RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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See the full story · 1 sourcesIn 2002, Santana and Michelle Branch released the buoyant, breezy “The Game of Love,” which went on to reach No. 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 and won a Grammy for best pop collaboration with vocals.
Now, nearly 25 years later, Branch and one of the song’s co-writers, New Radicals ’ founder and mastermind Gregg Alexander, have reunited for an uplifting reimagining of the song as a duet. The new version debuted on Billboard ‘s Adult Pop Airplay chart at No. 33 for the Aug. 8-dated chart.
They also created a new music video for the song — premiering below — marking the first clip that New Radicals have appeared in in 28 years.
The video is also the latest in a relative flurry of activity for New Radicals and Alexander in the last few years, which has led to Alexander and New Radicals partner Danielle Brisebois reforming and working on new music together. That included releasing the first New Radicals song in decades, “One Night Only (Break Loose Break Free!),” featured in the new rom-com One Night Only , which opened Aug. 7.
“No matter how I try, I just can’t escape New Radicals,” Alexander tells Billboard , citing Shazam statistics of how the group’s 1998 pop classic “You Get What You Give” remains heavily searched by users of the song-identifying tool around the world nearly 30 years later. New generations continue to discover it through creative usages, such as a re-recorded version by New Zealand’s Benee used by MTV to promote its 2025 Video Music Awards, or a Geese cover of the tune during an appearance on BBC Radio in November. “So, if I can’t escape my pop past, perhaps [I] just embrace it!” he says. But more about that later.
The effervescent video for “The Game of Love” follows a man touting a boombox gathering followers through a neighborhood and is based on a real incident experienced by Alexander.
“This video’s concept actually happened,” he says. “I recently was in [New York’s] Washington Square Park one night a bit stoned and this swift-moving boombox from the other side of the park was blasting [Stardust’s 1998 dance hit] ‘Music Sounds Better with You,’ but the music was not staying in one spot,” he says. “So, I started running towards the bass sounds. It was coming from this huge dude the size of a Sumo wrestler, with a giant boombox strapped onto his body with everyone staring. And when his boombox segued to Daft Punk’s “One More Time,” me and a bunch of park [goers] started following this guy like the Pied Piper, with everyone singing along. People couldn’t believe it! That was the whole concept which we later recreated on the streets of Nashville.”
With the new “The Game of Love” video, directed by Running Bear Films’ Stephen Kinigopoulos and Alexa Stone, Alexander also gets to right a wrong that has haunted him from the original “You Get What You Give” music clip, which took place in a mall.
“My ‘You Get What You Give’ video was beyond fun, but I always wanted it to be more multicultural,” he says. “Yet in the ‘90s you’d ask for a diverse cast of extras, but then show up on set and it’d look kind of like a Gap commercial. The whole idea with this video was to have every age and size and color of people, which thankfully came to be. We even have rockin’ grandmas!”
One holdover from the original “You Get What You Give” video in the new clip? Alexander’s now-legendary bucket hat that he not only sports in the video, but also on the cover of the New Radicals’ 1998 studio album, Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too.
“It’s a small miracle it hasn’t been eaten by moths by now,” he says of the famous hat. “I had it in a storage space, locked up with my boxes of photos and songwriting reels and voicemail tapes dating back to the early 1990s.”
Reuniting with Branch for the re-imagined “The Game of Love” as a duet was a joy, Alexander says. “It was a blast recording with Michelle because it felt like an old school New York session: Real musicians and tube mics… I adore Michelle, so when you’re with someone you’re protective of — we met when she was just 19 — it makes singing more of a soul connection than anything else! We have a lot in common. We’re both teenage rock & roll runaways. Except my one-way L.A. ticket was from Detroit, age 16, and her was from Sedona, Arizona, age 17.”
Similarly, working again with Alexander “felt incredibly special,” Branch says in a statement. “Gregg and I have known each other for so many years, and there’s such a history between us through ‘The Game of Love.’ To come back together now, all these years later, and actually be in front of the camera together for this song felt a little surreal — and also completely natural. I hope you can really feel the joy we had making it. It feels like a full-circle moment, and I’m so excited for people to see us together.”
The song is the first release from Branch’s Everywhere and Back Again EP, arriving Nov. 6 via BMG — which reimagines a number of Branch’s past hits, including “Everywhere” and “All I Wanted.”
The video concludes with an end-title card that reads, “In Loving Memory of Clive Davis,” the legendary label executive who died June 22. “The Game of Love” originally came out on Davis’s Arista imprint, and followed Santana’s comeback album and worldwide sensation, 1999’s Supernatural.
After Alexander and Rick Nowels wrote “The Game of Love,” Davis first wanted the recently disbanded New Radicals on it with Santana. “But I was having too much fun to weigh down my new life with rock dream tedium, so I moved to Europe,” Alexander remembers. Then, Davis famously had Tina Turner record the song with Santana — but she declined to make a video, so Davis turned to Macy Gray. He ultimately landed on Branch, who not only sang on the track, but played rhythm guitar. Alexander and Branch originally planned to surprise Davis with the new version.
“I was flying back June 22 from Prague to New York to master the record planning to present it to Clive...
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