Michelle Branch re-cuts 'The Game of Love' with New Radicals' Gregg Alexander and announces a fall tour

Twenty-five years after a teenager from Sedona sang "The Game of Love" into a Grammy, Michelle Branch has cut the song again, this time as a duet with the man who wrote it. She released the new version on Wednesday alongside the announcement of an EP and a fall tour, her first real return to the road in years.

The single is the first taste of Everywhere and Back Again, a six-plus-track EP of reworked catalog songs due November 6 on BMG. Branch built it around collaborations, handing her old material to friends and peers and singing it back with them. The tracklist so far names new takes on "Everywhere," "All You Wanted," "Goodbye To You" and "Breathe," with more to come.

The one that started it

Re-recording your own hits is a crowded lane in 2026. Anniversary reissues and artist-owned re-cuts are everywhere, and most of them exist to move merch and reclaim masters. This one has a better reason to exist, and it lives in the "Game of Love" credit line.

Most people file the song under Santana, where it lived on 2002's Shaman and won Best Pop Collaboration with Vocals. Fewer remember it was written and produced by Gregg Alexander, the New Radicals frontman who wrote "You Get What You Give" and then mostly disappeared into songwriting. Branch was the voice Clive Davis picked for it after, by Alexander's account, auditioning the melody on Tina Turner and Macy Gray first. A 19-year-old walked in, cut the vocal in one take, and a year later everyone had a Grammy. The song hit No. 5 on the Hot 100 and topped Adult Contemporary.

So the 2026 version isn't a nostalgia grab. It's the writer and the singer in a room together for the first time on record, and by both their accounts they mixed the 2001 and 2026 vocals side by side at New York's Hit Factory. "Being able to sing this together with him is really a full circle moment and captures the original spirit of the demo," Branch said.

Alexander, who does not say much publicly, said a lot here. His statement ends with a dedication to Davis, the mentor who paired them: "the music world misses you already... this record is dedicated to you." He signed off, "let's turn this motherfucker up and dance like no one's watching." Whatever the reworked track sounds like, it arrives carrying that much history, which is more than most re-records can say.

Branch on the record

Branch framed the project as a look back that is also a hedge against being treated like a legacy act.

"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. 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."

That last line matters for what comes next. The EP is billed as the warm-up to a full album of new original songs, her first since 2022's The Trouble with Fever. The re-records are the anniversary victory lap. The real test is the record after them.

The tour

The "Everywhere and Back Again Tour" runs 18 dates from late September into November, opening at Seattle's Showbox on September 27 and closing at Manchester Music Hall in Lexington on November 13. It sticks to theaters and clubs, not sheds, with stops at The Wiltern in Los Angeles and the Beacon Theatre in New York. Artist presales started Wednesday, July 15, with the general on-sale Friday, July 17 at 10 a.m. local time.

The venues fit the moment. Branch is playing rooms where the early-2000s songs will land with a crowd that grew up on them, and where she can test whether "my best work is still ahead of me" is a promise or a press line. We will know more on November 6.