Branch won Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals for “The Game of Love” with Santana
Credit: Entertainment Tonight; KMazur/WireImage
NEED TO KNOW
- Michelle Branch missed accepting her 2003 Grammy Award due to a snowstorm and traffic jam
- Branch is releasing an EP on Nov. 6 featuring reimagined versions of her biggest hits to celebrate her 25-year career
- The EP includes a new version of “The Game of Love” with Gregg Alexander
Michelle Branch has a Grammy Award to her name — but she never got her moment in the spotlight.
The singer-songwriter, 43, took home the win for Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals for “The Game of Love” with Santana at the 2003 Grammy Awards, but missed her chance to accept the prize due to a traffic jam.
“I feel like my whole Grammy experience was… I need a re-do,” she told Entertainment Tonight. “There was a huge snowstorm and I was in the car getting in a queue of cars trying to get to the Grammys.”
Branch said she didn’t realize that the award she was up for was announced during the pre-telecast, and wound up missing her moment.
“I’m in the car and all of a sudden everyone’s phones start going off and everyone’s like, ‘Oh my god, congratulations!’ And I’m like, ‘What?’ And they’re like, ‘You just won a Grammy!’” she recalls. “And I was like, ‘Wait, no…’ I didn’t get the moment to go to the podium, accept it, cry, thank anybody. It just showed up in the mail a few months later.”
The “Everywhere” singer — who has been nominated for three other Grammys — joked that she didn’t get to have the moment that she’d been “practicing in the mirror with my hairbrush since I was tiny.”
When asked what she would have said had she had the chance to give a speech, Branch said she would’ve thanked her parents, Carlos Santana and Clive Davis, who chose her to sing on it over more established acts like Tina Turner and Macy Gray.
“It was so crazy because ‘Smooth’ with Rob Thomas was the hugest, hugest song. No one thought that we could follow ‘Smooth,’ and so then to have this huge single…,” she recalled. “There was a lot of pressure and I kind of went in with the understanding that it was an audition and the track was finished. I went in and I sang it and just kind of left and was like, ‘That was a cool experience. We’ll see what happens.’ Didn’t think anything was really gonna come of it, and next thing you know, I’m flying to Chicago to shoot the music video, we’re traveling all around Europe, it was on the charts in like, 27 countries. It was crazy.”
Credit: Anna Webber/Getty
Branch is set to release the EP Everywhere and Back Again on Nov. 6, which will celebrate her 25-year career with reimagined versions of her biggest hits, including “Everywhere,” “Breathe” and “All You Wanted.”
The EP’s first single is a new version of “The Game of Love” featuring New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander, who wrote and produced the original song.
Branch told Entertainment Tonight that she originally wanted Olivia Rodrigo to join her on the track, but was sold on Alexander as soon as they realized how good their voices sounded together.
“Getting to hear these songs, many I wrote as a teenager, performed by friends and peers that I so greatly admire has been such a ‘pinch me’ moment as a songwriter,” she said in a statement. “Suddenly these adolescent songs about love lost and found take on an entirely new meaning and weight when sung by artists of all different genres and in a different era. Being able to celebrate a 25 year career while firmly believing my best work is still ahead of me is the dream of any artist.”
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