We Finally Know What Happened To Macklemore

Back in 2012, a catchy, rap-infused single titled "Thrift Shop" took the world of pop music by storm. Created by Seattle rapper Macklemore and his producing partner, Ryan Lewis, the song struck a nerve by celebrating the kind of cool stuff to be found in thrift stores, a none-too-subtle repudiation of the conspicuous consumption of luxury brands permeating rap. The song hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, spending six weeks there. The following year, the duo once again hit the top spot on that chart, with "Can't Hold Us" spending five weeks at No. 1. 

Their success was all the more impressive when considering that they were independent artists who'd never signed with a major label and garnered a following through grassroots efforts beyond the typical star-making machinery of the music business. As Macklemore explained in an interview with the Nerdist podcast, it's not coincidental that the themes within "Thrift Show" were emblematic of the independent ethos that catapulted them to the top of the charts. "It's not just 'Thrift Shop;' it's this kind of do-it-yourself attitude behind the music we've made — that is also within the midst of this thrift shop song," Macklemore said, via TechDirt.

While he's never matched the chart success of his earlier work, Macklemore has continued to be a force to be reckoned with in the years since then.

In January 2013, Macklemore — whose real name is Ben Haggerty — made a big announcement about his personal life, revealing that he and longtime girlfriend/tour manager Tricia Davis had gotten engaged. "After 7 years... I asked. And she said yes," he wrote on Instagram, accompanying a photo of the hefty diamond engagement ring.

Two years later, the couple unveiled a YouTube video revealing they were expecting their first child, confirming an earlier report that Davis was pregnant. A few months after that, Davis announced their first baby had arrived, daughter Sloane Ava Simone Haggerty. In that Instagram announcement (she's since taken her account private), she also revealed that they'd tied the knot. "Got married on June 27th once the Supreme Court ruled same sex couples could too..." she wrote, as reported by E! News. In conjunction with the birth, Macklemore also debuted a new single — a collaboration with Ed Sheeran — called "Growing Up (Sloane's Song)," dedicated to his infant daughter.

In 2018, Macklemore revealed that he and his wife had welcomed a second child, another daughter;  he subsequently divulged her name, Colette Koala Haggerty. Their third child, son Hugo Jack Haggerty, arrived in 2021.

As Macklemore's fans know, he's been highly candid about his past struggles with substance abuse and the fact that he lost his best friend to an overdose at age 21. In 2016, that history led him to be tapped by President Barack Obama to join him for his weekly address, with a goal of combating opioid addiction.

In that address, the president observed that drug overdoses had tripled since 2000, resulting in the deaths of more Americans than traffic accidents. "Addiction is like any other disease — it doesn't discriminate," Macklemore said, explaining how addiction is a problem that transcends racial and economic factors. "It can happen to any of us," he added.

At the time, Obama was attempting to convince Congress to pass a new bill that would devote $1.1 billion to help fight opiate addiction. "That's why just talking about this crisis isn't enough — we need to get treatment to more people who need it," Obama said, noting that his administration had been working with law enforcement to ensure that more addicts were sent to treatment centers instead of jail. "Recovery works," Macklemore added, "and we need our leaders in Washington fund it and people know how to find it."

It's no secret that Macklemore's biggest success came in collaboration with Ryan Lewis. In 2017, however, Macklemore announced that he and Lewis had decided that some distance was needed — and that his upcoming album would be produced without Lewis. 

In an Instagram post, Macklemore insisted that Lewis would always be his "brother forever," and there was no drama behind the decision to go their separate ways. "After the last tour, Ryan and I agreed that some creative space would be good for the both of us," Macklemore wrote. "This decision came from a place of love for one another," he added, pointing out that they'd been working closely together for nine solid years. 

The result was "Gemini," Macklemore's second solo album (arriving 12 years after his first). As he told Rolling Stone, there was no political agenda behind the music. "It's the music that I wanted to go get into my car and listen to," Macklemore explained. "I wanted it to be fun." He also opened up about the experience of working without Lewis, admitting the producer's perfectionist streak was a double-edged sword. "I think at times it can be daunting a little bit," he said of Lewis insisting he rewrite parts that he felt could be better. Working without that level of criticism, he added, freed him up to get more experimental. "And with that I gained a new level of confidence that I was lacking," he shared.

Among the songs on Macklemore's 2017 "Gemini" album was "Good Old Days," a collaboration with singer and songwriter Kesha, who'd undergone quite a transformation herself. As he told Rolling Stone, he'd found a kindred spirit in Kesha. "She is someone that I walked into the room and I immediately just caught a vibe with and became friends with pretty instantaneously," he gushed

When Macklemore decided to bring the music directly to fans via a new tour, he co-headlined with Kesha, a canny move that would entice both of their respective fanbases. The 30-date tour — titled The Adventures of Kesha and Macklemore — kicked off in the summer of 2018. While fans have been able to look inside Kesha's tragic life, the tour was a triumph for both, and anything 

In addition to music, the two added an altruistic element to the tour, with $1 from every ticket sold donated to their favorite charities — Kesha's pick was the Rape, Abuse, & Incest National Network, while Macklemore donated his portion to M Plus1, an organization devoted to racial and social justice. The two promoted the tour with a series of behind-the-scenes videos posted to YouTube. These included one in which they went shopping for cowboy boots in Texas, and another featuring a visit to a San Diego animal rescue shelter.

After the success of his tour with Kesha, Macklemore announced he'd be taking to the stage again. This time, he'd be headlining a music festival with a stark difference: Recovery Fest, a drug- and alcohol-free festival held in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, in late September of 2018.

Like his previous tour, proceeds would be donated to various Rhode Island organizations working to address opioid addiction, including Anchor Recovery Community Centers, R.E.S.T., and Push Hope.

"You're making history tonight. Isn't this the first sober music festival ever?" Macklemore told the crowd, as reported by Wicked Local. And while that may or may not have been the case, Macklemore was adamant in acknowledging the positive impact that sobriety had on his life, as well as those in the audience. "I'm just here to try and share my experience, my hope, and strength with you people," Macklemore told the crowd, "so we can all celebrate this gift of life."

As a native of Seattle, Macklemore's sport-related allegiances are to the teams in his city. Among these are the Seattle Sounders, the city's professional soccer team, and in 2019 he went beyond just cheering the team on by becoming one of its owners. As the Seattle Times reported at the time, Macklemore and his wife, Tricia Davis, were part of an ownership group that purchased part ownership of the team (whose original owners included Adrian Hanauer, billionaire Paul Allen, and game show host and devoted soccer fan, Drew Carey. Joining Macklemore and his wife were Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson and his wife, singer and actor Ciara, along with several other families. 

"Man, to be part of this organization, having grown up in Seattle — it's pretty surreal," Macklemore said in a statement. "It's just very exciting. I'm very honored. I think we have a great group. This team is building an incredible legacy, and I'm just excited to be part of it."

Macklemore, however, wasn't done. Just a few years later, in 2022, he joined the Seahawks' Marshawn Lynch to became part of an investors' group that owned the city's NHL team, the Seattle Kraken. "Hockey and music are ways for people to come together in a society where it is a little too easy to isolate," Macklemore told NHL.com. "Bringing 17,000 people into that arena is something energetic and spiritual and magical."

Macklemore had been flying solo for a few years when he reunited with Ryan Lewis in 2021. Working together for the first time since 2016's "This Unruly Mess I've Made" album, the two collaborated on a new single, "Next Year." For those who listened to the lyrics, the real meaning behind Macklemore's "Next Year" was clear.

In a statement to Complex, Macklemore noted that despite not working together in five years, they effortlessly fell back into their old groove. "Ryan first played this for me in his car, as a rough demo, but it immediately stood out. I then wrote a bunch of verses quickly and went down to L.A. to record," he said. "And with the time that had passed, I felt a little apprehension at first; however, once we started the creative process, it felt like we hadn't skipped a day."

Lewis felt similarly, issuing a statement of his own in which he'd come to realize that the time they'd taken away from each other had only led to a great appreciation of their musical partnership, that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. "It felt like a fresh start for our creativity and a reminder of the powerful force we make together — I missed my guy," Lewis said.

Australian music sensation Tones and I made a huge splash with the 2019 single "Dance Monkey," and it wasn't long before Macklemore caught her performing in a Seattle club. "I left the show inspired," he told the Herald Sun (via the Daily Mail). He invited her to come back to Seattle, and they wrote some songs together. For Tones and I, a fan of Macklemore, being taken under his wing was huge, telling Gold Coast Bulletin that meeting him was "the biggest thing" to have ever happened to her.

Macklemore tapped her as his opening act, and the two toured together several times. "Gosh, I love him so much," Tones and I told Rolling Stone. "I don't know whether you should meet your idols or not, because I have been given the best example of one."

In 2022, the two teamed up to collaborate on a single, "Chant." Not only did the song introduce Macklemore once again to fresh ideas through a collaboration, but it also represented another stage in his musical evolution. "This song is a bit of a rebirth," Macklemore said in an interview with Rolling Stone. "I wanted to challenge myself, get through moments of writer's block, and capture the spirit of what it's like to overcome something, push through it, and get up the next day and do it again."

COVID-19 wasn't great for the mental health of many people, and that was certainly true for Macklemore. In 2022, Macklemore opened up about hard times during the pandemic, and admitted he experienced some dark moments. In a TikTok video promoting the release of "Chant," he dropped a huge revelation. "I relapsed during the first summer of Covid," he wrote in a caption appearing in the video. "Today I have 694 days clean."

Macklemore shared even more when he appeared on "The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon," revealing that a big part of his recovery process had been attending 12-step meetings. Once those in-person meetings shifted to virtual get-togethers as everyone was advised to avoid contact with others, he felt as if he'd lost his bearings. "Once those stopped, I was alone, and the disease of addiction was like, 'Yo, this is crazy. The world has stopped. You can get high,'" he said, adding that he'd "stopped doing the things that prevented me from getting high, and I listened to that voice."

As one of the celebs who opened up about relapsing, Macklemore got candid about falling short. "And it was a couple weeks of a relapse and very painful," he said, admitting he was still facing the repercussions, two years after the fact.

May 2024 saw the release of "Hind's Hall," a new Macklemore single tackling a controversial subject. As Vox pointed out, the song is an unveiled and scathing critique of Israel's military assault on Gaza, while also supporting college students who'd been protesting it. The song's title actually has a double meaning — referring to a building at Columbia University that received the nickname Hind's Hall from the death of a six-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, who was killed during the conflict. Macklemore vowed to donate all proceeds from the single to Palestinian relief efforts.

Macklemore — who previously joined Dua Lipa, Drake, Jennifer Lopez, and numerous other music artists in signing a letter calling for a ceasefire — had also spoken out at a rally in support of Palestine, held in Washington, D.C. in late 2023. Speaking to the audience, Macklemore admitted there were many other people far more qualified to speak on the topic and that he'd been warned about the controversy and backlash he'd experience for sharing an opinion on such a polarizing issue. "They told me to be quiet. They told me to do my research, to go back, that it's too complex to say something, right?" he said, as reported by Billboard. "I don't know enough," he continued. "But I know enough that this is a genocide."

Macklemore's political activism extended beyond Palestine and grew to encompass the war in Sudan. In August 2024, he announced that he was cancelling a concert in Dubai in protest of the United Arab Emirates' alleged involvement in the conflict.  

He shared the news in a lengthy statement he posted on Instagram, explaining why he was taking such drastic action, which would certainly cost him a significant amount of money. "I don't take this decision lightly and think it's important to explain why," he wrote, explaining that numerous people had reached out to him explaining the importance of boycotting the UAE due to "the role they are playing in the ongoing genocide and humanitarian crisis in the region." He continued by pointing out the situation in Sudan had become "catastrophic" — with more than 150,000 casualties and 10 million people displaced. Ultimately, Macklemore wrote that the prospect of performing in Dubai had forced him to confront his own hypocrisy. "And if I take the money, while knowing it doesn't sit right with my spirit, how am I any different than the politicians I've been actively protesting against?" he asked.

Recognizing that he would disappoint fans and potentially threaten future shows in the Middle East, he felt this was the only way he could draw attention to a humanitarian crisis that had been weighing heavily on his soul. "As always," he concluded, "my message is love." 

If there were suspicions that Macklemore's support of Palestine was simply another example of a rock star dilettante phoning it in, he laid that to rest. Not only did he take to hoisting a Palestinian flag during his concerts, in March 2025, he unveiled "The Encampments," a documentary on which he served as producer. "The Encampments" took his activism even further by focusing on the Columbia University Gaza Solidarity Encampment, which began when students at the NYC university set up tents on campus in protest, sparking a movement that spread throughout the U.S.

"This is more than a student protest, it's a generational struggle for justice," said Macklemore at the film's premiere, as reported by Deadline. He observed that college students have historically been at the forefront of movements pursuing social justice, from the civil rights protests of the '60s to the '80s efforts to end apartheid in South Africa. "They've never been on the wrong side of history," Macklemore said of student protesters, explaining that Columbia's student protesters are the latest in a long line. "The film ensures the students in the U.S and Gaza are heard, their actions are remembered, and the fight for Palestinian liberation continues," he added.