Michelle Branch recalls the journey of 'The Game of Love' (Part 2)

Studio. Before we started talking to Michelle here, we were talking about, of course, Game of Love, one of my favorite songs of all time. Of course, Michelle did it with Santana and a Grammy, right? You want a Grammy? Look at you. And I was enjoying one of the last top down convertible days of the season the other day. And that song came on and I rattled my Bose speakers this. But on the album, you do it with New Radicals. Yes. And it's a perfect. It's like a summertime song. You need to listen to that song with the windows down. But there's an untold story about this. A lot of people don't know the story. You and Santana were not the first. New Radicals are not the second. Yeah. Who was the first to sing this song? There's a lot of lore behind this song. Tina Turner was the first person to sing the Game of Love. And then Macy Gray sang the Game of Love. Obviously. Like, you know, when Rob Thomas version of Smooth came out with Santana, it was like the biggest song on earth. And Clive was like, I want to follow this up with another song. And like, how do you follow a song like Smooth? And so he had Tina Turner sing it, Macy Gray sing it. He asked Greg Alexander, who wrote the song from the New Radicals, to sing it. And he had just really. He had just decided that he didn't want to be a frontman anymore and he wanted to just be a writer behind the scenes. So he said no, and he kindly suggested that I go in and audition for the song. So I went to the studio and sang on it and just thought, like, there's no way in hell I'm ever gonna get this. Tina Turner sang it like, why do you even have me here? And it wasn't until like a couple months later I was on tour and I get a call from my manager and he's like, you need to be in Chicago this weekend. You're filming a music video with Santana. You've been chosen. It was raising at that point. You're getting on escalator and here we go. Yeah. What a great story. Yeah. And congratulations on this 25 year project. Yeah, it's, you know, to be able to, like, the fact that people are buying tickets to the shows and showing up and singing these songs. Like, it's just like the. The biggest gift that you could hope for is, like, to be 25 years in and have people still show up and care. Do your kids realize that mom is cool? I don't know if they think I'm cool. Like, they know my husband.