’re probably struggling without medical attention after you pop out your baby, you get one six week checkup, and then your doctor goes back to being harder to find than looking for Waldo without your glasses on you.
Samantha Bee 03:46
This is Choice Words, I’m Samantha Bee. My guest today is the amazingly talented singer and songwriter Rachel Platten. You know her from fight song, which has been streamed more than a billion times, and her new album, I am Rachel Platten, is out soon. Until then, her new single, I know, is out now, and it is so pretty. It’s a deeply personal album, and she has been super honest with how her postpartum experience has shaped her music. So take a listen and make good choices.
Samantha Bee 04:30
Okay, I’m in a hotel room in New Hampshire, and for those who are tuning in, visually, you can tell I’m in a hotel room because there’s a painting of a sailboat.
Rachel Platten 04:38
The art, the art, yeah, is dead giveaway.
Samantha Bee 04:41
Dead giveaway. Okay, all right, I want to thank you so much for being here. If people don’t know we know each other, we’ve we don’t know know each other, but I like you so much because you just did. We had so much fun. We worked together. We did a second that was so funny. For full frontal back in the day. I’ll reshare it, because it’s so good. You’re so funny, yeah.
Rachel Platten 05:09
I was cracking up at you the whole time because what I was like in a bathroom, right?
Samantha Bee 05:14
It was like to, it was like to, it was like to fortify myself. You would, you would sit in my bathroom.
Rachel Platten 05:23
That’s right, and sing fight song, fight song to you, to me when you needed it.
Samantha Bee 05:27
to the point where I was like, get racial flat and get out of my bathroom. Give me peace. And you were like.
Rachel Platten 05:34
I was like, I won’t leave until you’re empowered, not until you’re empowered.
Samantha Bee 05:39
Okay, I was listening to your new album. We are going to talk all about your new album, which is great. It’s great. It’s great, goddamn great. It is, but our entry point into this conversation is going to be about choice, because the show’s all about choice. You know, we always introduce the concept of the podcast to people, and we’re like, it’s all about choices. Like, think of a choice, and I think it’s really agonizing for people, because they’re like, what’s the choice? The biggest which one? Because our life is made up of minor ones, major ones, whatever, sometimes a minor choice turns out to be like.
Rachel Platten 06:23
Comes the major?
Samantha Bee 06:24
Becomes the major. So, like, are you good at making decisions? Are you good at just, are you just, like, fundamentally, are you good at deciding things? Do you mulled you go to your thinking corner?
Rachel Platten 06:36
You know, I am. I don’t think that I’m good at making little decisions, like daily decisions. I’m actually love being around people that are just kind of more bossy in that way, like, you know, like, I love having best friends who are the kind of vibe that they’re just like, This is what we’re doing, and this is what you know, and this is what you should do, and this is where you should put your daughter for school, and this is what you do for class like, little decisions. I’m pretty tight B and I’m like, kind of like my husband would, like, roll his eyes and be like, you are so controlling. I don’t know what the dick you’re on, but, like, I strive, but I feel that I’m not that decisive in terms of small things, but when it comes to big things, and like, core decisions and big things, I do feel like I am an excellent decision maker, and I listen to my gut, and I’m good at tapping into my intuition, and I’m practicing and learning tapping into that intuition for these littler things, because the littler things, for some reason, are tougher for me.
Samantha Bee 07:29
That’s so interesting. It’s interesting that you would even recognize that and reflect on that.
Rachel Platten 07:35
I’m very enlightened. I’m very enlightened, I can tell.
Samantha Bee 07:39
We can tell.
Rachel Platten 07:39
A lot’s gonna surprise you about me.
Samantha Bee 07:41
I feel like, just like, if people have questions about how to do things, they should just call us up. Just ask us, and we’ll solve stuff for them, no prob.
Rachel Platten 07:50
I was having the same thing that I imagine other guests or maybe you too have felt like, what is the what’s the one? What’s the one I can talk about, what’s the what’s a big one? Or should I talk about a big one? Is that too obvious? Yeah, anyway, okay.
Samantha Bee 08:02
Well, what did you decide on? No, no. I mean, no, like, if you’re we’re there. I just feel like I need to know what you I know it’s, it is really hard because you go, oh. Like, I you know it is really hard, but do you okay?
Rachel Platten 08:20
Okay, yes, okay, so I thought about it, and I have several, but I that the one that I want, something I want to talk about. Let me tell you two. And then you see, this is my indecisiveness in my decision making about the small things, all right, so one is about the choice that I made to become a parent and have a baby. And I was late. It was like 36 I was kind of moving in the music industry, and it was a kind of okay, really gonna put your career on hold if you decide this. But the one that I think is most interesting in my life, and that impacted me the most, most, besides becoming a mom, was this choice. When I was in college, I was an international relations major, picture me 19. I was, like, restless and angsty and and wanting more. It was the beginning of my own heroine’s journey of like, something more is out there. I can feel it. I was a good girl. I grew up in Boston, and I think, as you know, and I was doing the path that I thought were supposed to do, you know, college, maybe graduate school. I don’t know, be normal. Don’t be an artist. Don’t be crazy and but I had this call for music in me. And I was in a class. I was in a national relations class, and there this man came in, he came in, and he presented this study abroad program for Trinidad, and I was planning on going to Spain because I speak Spanish, and I was excited about the normal thing that you do if you’re in a liberal arts college and you go to fucking Europe and blah, blah, blah, and that’s what I thought the path I was going to be was on. And all of a sudden my soul lit up. I saw this presentation on Trinidad. I saw carnal wall. I saw the costumes, I saw the music, I heard the steel drums. I felt in my soul. I need to go there. I need to go there. And I switched everything around. And on an impulse and on a whim, I was like, I’m going to Trinidad. And it was the weirdest decision according to my family, they were like, what? Where is Trinidad? For those of you don’t know. It’s a small island in the Caribbean. It’s 12 miles off the coast of Venezuela. It has an incredibly rich history that we don’t need to dive into. But music is one of the foundational, you know, that heartbeat backbones of their culture. And that was something that he talked about, was how music was so integral in everything from culture to politics to religion. Like music was just the heartbeat of this country, and I realized I need to be there. It’s going to somehow bring this musician in me alive. And so I went and it did.
Samantha Bee 10:50
What? That’s incredible. You chose, you chose correctly, 100% but that is, like, I love that story so much. So you were just really called to it. And so tell me about your experience in Trinidad. So you switched your study abroad. You were like, I’m going to Trinidad. Everyone was like, okay, let me change, all the paperwork. What are you going to do there? And you were like, I don’t know, go to carnival.
Rachel Platten 11:22
First of all, I’m exactly I got to Trinidad and knew nothing. Knew no one knew nothing about even songwriting, and I knew, and I signed up for a course of songwriting classes with a famous in the Caribbean artist named Andre Tankard, who has since passed away, and he was a Calypso artist, and I had an internship with him, and he was going to supposedly teach me how to write songs. And then I also had an internship at a record label called rituals music in Port of Spain. And that was my life, and that was what I did. I got there and and I was thrown into that, and I and I was at the University to West Indies, their dorms, all of it was just so confronting and different and wild and scary, and it almost it was such a brave wild thing to decide that it forced songs out of me. You know, it was like I knew somehow that I needed to write songs, and I needed some kind of experience. I needed something to rub up against some kind of light, to like.
Samantha Bee 12:22
You needed, like, friction and excitement and like.
Rachel Platten 12:27
Yes, just to confrontation and like, yeah, fear. And it was just so much that I had to face about myself in my world. And it was a complicated time in the world too. I think it was 2000 I want to say 2002 so it was right when US liberal arts college students were really like, trying to understand, well, how does the world actually see us? Because you We, at that time, I think we all thought America’s a superhero, and blah, blah, blah. And going abroad, I had gone to Italy the year before, and going abroad to the Caribbean was a very different story, where it was like, wait, is America the bad guy? What’s going on? I’m so confused. I’m so much less comfortable talking about politics now, because I’m just so not aware of stuff. I’m so much in my songwriting and of young ladies. But then if you had interviewed me, then I would have had a million opinions. Felt so comfortable vocalizing them anyway. That was what I was writing songs about. If you can believe it, I was I was writing songs about a understanding. What does it feel like to be the other? What does it feel like to be in a room where I’m the only one of who looks like this verse, in a room at home where everyone almost looks like me, and I’ve never had that experience. And so my earliest songs were to understand the world around me. They were so deep and so emotional and and just like you think that the first songs an artist writes might be about boys and some of them, but, or parties or something, but mine were wildly deep. There was one called, like, solo sailor, and it was about the slave trade, and, like, trying to understand that. I mean, I was desperate to understand and empathize and learn.
Samantha Bee 14:14
Yeah, I know that’s amazing. Do you listen to those? Do you listen to your first songs ever? Do you?
Rachel Platten 14:20
Oh they’re so bad. My mom, has them all. She’s like, they’re wonderful.
Samantha Bee 14:29
And did you write? Did you just write and write and write? Were you just like, I don’t know what’s happening right now. I’m gonna eat some food. I’m gonna write some songs, eat.
Rachel Platten 14:39
You have no idea how worried you were about to eat some food part. I ate so much food, and I actually gained quite a bit of weight, and I my mom came to visit me, and they were like, oh my, you look so happy. You look robust and healthy, yeah.
Samantha Bee 14:57
Oh, I love Trinidadian food. I love Trinidad. So, like, these little literally, that’s so funny. Because we were, was talking about Trinidadian food with my son today, because he loves it too. And we were, he was like, can we make country Captain chicken? Because I love it so much. I’m like, we could try, like we said, we’re not going to make it.
Rachel Platten 15:20
That’s so funny. Why do you know about Trinidadian food? Have you been to Trinidad?
Samantha Bee 15:23
I just have. I have been to Trinidad. And I grew up in Toronto, in.
Rachel Platten 15:31
There’s a lot of Trinidadians in Toronto.
Samantha Bee 15:32
Yeah, and my high school was in, like, it was, we called it little West Indies, like, at the that’s where my high school was. So all my friends were nadadian or Jamaican, like, and we just ate like, that was just like, oh my god, Samantha, my whole high school life, in a way, like it was just woven into fabric of everyday life.
Rachel Platten 15:53
And you like, and you’ve experienced maybe carnival a little bit and, like, I don’t know they have duvet at the carnival there, but that was the most. I mean, it was such an amazing experience to be let in, to the, to that, you know, to get a sneak, like a peek in, in a way that, like, I don’t really feel was earned for me, but I just generous and like, great here you want to learn, and you have an open heart and an earnest heart will teach you what our experience is like, and come you know, I’ll teach you the real meaning. You’re listening to steel drums. Do you know why we play steel drums? It’s not just for entertainment, and they don’t not just the Caribbean sound. It’s because that was the only instruments that slaves had, and they were trash cans, and they got dented by the rain, and they realized that the rain was denting and made different sounds based on how dented they were. And so the music was out of necessity and out of desperation and like thirst. And though it’s I feel almost afraid to be like I understand, because what right do I have to understand that part of my soul understands the need for music, you know? And certainly, after the last five years that I’ve really a deep battle with mental health that I was pretty public about. We can go into it if you want, but yeah, I understand the need and the hunger for music to save your life when you have nothing else in any whatever way that resonates for you.
Samantha Bee 17:16
That is so it’s actually amazing to hear you talk about this, because it’s so funny to me that you could have ever had a different vision of your life, speaking to you now, and actually even listening to your new album, and like hearing that, like pulsing, need to make music that is inside you. It’s so impossible for me to imagine that there was a version of you who was like, I guess I go to law school next. Like, what is step? What’s step? E and F and G on my list of 10 things that I need to accomplish so I can pay my mortgage.
Rachel Platten 17:54
It’s hard for me to imagine that girl too, and yet it was so repressed in me, like this, this artist was so buried, and I was so afraid to be different and to follow a path that would scare my friends and family and be something that was, you know, I listened to you on, I think, a podcast with one of my friends, Maybe Kate Buller, was it?
Samantha Bee 18:21
Yeah, she’s great. She’s great.
Rachel Platten 18:23
Oh, I love her. And she and I know that you taught, I remember you talked about, um, growing up in that lonely house in Toronto, right?
Samantha Bee 18:31
Yeah, okay, that was that old hospital, an old hospital.
Rachel Platten 18:38
So that was so why that was so interesting to me. I love you. And so I was listening to it anyway, just, but listen, but listening to what I learned about you and like you’re like, it makes sense that you are doing something artistic and creative and wild and different. Because if you grew up in a weird old haunted house in it sure by yourself, what the hell else are you gonna go into a normal career like no.
Samantha Bee 19:00
impossible.
Rachel Platten 19:02
Weird, if you were, like an administrator in HR.
Samantha Bee 19:06
Right, but you’re a beautiful singer. Like, were you even when you were studying international relations and you were like, I guess I go to the UN next. Were you singing? Were you?
Rachel Platten 19:17
Yeah, okay, but in an acapella group, like, it in a very, in a rigid, within a rigid, a way that felt safe in with rigidity. I was like, in musicals. I was in an alcohol group. I was the director. I was a nerd, like.
Samantha Bee 19:33
And, yeah.
Rachel Platten 19:34
It was very like, how, what? How will you let me express my creativity? That’s how I will. Let me ask permission about, where may I do it? Where may I sing, right? Oh, in choir, great, I’ll sing, oh, in I’ll sing, there in the musical, I’ll sing. It was never and I started piano, basically, right?
Samantha Bee 19:53
Structure, competition, like, yeah, line.
Rachel Platten 19:57
My like, even, like, piano playing, I was, I studied class since I was five, and it was classical, there were rules. There was black and white, notes you follow. It wasn’t like now, lose all of that and find the artist and what she wants to do and color outside the lines. And no one invited me to it, not that they were supposed to, but I needed Trinidad, and this choice that I made. Strangely it was the first choice I made in my life. Now that I think about it, that was truly outside the norm lines, outside the rules, outside the rule box, that shocked everyone, and it was setting me up for years of that to come, of decisions that I just started to realize, okay, I don’t care anymore what you say. I can do now. I need to decide for myself and follow my own path.
Samantha Bee 20:44
Can I be honest with you? I could actually cry. This is a beautiful story. I just feel like your whole life was you like, just doing I am. I’m crying. Oh, my God, you made me cry. There’s some things like I feel, I feel so tenderly. I’m like, you did all this. You didn’t even know how much you were training to be ready to have your heart like pulled out of your chest. Like, it’s awesome. You you set all the conditions. You did everything right, and then you did the most right thing you could do without even knowing.
Rachel Platten 21:21
I love that you say it like that. I love how you put that it was, and it felt like the most wrong thing, and it was the scariest decision ever I got there, and I remember being like, what the dick have I gotten myself into? Where am I? What I am so far away. I don’t even know how to exist, or how to be, or what the norm is, and and then you’re right. It was the most right thing I ever did, because I learned to write songs. I was I was forced to write poems because I was so alone and lonely and scared. And the poetry like I I needed it. I needed, like we said, the friction, the something wrong in order for the rightness to come out.
Samantha Bee 22:04
Oh, my God, I have literal chills. We’ll be right back after this.
Samantha Bee 22:23
You are a musician, you’re a writer, you’re an artist. Do you even like I get this is a weird question. Do you have to make the decision to be vulnerable? You’ve been so vulnerable. Do you have to, like, when you’re writing your new album? Do you have to go, am I? Did you have to think to yourself, did you have to go to your that special place in your room and go, am I ready to be this raw? Like, how how raw can I really be? Like, how raw can I be and still sing these songs every time out on tour, or, like whatever.
Rachel Platten 26:25
I’ll answer it in a couple of different ways, one in the way that they are. Sam has listened, and you guys will hear them soon, and some of you have heard some of them, but they are very raw, and they’re very vulnerable, and they’re very real. And they’re about a mental health crisis, a woman finding herself and losing herself, a mother becoming a mother, and what and joy and love and and it’s about really, like the heroine’s journey of, you know, succumbing, fall into your knees, being in the dark, crying, mercy, yeah, find, you know, finally surrendering and finding freedom again and like, that’s what it tells the story of and so when I sing them now, it took me a minute in therapy and journaling and very hard work to be okay to sing them on tour, because i You were right on they are they are so personal, and they are so they were my medicine when I was breaking. So it was really hard to to not be re traumatized by them when I first started singing them in public, and I was a little bit but I’m really hard worker. And no matter what it is, I work my butt off. And so when it was like, man, I have an incredible therapist. I’m so lucky. And so when it was time for me to work on this, we worked and I worked, and now I can sing them, and it’s almost like a not a role, but it’s like I can, I can sing them with joy and remembrance of the pain, but I’m not there anymore. But when I was writing them, there was no intentional decision to be any one way or the other, they were what I had to say. They were they were coming out of me if I wanted them to or not. They had to be written. They were medicine when I was breaking they were they were for me. And that was another thing that happened for the first time since fight song, and that that era, I no longer cared. What do people want from me anymore? How do I stay and be the empowerment girl or not? What do I need? Because I am breaking I am losing myself. I am losing my mind. I am not okay. And so music became a lifeline, and there was no choice to be vulnerable or not, I just had to be.
Samantha Bee 28:41
Just had to be, because the artist lives.
Rachel Platten 28:45
And because, God, I believe, was like coming through me, healing me with my songs, like I was on my knees crying in the middle of the night, mercy. And that song, mercy that I released a couple months ago was it just came in 15 minutes. It just, it was, it was like, a and I didn’t write it. I like, didn’t write it there. There are ones that I feel like I wrote, but that one was just done coming through me and so.
Samantha Bee 29:12
You were just, like, a conduit, you were just like, I’m just like.
Rachel Platten 29:16
Yes, I need this. I was begging. I was like, Help me, help me, help me. And the answer was, through my songs.
Samantha Bee 29:22
You have two kids, what do you wish that you had known about pregnancy and the postpartum experience before you, before you experienced it yourself, like could anyone have told you in a way?
Rachel Platten 29:34
Oh, my God. You know, a friend tried to give me a book called The fourth trimester when I was pregnant, and I think I was in such denial, maybe a part of me, some very wise, larger than me, part of me knew what I was about to experience, and felt so much discussed for that book, like it was like this, because I started to read it, and it was a woman being very like very honest about the. Brutal experience. She had the postpartum depression and with her vaginal walls, like, all the kind of stuff that you that you have no idea about before you’re a mom. And it was all of that, and I was just like, get that book so far away from me. And I also had a little bit of, not a little bit, quite a lot of the LA BS, like spiritual bypass thing going on where I was like, like, I don’t want that negative book around me.
Samantha Bee 30:31
I don’t want to, I don’t want to manifest any if I touch the cover of the book, it’s gonna go inside me. I don’t want to.
Rachel Platten 30:37
It’s insane, and it was, must have been so much repression. It must have been a part of me knowing it was coming that like something had to break, the dam had to break at some point and but so I don’t know if someone could prepare me. My mother, when I was pregnant, my second for those of you guys that don’t know that are listening, I suffered very publicly and very extremely with postpartum depression with both of my babies with my second after I’d healed from my first. My mom asked me when I was pregnant, are you afraid of it happening again? And you would think that I had just been through this and had worked so hard in therapy and understood that I would not repress it again. And yet I was like, Mom, why are you bringing that on me that is not going to happen. I mean, I want to hug myself so much back then, be like, Oh, baby. Like, come here. I know you’re so afraid and and I think I was just so scared of it happening that I wanted nothing to do with, like, remembering it. And now, since really, truly, falling to my knees and reaching the bottom, which, those of you who have really had your, you know, Dark Night of the Soul know what I’m talking about, like, the bottom, when you think it’s the bottom, and then you’re like, I’m still falling.
Samantha Bee 31:53
God damn it, yes, we’re still going okay.
Rachel Platten 31:58
Right, and I, just before I had reached that point of breaking I still kind of had this idea of Magical Thinking, of like I can pray it away or wish it away, or Reiki it away, or whatever, until I really realized, like at a certain point, you have to face your demons, and you have to face it head on, and you have to allow it all in, you have to allow yourself to integrate the dark and the light, and you can’t run away, because it’ll just find another way in.
Samantha Bee 32:28
When you make a decision to talk about it, like to be so public with it, I really do like I think it helps people. I just think it really helps people. How did you I mean? So I hope you look it’s not like, and I don’t mean helps people in the way that they go. Now I know what to do. It’s more like. Now I know exactly what my path out of this is. It’s more like they just don’t feel you don’t feel like alone, like, if someone who’s successful and appears to like, have it all. And like, if that person can, like, hit the wall, just like, yeah, then maybe it’s not just me.
Rachel Platten 33:09
I think so. Honestly, I think so. And whenever I listen to people that I admire talk about their deep lows, it brings me so much relief. And same thing knowing, like, you know, okay, well, if that person who seems to have it all together also experiences pain and devastation and loss and and they’re human, like, okay, then yeah, maybe I’m not so weird and, and so the first moment of this vulnerability, like, it’s actually funny, Sam, because when we met at that time, I think it was like 2016 or 2017 I don’t remember.
Samantha Bee 33:45
Yes yeah, would have been yeah, 2017 yeah, yeah.
Rachel Platten 33:50
I still hadn’t gone through this journey, so I still wasn’t talking vulnerably. And actually something funny was that I would feel like around the whole fight song release and stand by you and my album, that I was only showing everyone this, this one side of me that I thought they see, and I thought people needed me to be sweet and grateful and empowered and like, and I didn’t realize that I could actually really be myself. And that was maybe, maybe something that would have benefited me even more, to be able to sustain the kind of fame and attention I was getting, instead of running away from it and being terrified and almost losing myself underneath the song, like people don’t know who actually sings that song. If you ask the majority of people, they’re like, didn’t Taylor or Katie or Kelly? I’m like, no, no.
Samantha Bee 34:39
I was just telling my producers before we hopped on that. Actually, I met up with my friends today at their house, and I was like, I was like, I didn’t know. I know. I said, you know this. I know you know the song, fight song. They were like, Rachel Platten. I was like, I’m talking to her today, so maybe I’m wrong.
Rachel Platten 34:57
You know why?
Samantha Bee 34:59
I know that it happens, but I just want to say that I have very high quality friends, and they.
Rachel Platten 35:06
Really appreciate that I needed, I needed a little that, yeah, you know, I think, yeah. I think though that I used to be upset about it, and I used to feel sad and like, be like, but now I understand what happened. Now I understand like, well, I didn’t reveal myself. I was so afraid of it. I was so afraid after 15 years of trying to get it and finally came that it would go away. So how do I make it stay okay? Be vanilla, be so pleasant and just so agreeable, and don’t say anything wrong and don’t do anything wrong, and just try to cling on to this and be just like Taylor and just like Miley, or wherever, whoever’s famous at the time, right? You know.
Samantha Bee 35:45
That’s like the opposite of your experience in Trinidad. So then you, you, you have this success. Literally everyone knows your song. I mean, everybody knows that song. It’s just such a note. We all know I could sing it right now, but like, it’s actually being very well known for something, or being very famous for that thing is very different from what you think it’s going to be when it happens, very different.
Rachel Platten 36:13
Yes, very different. Very different. Yeah, very different, yeah.
Samantha Bee 36:18
And I do think that some people are just, like, super built for it, probably because they’re sociopaths or whatever, you know, whatever that was mean, some people are built for it, though they can just absorb, they can just, like, absorb the light. And it’s like, feeds their it’s like their energy source. It’s like, chlorophyll.
Rachel Platten 36:40
Maybe it doesn’t change them. It doesn’t change you. How does it change you? It’s so weird. Fame is so weird. Everyone acts like you’re special or than everyone else, but you’re not, but you’re just a human being, you’re not. And then you have to deal with your family who there’s like, Who the hell do you think you are? And you’re like, Well, don’t know, I’m actually special. I’m actually special than you.
Samantha Bee 37:02
Everybody told me I was really special. They told me the Good Morning America, that was really super special. Why don’t you all agree with that?
Rachel Platten 37:09
Pretty sure that I’m specialer than you.
Samantha Bee 37:13
And then your song became part of the Clinton campaign in 2016 but I have heard you say that you you in your gut that the context didn’t really feel right to you. But then it’s, it has a life. It had a life of its own. So what does it feel, I guess, what does it feel like when the thing that you have birthed is really co opted by something else?
Rachel Platten 37:36
You know, it just became so much bigger than me, like the song and the ride almost became, I felt like I was holding on by the tail of it, just trying to catch it and ride it, and like I was so afraid, like I said, of losing and maybe the only thing I haven’t talked about in this is from that gap, from deciding that I at 19, that I wanted to go to Trinidad, and I ended up staying For almost a year, from that gap back into New York City, where I came back with my little, dumb songs and tried to make it, I had a lot of work and heart and I’m heartbreak and nose, and 13 years of struggling and traveling around the country in a touring van and a bus and a car and selling CDs out of my suitcase and printing them myself. I mean, there was like so much that I built up writing 1000s of songs until I finally wrote lightsong. And so when I finally wrote lightsong, and everyone finally paid attention, after years of ignoring, you know, my art, it was the weirdest, most jarring, confusing, wonderful, horrible thing, because I just was so afraid of the rug being pulled like what it can’t I finally got this, and it had, and I had been so close before, and had been taken away, like I almost had a record deal, and then I took it away at the last minute. So I was so afraid of losing it that I was just Yes, yes, yes, yes, you need us. Yes, okay, yes, yes, I’ll do that. I’ll do that. Sure. I’ll do Sam’s show. I don’t like Sam.
Samantha Bee 39:06
Yeah, I don’t hate her. She represents everything I hate. But I’ll do it on a Saturday, Goddamn it.
Rachel Platten 39:13
I do, I have to. No, I actually remember that in that campaign, that was, like, the one joyful thing of that awful campaign of promoting my second album that I felt so out of touch with myself and my label, It was, it was a pressure. It was all pressured. I was, I was being pressured by Columbia, my label, my manager. Everyone was like, how can you you can’t turn this down. You can’t turn who are you to turn that machine?
Samantha Bee 39:44
Like, what’s your focus? What do you got? What do you got next? What’s coming up? Like, what’s your next hit? Like, let’s be a hit machine, as opposed to an artist, which, like, that’s hard.
Samantha Bee 39:57
It was a confusing time, and I. It became too big for me to control the narrative of obviously, and all of a sudden it was maybe the punchline of jokes for, you know, political pundits, and then maybe it was some little girl in a hospital’s saving grace that saved her life. And the dichotomy between those two things was so confusing to me like, that. I was like, this is not mine anymore. This is yours and and I almost wanted to ruin myself from all of it and run away.
Samantha Bee 44:36
We’ll be right back after this.
Samantha Bee 44:43
Well, now you’ve been on this goddamn journey. You’ve been so open, you’ve again, if I can say you’ve made an incredible choice. Process to open yourself up like it’s actually, I’m going to say this, it’s actually rare to meet an artist who is willing to say that lots of success really fucking sucks. Lots of parts of it are terrible and very difficult. And here’s the path to like, where I want to be. And this is yeah, and it’s like being in the spin cycle of a washing machine a lot of the time. Yes, very confusing. And then you’ve had to fight in a way, oh my God. You’ve had to fight song your way out of like, you’ve you’ve.
Rachel Platten 45:42
Yes, you, I had to fight song my way out of it.
Samantha Bee 45:47
And you have fought so hard, and you have made, but you’ve made something so beautiful out of this. And to your dog, a breeze, your dog is a beautiful bark.
Rachel Platten 45:58
I don’t I did compliment. I didn’t mean, no, I didn’t mean so I want more of that compliment. We know more. Were you saying no?
Samantha Bee 46:04
Now you’ve gone back to the heart of what it is that you do, and you’ve actually like you’ve matured, and now you have these, these two children who feed you in a totally different way, isn’t it? I do think there is some, there’s children. I mean, children, motherhood. Motherhood It’s a wild ride, but it is, isn’t it? So it’s incredible at the end of the day to be like, well, I made you so I can do anything.
Rachel Platten 46:34
I don’t think I say that to myself enough. I think that’s a I bet you are really healthy with how you like love on yourself about it, because it I know you’re sort of joking and you’re laughing yourself, and I’m not letting you have the joke because I’m being way too intense, right? But I wish that. I wish I said that to myself more. That’s a beautiful thing to say. Like, hey, I made life.
Samantha Bee 46:56
Yeah, I’m awesome, guess what? You’re a fucking warrior. And you know what? You don’t always have to believe that about your like, no one ever always believes that about themselves. That would be so annoying. But occasionally it’s great to, like, look in the mirror and be like, yeah, I fucking did it.
Rachel Platten 47:12
Love that, Sam, I love that. I sometimes I’ll, like, in a weird, like, in my, one of my weird meditations, I’ll like, touch my womb and be like, good job boom, good job. You created. Like, yeah. But I just, I’m really hard on myself, and I’m working on it, you know, even even now after everything I’ve been through and rising again and bringing his body of work out. You know, it’s a vulnerable time to start sharing this and like, and I’m trying to learn to do that more, and to look in a mirror more and be like, hey, I did that, and I and like, unless it’s like, oh, this is good. I feel like, when I do a good interview, or when I interviewed, well, it feels like therapy, you know, feels good, you know, yeah. So here’s my realization that you’ve helped me get to, which is that my album, my new album is much like the baby. I made it, I did it, I already succeeded. I already birthed it. What happens next with that child? With my album, with the thing that you’re making, if you’re listening at home, it’s really not up to I mean, it’s up to you a little bit, but like you, I did the bulk of the work, and I should just be proud of the fact that I was the vessel, and I let myself be worked through and created life in the form of an album or children. And why can’t that be enough like, you know, I want to let that be enough.
Samantha Bee 48:30
It’s so much. It is so much. You cannot control how the world receives this stuff. But I think the only true thing is to create from your heart. I really believe that I’m like, the only thing that you can do is listen to what is in here. That’s all we fucking have at the end of the day. All we have is what is in our hearts and our minds. That is it, how you create who you put around you, how you feed yourself with the people you put around you, with the things that you push out. That is all there is. Everything else is just, yeah, sometimes you could do, like a nut commercial, I guess, like for pistachio, I don’t know. Sometimes you just have to pay the bills. That’s fine, too fair, whatever. That’s a different category of work. Let me tell you something yourself. Okay, this is dumb. Maybe it will maybe it will tickle you. I don’t know. Years and years ago, I wrote a book. It was, like, such a dumb book of essays, but they were funny, they were funny and they were from my life, and, like, I was really proud of it, and I wrote it and I had, like, anyways, whatever. I don’t even know why I did it, but I loved doing it. It was a fun process just writing this book, and then at the end, when it was all created, I was like, Well, I did it, I don’t know, and I couldn’t talk about it at all, because I was like, wait a second, like, I can’t talk about it. I’ll cry. Like, I. Know how to talk about it, because they are, they’re funny stories, but they are my life, like a lot of pain and like a lot of terror, like a lot of fear, and like who I was when I was a little kid, and like a little like a very scared person is like in these stories. So I hired a media trainer to help me. I was like, I know that I can’t talk about this book without somebody. I need you, I hired someone to tell me how to talk about myself. I couldn’t do it without somebody helping me, like a stranger. Do you know what I mean? Like some it’s hard, you made a thing, yeah, made a you’ve made a gem, you’ve made a jewel box, that’s just.
Rachel Platten 50:44
I love that you I love that you did that I I love learning more and more about you. Sam, you’re so cool. You’re such a cool onion. And there’s so much you know, it’s you’re such a beautiful person. I love that you wrote that book of essays, and that you bared your soul in that way that you understand what you understand the like, what it means to put yourself out there and have it’s surprising, no, all of a sudden you’re like, I guess this is what I’m talking I guess this is what. But I guess right now, okay, yeah, it’s just and I understand not knowing how to talk about it too. Because I think, in a way, that’s how I felt almost about mercy when I started to sing it. It was so deep and so painful that I had to be trained almost in how to detach myself from the thing and like, it makes a lot of sense to me that you had to have a stranger come and, like, remove you, Sam, from the little girl, Sam, so that you can look at the seat of the witness more. It makes a lot of sense because, like, you could re traumatize yourself, visiting those stories and talking about them publicly without to, like help.
Samantha Bee 51:45
Yeah, you’d like, have to practice you like, have to hear a story about yourself to sometimes know what it is.
Rachel Platten 51:51
And save enough times that it loses charge.
Samantha Bee 51:54
Like, 100%.
Rachel Platten 51:55
Right? Like, the first time on stage I sang mercy, I cried and had a back spasm because I was dealing I also had a journey with chronic pain, which is lovely. What a fun, great, just great.
Samantha Bee 52:07
Fun for touring, good for touring.
Rachel Platten 52:09
Yeah, lovely, but I’ve since learned that all of that was just different shades of the same thing, which was the, you know, PTSD from the depression and la, la. So, right, anyway, the first time I sang it, it was a disaster for me. The audience, I think, resounded with applause and tears in their eyes. But it was too much. It took too much. And so I really had to separate myself and say it enough time say the story. I wrote this crying on my floor at 2am I wrote this crying on my floor at 2am praying to God for relief. Now I don’t, there’s no charge in it anymore. It’s just someone else who was in their studio at 2am crying on their knees for relief.
Samantha Bee 52:47
Okay, that’s really, yeah, really, that’s, I really, really relate to that. That’s really great. That’s, you know what song I’ve listened to on repeat, I know.
Rachel Platten 52:58
You’re like, not yours, but I wanted to tell you about, oh, I know.
Samantha Bee 53:01
Yeah, on total I’m just like, Can’t stop, can’t stop, can’t stop, won’t stop.
Rachel Platten 53:10
Really, what does it bring for you? What does it feel? What does it make you feel?
Samantha Bee 53:14
It makes me feel. It feels like the purest songwriting. It feels like it comes from it. That’s the word that when I hear it, I’m like, It’s the sound is pure, the intention is so present. It is like, it’s like a it’s like a clarion call, in a way, like it’s just like a crystal, like, you know when you hear a crystal and you’re just like, it’s like, it’s, it’s just a pure song.
Rachel Platten 53:54
It’s making me cry to hear that, because I feel seen in that way. And I think I’m so longing to one of the things that I’m having trouble detaching from what people respond, how people respond, is that I so desperately want to be seen for who I really am. I so desperately want them to know the real me, and so to hear that you do, or that you heard that. And in this, in one of the songs, is like it’s just the sweetest bomb on my, on my, you know, desperate soul for like, please see me, understand and like and hear and thank you so much, Sam. It means so much to me. And I’m I love that one too. It was just that it was so pure. There was nothing except for just this simple longing for relief and and, and it was a sweetness. And my dad used to tell me that phrase in the song, there’s a phrase this tea shall pass. My dad used to tell me that, so it was just a very yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. I’m so glad. I love you girls.
Samantha Bee 54:57
My God, okay, well, every we’ve all got to. Happy album. We’ve got to support your tour. We’ve got to support you. We’ve I feel that people are I feel that you will. I don’t know you’re being seen and you, I appreciate you.
Samantha Bee 55:22
Okay, that was Rachel Platten, and I had no choice but to look up one thing she talked about having mixed feelings about fight song being used by the Clinton campaign, which got me wondering, how many artists have told Trump that he can’t use their music hell it has been a whopping 23 times and counting, including Rihanna, Elton, John and Adele. Ah, I love it. Thanks for joining us, I’m Samantha Bee and see you next week for more Choice Words.
CREDITS 56:11
Thank you for listening to choice words, which was created by and is hosted by me. The show is produced by its via Baron Reinstein, with editing and additional producing by Josh Richmond. We’re distributed by Lemonada, and you can find me @realsambee on X and Instagram. Follow Choice Words wherever you get your podcasts or listen ad free on Amazon music with your Prime membership.