Rachel Platten is thinking she might slip on a hoodie Sunday afternoon and sneak into the crowd at the inaugural My 92.9 Oro Valley Music Festival.
But the forecast Sunday, Sept. 13, calls for tank-top weather, not hoodies.
“I’ve got to find another way to hide. Maybe a wig,” said the 34-year-old Massachusetts native who joins the lineup that includes Plain White T’s, Parachute and her one-time tour mate Matt Nathanson. “I try to go incognito and go stand in the crowd. I’m just a fan of music. I love watching festivals especially.”
A year ago, Platten might have easily been able to get lost in the crowd. But these days, she has a hard times slipping by unnoticed.
This summer has been all about Platten’s “Fight Song,” her breakthrough I’m not-giving-up anthem that’s turned her world from virtual unknown to emerging star.
“I didn’t anticipate it,” Platten said of the song’s breakaway chart and sales success that started with its wide release last February and culminated with the song being adopted by Ford Motor Co. in its ads and becoming a rallying cry for the disenfranchised, underestimated and underdogs everywhere. “Maybe in my wildest dreams a little bit, and I hoped, but no.”
But Platten knew that she was onto something special almost from the moment she and her friend and writing partner Dave Bassett started penning the song in November 2013. “Fight Song” was meant to be Platten’s resolution, a mission statement that she had no intention of walking away from music and getting a day job despite a decade of not getting very far. Even if it meant playing before 20 people in a broom closet, or patients in a hospital, she was determined to continue the journey.
“I was just reading my journal last night in New York City, in my apartment. … Looking back on my story I was like, how did I keep going? I have an entry that was literally like ‘OK, I’m going to do this no matter what’,” she said during a phone call from New York City Tuesday morning.
When they got to the chorus — “This is my fight song / Take back my life song / Prove I'm alright song / My power's turned on / Starting right now I'll be strong / I'll play my fight song” — Platten and Bassett and “my whole team, to their credit — my manager as well — we all were like there is something special with this chorus,” she said.
The team spent the next several months tweaking and reworking the song, getting it as close to perfect as they could before it was released as a single in February 2015.
“The song’s went through so many iterations and changes and it was because I thought — and my team thought — this was something worth working hard for,” Platten said.
Over the summer, “Fight Song” scaled the Billboard charts — including the mainstream and adult Top 40 charts — as well as charts in New Zealand, Scotland, Canada, Australia and the UK.
It has spawned something of a movement. There’s a hashtag — #FightSong — and endless covers on YouTube. Folks bring signs that say anything from “I Fight for Love” to “I Fight Against Hate,” “I Fight for Peace.”
And even though she has sung the song at least a hundred times in the past few months, including when she was on the Colbie Caillat-Christina Perri “The Girls Night Out, Boys Can Come Too” summer tour, Platten said she never tires of looking out into the audience and seeing their reaction. (She was not on the lineup when the tour pulled into Tucson; she had to take time off to promote the single.)
“It is the most unbelievable thing. It is simply amazing. I get tears in my eyes when I sing it and people are singing it back to me,” she said. “There will be looks of conviction on their faces and oftentimes people will have tears in their eyes and they will come up to me afterwards at the meet and greet and cry and apologize. ‘No, don’t apologize.’ That’s the most powerful thing.
“Singing it is amazing because it reminds me of what I’m saying,” she added. “Those words are my affirmation, and singing them over and over again no matter what I’m going through is like ‘Oh my gosh.’ I’m right on message. That’s what I want in this world. Look at all these people; this is working.”
