Michelle Branch is going back to her electric blue beginnings. To celebrate 25 years of her debut album, The Spirit Room, the singer-songwriter has announced Everywhere and Back Again, an EP of some of her biggest hits that have been reimagined by other artists. The full project will be out on Nov. 6 via BMG, marking the first release under Branch’s new label home. But a new version of the 2002 hit “The Game of Love” featuring New Radicals’ Gregg Alexander is out now.
“I’ve been in a very creative time in my life,” Branch tells Rolling Stone over the phone. In addition to the EP, the musician will hit the road in the fall for an 18-date trek through the U.S. She’s also putting on a special, nostalgia-packed performance at the Sun Rose that’s meant to recall her first TRL appearance for a few lucky Los Angeles fans on Tuesday night.
It’s a few days before she is set to share the exciting news, and Branch takes the call from her house in Charleston, South Carolina. Despite the busy slate of things ahead of her, she is basking in what she calls “full summer porch vibes,” sitting in a swimsuit and gazing at the palm trees as she details her next chapter.
“This whole anniversary project has really been a way to get everybody hyped up,” she says. So far, it has worked. When Branch wiped her Instagram profile and began posting cryptic photos using lyrics from The Spirit Room, everyone freaked out. Maren Morris marvelled at Branch’s ageless looks, while Clairo commented, “I have chills, I love you.”
When it came to honoring the album that launched her career, Branch knew she wanted to do something different that would set the milestone apart from the re-recording she made for its 20th anniversary. “I wanted a chance to have other artists who I was inspired by or who are friends of mine,” she says of Everywhere and Back Again. “If you were a fan of the early records of mine, you’re going to be thrilled to hear these re-imaginings from these other incredible artists.”
Branch won’t reveal her full list of collaborators just yet but she is over the moon to have Alexander on the new version of “The Game of Love,” a 2002 hit he wrote that helped catapult Branch’s star even higher. “That song took me all over the world … It was just the craziest kind of surreal thing to be thrust into, and it was all because of this amazing song Gregg wrote,” she shares. Branch says she recently told her husband, Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney, “I feel like I was put on this earth to sing Gregg Alexander’s songs.”
“The Game of Love” has a storied history, one Alexander is more than happy to tell over the phone. Before it was released on Santana’s Shaman album and became a Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hit that went on to win a Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals, the song was one of many that Alexander wrote after New Radicals disbanded. “It was such an atypical pop song that it had been passed on by several artists,” he says. But that all changed when Clive Davis came into the picture.
At the time, Davis was producing Santana’s highly anticipated follow-up to “Smooth,” and he convinced Carlos Santana to record Alexander’s “The Game of Love” as the album’s lead single. “[Davis] wanted me to sing it, but I’d just recently ended New Radicals so I passed on that,” Alexander says. So the pair enlisted legendary singers like Tina Turner and Macy Gray to lay down takes, but Davis was after a different, newer sound. That’s when Alexander suggested Branch, who had been touring with members of New Radicals and covering the group’s hit “You Only Get What You Give.”
“Word got back to Gregg that I was covering it and that I admired him greatly,” Branch says. “It was my understanding that, for whatever reason, Clive hadn’t found whatever he was looking for … and Gregg put my name in the hat.” She still remembers her teenage excitement. “I was like, ‘Wow, that’s fucking cool. That’s incredible. This is someone I greatly admire suggesting me for this huge record,’” Branch recalls. In 2002, the singer-songwriter was only nineteen, and still reveling in the success of The Spirit Room when she hopped on “The Game of Love.”
“It’s a testament to what a humble yet absolute badass she is that she came to the studio aware of the fact that there were these other legends that had sung the song,” Alexander says. Of course, Branch crushed it, nearly recording her vocals in one take. “Everybody in the control room had our jaws dropped,” Alexander recalls.
Unfortunately, Davis died before the pair could play the reimagined “The Game of Love” for him. “As fate would have it, I was flying back from Prague to present the record to Clive and it was the exact same day that Clive passed away,” Alexander says. It was a heartbreaking moment, but Branch and Alexander see the timing as a message.
“The spirit of music lives on and even the spirit of this wonderful man,” Alexander says.
“He would’ve been really tickled about Greg and I working together all these years later and me getting Greg to sing on it,” Branch says. “It’s a bummer that he didn’t get to hear it, but I feel like somewhere out there he is [listening] in some other dimension.”
The new version trades in Santana’s signature guitar licks for a synth-driven sound, and marks a full-circle moment for both Branch and Alexander. “I’ve lived with this song for so long,” Branch says. “To be able to share it with Greg and not have to worry about being a teenager on a huge Santana record, we just get to live in the joy of it now. That’s a really beautiful thing.”
Branch may be revisiting the past, but she’s looking forward to what comes next, too. After Everywhere and Back Again, the singer-songwriter will release what Alexander calls a “ jaw-dropping album” of new music, Branch’s first since 2022’s The Trouble with Fever. “[This anniversary project] is a way to get people fired up about the past,” she says. “In a way that also carries them along to the new kind of chapter that I’m starting.”
