You're listening to Song Explorer, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishike Shiarway. Rachel Platon is a singer and songwriter who's released four albums including her 2016 album, Wildfire, which went gold. In this episode, Rachel breaks down her song, Broken Glass, which came out in August 2017.
My name is Rachel Platon, 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 Platon called Fight Song. Fight Song broke the top 10 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'm going to 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 selecting 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 for 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 really make me talk about all that. It wasn't a political song. It was a song that I wrote in my bedroom because I needed a reminder not give up on myself. That was it.
So that's why I was a president. 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 started that. And eventually I was like, yes. Fast forward through to January 2016, going to 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 to 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 a daughter Chelsea.
Ladies and gentlemen, my mother, my hero, and our next resident, Hillary Clinton. Yes. I know you know, my song is 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 what 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 nominate 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 and healed them and now they couldn't listen anymore. And I was heartbroken. The summer war 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 to my record so far and staying far away from 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 point towards Hillary Clinton victory. So right now, as we are taking this in our polls, only forecast the 5.8 model gives Hillary Clinton a 71.8% chance of winning Donald Trump 28.2. 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, Cypher 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 face out this melody that I'm hearing in my head and I can't.
My fingers are not doing what they want to do. But that's how I was hearing it first. Don't, don't, don't, don't. So I was playing that and they were like, which is the first to me and I was like, well, maybe this is the first.
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 going to 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 and my iPhone. The first song that did not exist and 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. I can take it, stomp on my dreams.
I'm not caving. I'm not caving. But I'm not waiting anymore. Not anymore.
No, I'm going to get some broken glass. Hey, I'm broken glass. And I'm looking at ceiling crash. Oh, that 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 like back down and defer to men around me who work for me.
And I forget that I'm the boss. 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 sense sounds. Let's get some weird based sounds. The chords are feeling too happy. I was just kind of like, give me something deep and like a resonant.
So Jared went and he starts with this growly synth bass. And then put in 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 Soaker 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 is 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 image that I had that felt like the soundtrack to that. I wanted it to feel like there was a crowd of people that 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 got my haunting sounds and I was like, now I can keep writing these words. So I'm out of my back. So I'm tired to the tread. 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. And 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 insecurities couldn't handle, 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 an eyes in my back. So I'm tired to the tread. So then election happened.
I was in LA 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 the 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. 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've 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 it is that I wrote it about something that I think anyone who's really listening could hear.
So my manager is like, no, no, no, you definitely have to continue this song. Go back to the studio and finish it. I have a little voice memo of how the bridge got me. I'm a fighter.
I'm a fighter. I'm a fighter. I'm a fighter. I'm a fighter.
I'm a fighter. I'm a fighter. I like me spitting things out. They were probably bad.
And then them interpreting them and being like, okay, Rachel, I think it would be my best. They were really beautiful at doing that today. The words are through to the other side. I'll survive because I'm a fighter.
Through the other side, I'm a fighter because I'm a survivor. And it's a chant. We envisioned a humongous group of girls like a girl choir stopping and singing it together. In reality, it's just me and Nate.
And that came from a really raw place. 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 night and we were like, this feels great.
I kind of watched my hands. I was like cool, and 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 written. So it became a whole another struggle of like getting back into the mind side 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 gonna be the single, then I wanna 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 Katy Perry, Firework, Rihanna Diamonds, a ton of CS stuff. They're incredible.
So I approached Stargate about it. And by the way, I met with like a lot of everyone telling me, no, it's never gonna work. They're too busy. They're not gonna do this.
I was like, hey, let's not say no before I ask, okay? So I approached Stargate. Stargate's made up of Tor Hormundsen and Michael Erickson. Tor was in another session, so it just me and Michael.
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. It was kind of thinned 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 bad. That 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.
Any more? 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. We had like six versions that we did. Sorry, Michael, that's a lot of work. But you finished June 28th, August 20th.
And all of a sudden I realized I was going to start turning out already 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 the song came from and its roots and who it's really for. That hurts too. And now here's Broken Glass by Rachel Platt in its entirety.
For more on Rachel Platt, visit songexploder.net. You can see the music video for Broken Glass and there's a link to buy the song. Song Exploder is produced by me, along with Christian Coons, with help from Inter and Olivia Wood. Special thanks to Mike Taylor and Greg Hale from Helly for America.
And Joey Evergan from the FiveThirty-Eight Politics Podcast. And Brian Yance and Julie Shapiro. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radio Topia 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 K.
Shirway. Thanks for listening. I knew you were going to do one of those introductions where you're like, Rachel Platt knows in my studio and she was very hesitant to talk about this song. Here, we dive into Broken Glass.
And I'm going to be using it like, why did I tell him everything? Radio Topia. You've probably heard me say at the end of every episode that Song Exploder is a proud member of Radio Topia, a network of independent, artist-owned, listener-supported podcasts. Well, this is the time where the listener-supported part comes in.
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