You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Rachel Platten 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 Platten 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 Platten called Fight Song.

Fight Song broke the top ten 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 mean, I'll 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 fire.

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 wait to make it 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 and I'll give up on myself.

So that's why I was so hesitant. 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 heard that. And eventually I was like, yes.

Fast forward through to January 2016, going into 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 too 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.

...