Michelle Branch Talks Legacy and the Grammy Speech She Never Gave on ET Then & Now

Twenty-Five Years Later, Michelle Branch Finally Gets Her Victory Lap

Y2K pop-rock royalty Michelle Branch sits down with Entertainment Tonight’s Denny Directo for “ET Then & Now,” revisiting the songs, career turns and one very overdue awards-show moment that helped shape her first 25 years in music.

Branch arrived in the early 2000s with a guitar, a point of view and the kind of choruses that moved into your head without asking for rent. Her 2001 major-label debut, The Spirit Room, delivered “Everywhere,” “All You Wanted” and “Goodbye to You,” establishing her as a singer-songwriter who could live inside mainstream pop without sanding away the rock underneath.

The numbers support the memory. BMG describes The Spirit Room as a double-platinum release that spent 86 weeks on the Billboard 200, but the album’s longer legacy sits beyond the chart math. Branch offered a generation of listeners a different version of young womanhood in pop: melodic, emotionally direct and visibly attached to the writing and playing of the songs.

Then came “The Game of Love,” her collaboration with Santana. The track won Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals at the 45th Grammy Awards in 2003, the same year Branch was nominated for Best New Artist. Yet her victory arrived without the acceptance speech she might have given in the room.

That is where ET hands the timeline back to her. During the “Then & Now” conversation, Branch finally delivers the Grammy speech she never got to give—more than two decades late, but still hers. It is sweet, slightly surreal and exactly the kind of delayed pop-culture closure these retrospective interviews were invented to provide.

The Grammy was not a one-off brush with the institution. Branch has received one win and four nominations, including recognition for “Are You Happy Now?” and, later, The Wreckers’ “Leave the Pieces.” The career kept bending into new shapes—solo pop-rock, country collaboration, label limbo, reinvention—but the earliest songs never stopped finding listeners.

Now that catalog is entering another chapter. Branch signed a new global recordings agreement with BMG in July 2026 and announced Everywhere and Back Again, an eight-song EP of reimagined recordings due November 6. The first preview reunites her with New Radicals frontman Gregg Alexander for a new version of “The Game of Love,” bringing the song’s writer and its Grammy-winning voice into the same recording.

The project is being presented as a celebration of Branch’s 25-year career, but she is not framing it as a retirement scrapbook. Re-recorded songs, new collaborators and a fall tour turn the anniversary into a bridge between the catalog people grew up with and whatever she decides comes next.

Michelle Branch Revisits Her Career on ET’s “Then & Now”

The complete supplied gallery accompanies Branch’s conversation with Denny Directo about her early success, lasting musical legacy and long-delayed Grammy speech.

Michelle Branch during Entertainment Tonight’s “ET Then & Now” feature with Denny Directo.

Branch’s story makes the “then and now” format work because the two sides are still speaking to each other. The teenager writing songs that would become permanent Y2K touchstones and the artist reclaiming them 25 years later are not separate acts. They are the same songwriter, finally getting enough distance to understand just how far those songs traveled.

Watch Michelle Branch’s ET Then & Now Interview With Denny Directo

The Entertainment Tonight segment revisits Branch’s early-2000s breakthrough, enduring catalog and the Grammy acceptance speech she never got to deliver.

Source: Entertainment Tonight; BMG; Recording Academy.