Musicians take breaks between albums all the time, but Rachel Platten didn’t mean for hers to last nearly a decade.
“It wasn’t intentional,” the singer-songwriter, 43, exclusively told Us Weekly ahead of the Tuesday, September 3, release of her fifth studio album, I Am Rachel Platten. “I got pregnant [in 2018] and I had my baby Violet, and then the pandemic happened. I went on tour right before the pandemic and thought that I would get right back out there [after giving birth].”
Violet, now 5, arrived in January 2019. Before the pandemic cut Platten’s tour short in 2020, she was suffering from postpartum depression, which was only compounded by the isolation of coronavirus lockdowns.
“I really had goals to just keep going and not let motherhood affect me or impact my career,” she explained. “And so it just took time to heal both emotionally and physically. … So not only was there the pandemic to contend with, I was also facing my own personal demons.”
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Platten and her husband, Kevin Lazan, then welcomed their second child, daughter Sophie, in September 2021 — and that point hitting the road again was really off the table.
“I had to go through another struggle with my mental health after having Sophie,” Platten recalled. “It took a lot of healing to get ready to rise above where I had been and find, ‘What do I wanna say right now?’ But honestly, I’m really proud that I took that time, because I’ve changed fundamentally and I’m really ready to bring this message and this new music into the world, and I can stand behind the songs that I’m singing because they weren’t written for other people. They were written for me to help heal me in moments of terror and darkness and fear and rage and all the things that humans go through.”
Platten’s seven-year break was especially jarring given that her previous two albums dropped in consecutive years. After her 2015 single “Fight Song” became a smash hit (and a campaign theme song for Hillary Clinton), Platten’s label was eager for a follow-up to her 2016 album, Wildfire. She could barely take a breath to enjoy her newfound success before she was back in the studio working on 2017’s Waves.
“They just want you to pump out music, and I wasn’t ready,” Platten recalled. “I’m proud of the record that I released. I love Waves and I love the songs on it, but if I really, honestly look back and think, ‘Was I ready to share how I felt?’ yet, I wasn’t. … My process is I have to go really, deeply inward and feel and process the world around me and have my antennae and just do a deep dive before I can transmute it into art and before I’m ready to share. So it was too soon for me, honestly.”
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That ability to take a long pause is evident on I Am Rachel Platten, which sounds like an artist feeling more at home in her music than ever before. There are the kind of empowering ballads Platten is known for (“Bad Thoughts” and “Mercy”) as well as wedding-ready love songs (“Need You” and “First Day”). There’s even a duet with the legendary Michael Bolton, who joins Platten on the duet “Caroline,” which she describes as a kind of “postscript” to the album.
Platten credits motherhood, in part, with helping her find a new kind of pleasure in her music.
“Not just motherhood, but what I went through struggling with my mental health, all of that collectively has made this time around coming back out so much more joyful, because I feel so much more at peace with it,” she explained. “I love my life, I love my girls, I love my husband. I’m so proud of what I’ve done. I’m so proud of what I’ve built and what we’ve built, my husband and I, together. And this music already saved my life. These songs that I’m about to share with the world, they were already the medicine I needed at my lowest, darkest moments. And so the album really is already a triumph for me. Whatever else happens is extra, you know?”
I Am Rachel Platten is out Tuesday, September 3.
