Loud And Clear

Don’t Call It a Comeback—michelle Branch Hasn’t Stopped Making Music Since Her 2001 Debut . Only Now, She Won’t Be Silenced.  

- Marissa R. Moss

The night before Michelle Branch slides into a bar-side booth at Nashville’s Union Station Hotel to talk about Hopeless Romantic, her first solo album in 14 years, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell silenced Elizabeth Warren with his now-famous phrase-gone-meme,

“Nevertheless, she persisted.” These two things might not seem to have much in common, but if you talk to Branch, persisting amid nearly impossible odds—and despite some very close-minded men—has basically been her story for well over a decade.

“There were times where I was like, ‘Shit, do I need to go get a [day] job? It shouldn’t be this hard,’” says Branch, picking at a cheese plate and salad while clad in a leather motorcycle jacket and a Bob Seger shirt snagged from her boyfriend and Hopeless Romantic’s producer, Black Keys drummer Patrick Carney. “People always asked, ‘Well, where have you gone?’” she says, noting that it wasn’t that she stopped making new material after the release of her sophomore LP, 2003’s Hotel Paper. “I was just held hostage by my own record label.” After her debut, The Spirit Room, went platinum and established the then-teenager as a bankable pop star, Branch grew up: She got married (then divorced), had a child, started country duo The Wreckers, and moved to Los Angeles and fell in love with bands like Tame Impala. But her record label didn’t want the new Michelle Branch, at age 27 or 30. They wanted her at 15. “When I turned in some of the songs for this record, I was told, ‘You don’t sound like yourself. This isn’t what Michelle Branch sounds like,’” she recalls. “Well, I’m 33 now, and I’m a mom, and this is what I sound like.”