In 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, until Michelle literally messaged me on the plane the heartbreaking news Clive passed,” Alexander says. “The original, and now this new version, are equally two of my favorite productions I’ve done in my little life — and so Michelle and I planned to surprise Clive with it. We’re confident it would have brought him great joy us singing together. ‘The Game of Love’ was Clive’s fave song of mine!”
Working with Branch again is not the only recent reunion for Alexander. As Alexander first told Variety, New Radicals — Alexander and Brisebois — are working on a potential sophomore album, cheekily titled, “Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed TWO (THE Heathen Will ‘CON$pirituality’ TROLL).
“The new New Radicals album is a lot like our first album,” he says. “A wild array of random demo-quality masters, and indeed zany pop monsterpieces (sic) like ‘You Get What You Give.’” The last released song written together by the duo until “One Night Only (Break Loose Break Free!)” was the Oscar-nominated “Lost Stars,” penned for the 2014 film “Begin Again” and performed by Maroon 5’s Adam Levine.
Writing “One Night Only (Break Loose Break Free!)” occurred after both Alexander and Brisebois had the serendipitous good fortune to have two of their past separate hits coincidentally experience massive resurgences over the past few years.
“Murder on the Dance Floor,” written by Alexander and Sophie Ellis-Bextor — who released the song in 2001 — found a totally new life following the tune’s integral usage for a climactic scene in the 2023 movie Saltburn. Concurrently, Brisebois saw a similar surge with “Unwritten,” Natasha Bedingfield’s 2004 smash, co-written by the two women and Wayne Rodrigues, after its synch usage in the Glen Powell/Sydney Sweeney 2023 rom-com Anyone But You. Both songs went viral and found a new generation of fans.
After the two songs’ renaissance, Alexander and Brisebois, who had remained close, came together to pen the new song. “The writing of ‘One Night Only’ was more than anything just about trying to capture some of the essence of that film’s plot, bonkers as it was,” Alexander says. “We wrote lyrics and got on the mic for fun and sent [it] over on a lark, and Universal dug it so much they immediately put it in the movie.”
The activity led to the New Radicals’ reactivation. “‘One Night Only’ being a soft launch song from a film and ‘The Game of Love’ being a duet just seemed like a fun, low-stakes way of warming up the plate for any proper follow up to ‘You Get What You Give,’” Alexander says. “[Putting] these two songs out in the last few weeks [is] sort of a fun rock & roll science experiment of just releasing some music to slowly spread the word.”
The first New Radicals’ album came out on Universal Music Group’s MCA Records, which now serves as UMG’s Nashville imprint. The new album will come out through a UMG imprint since it still had the rights to the band’s music. The album also reunites Alexander with UMG chair/CEO Lucian Grainge, who supported Alexander since his New Radical days and through writing multiple hits for Ronan Keating and other artists.
“Lucian changed my destiny in so many positive ways, much to the same extent Clive Davis did,” Alexander says. “So, although Lucian’s in rarified air nowadays, he always champions my quirky personality and music remaining a priority somehow behind the scenes.”
Alexander suspects the album will come out on Capitol or Interscope, but Interscope vice chairman Steve Berman is one of the few to have already heard some of the new music. Following the UMG’s Grammy party earlier this year, Berman invited Alexander to his office “and we spent 90 minutes jamming some of New Radicals unheard double-album,” Alexander says. “He reminded me Interscope is still the best label on earth, and that ‘You Get What You Give’ is one of UMG’s crown jewels of the whole ’90s — apparently second only to Nirvana’s ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’ in syncs, radio, playlists and such.”
Speaking of Nirvana, Alexander and Nowels — whom Alexander has known since he was 16 and whom he wrote “You Give What You Get” with — have already reunited to write a song that namechecks the late Nirvana leader Kurt Cobain. “We wrote one of our best songs. It’s early stages. [It’s] about how Cobain would be 60 soon, and what would he say of these Musks and Trumps running our world,” Alexander says, quoting some of the lyrics: “’Live in a cabana then in a Ramada/ Lookin’ like Madonna lookin’ for Nirvana/ Aren’t we all in the same boat? Even Kurt’s stuck…still lookin’ for Nirvana!”
“It’s bizarre how musically and almost spiritually connected Rick and I still are,” he says. “When I walked into Clive Davis packed funeral recently, Rick was naturally the first person I saw. And we sat together smiling warmly, reflecting on Clive until Jennifer Hudson came on mic and started singing ‘I Will Always Love You’ a cappella. And it sounded so poignantly heartbreaking we just involuntarily started sobbing and hugging. Wholly unexpected. Two grown ass men, who’ve known each other 40 years this month.”
