Musicians take breaks between albums all the time, but Rachel Platten didn’t mean for hers to last nearly a decade. “It wasn’t intentional,” the singer-songwriter, 43, exclusively told Us Weekly ahead of the Tuesday, September 3, release of her fifth studio album, I Am Rachel Platten . “I got pregnant [in 2018] and I had my baby Violet, and then the pandemic happened.
I went on tour right before the pandemic and thought that I would get right back out there [after giving birth].” Violet, now 5, arrived in January 2019 . Before the pandemic cut Platten’s tour short in 2020, she was suffering from postpartum depression, which was only compounded by the isolation of coronavirus lockdowns.
“I really had goals to just keep going and not let motherhood affect me or impact my career,” she explained. “And so it just took time to heal both emotionally and physically. .
.. So not only was there the pandemic to contend with, I was also facing my own personal demons.
” Platten and her husband, Kevin Lazan , then welcomed their second child , daughter Sophie, in September 2021 — and that point hitting the road again was really off the table. “I had to go through another struggle with my mental health after having Sophie,” Platten recalled. “It took a lot of healing to get ready to rise above where I had been and find, ‘What do I wanna say right now?’ But honestly, I’m really proud that I took that time, because I’ve changed fundamentally and I’m reall.