Macklemore and Kesha‘s “Good Old Days” came out nine years ago, a piano ballad about the years before anyone outside Seattle knew Macklemore’s name. It sits in a very different register from the coverage that has followed him through September 2026, after his removal from Ed Sheeran’s tour.
On September 4, opening for Ed Sheeran’s Loop Tour at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, Macklemore told the crowd that a big part of why he signed on was to stand in stadiums and say “Free Palestine,” according to Al Jazeera. He also performed “Hind’s Hall,” the song he put out in May 2024 after demonstrators at Columbia University renamed Hamilton Hall for Hind Rajab, a young Palestinian girl killed in Gaza that January.
Within days, Messina Touring Group, promoter of the U.S. leg, told Rolling Stone that venues on the remaining dates would not allow the show to go ahead with Macklemore on the bill. Billionaire and Gillette Stadium and New England Patriots owner, Robert Kraft confirmed he barred the rapper from his stadium, pointing to what he called “a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery,” which Rolling Stone read as partly a reference to a 2014 costume Macklemore was accused of basing on an antisemitic caricature. Sheeran said publicly that the decision was the promoter’s, since Macklemore’s contract was with the promoter. All of Sheeran’s other support acts withdrew from the tour soon after.
Macklemore answered by pledging his $1 million from his net earnings to Palestinian relief organizations and announcing a Free Palestine Tour of European dates running from Dublin on October 26 to London on October 30. “It’s 2026. Being apolitical during a genocide doesn’t work anymore,” he said in his statement announcing the shows.
Anyone arriving at Macklemore’s catalog through this month’s coverage will find “Good Old Days” in a much quieter register, a look back at the years before anyone outside Seattle knew his name.
The Seattle Session Behind “Good Old Days”
“Good Old Days” came out on September 19, 2017, three days ahead of the album “Gemini”. Macklemore’s former producer Ryan Lewis had been working with Kesha in Seattle, where the two had already finished “Praying,” and Macklemore told Rolling Stone that when she had a day off, he asked Lewis whether he’d mind if he reached out to her.
Kesha had a comeback of her own underway in 2017 with “Rainbow”, her first album in five years. On release day she wrote on Twitter that the song took her back to being 16 and chasing wild dreams, with no idea how precious those moments would turn out to be. The official score credits six writers: Haggerty (Macklemore) , Kesha Sebert, Joshua Karp (Budo), Samuel Wishkowski, Andrew Joslyn, and Tyler Andrews.
Macklemore’s lyrics lean on specific memories. The first verse recalls a small club in Minnesota and the snow outside First Avenue, where he wanted his name on one of the stars painted across the building’s exterior. Minnesota Public Radio’s The Current reported in 2013 that Macklemore was already the newest name added to that wall, four years before the song came out. The second verse is a list of regrets, among them a crush he never asked to homecoming and drinking he wishes he’d skipped, which XXL read as a reference to his history with alcohol.
The pair performed the song on Ellen in 2017 and again at the 2018 Billboard Music Awards, where they re-created a scene from the video in front of a van. The Hollywood Reporter noted the single peaked at No. 48 on the Billboard Hot 100 that March, after reaching Number 8 on the Digital Song Sales chart in October 2017. That summer, they co-headlined The Adventures of Kesha and Macklemore, a 30-city North American tour that sent a dollar from every ticket to charity.
Inside the “Good Old Days” Score: Plagal Cadences and the iii Chord
The official arrangement on MuseScore is a seven-page piano-vocal-guitar reduction in E-flat major, marked “Hip-hop Ballad” in cut time at 61 half notes per minute. Four chords do nearly all the work: E-flat, A-flat, C minor and G minor, plus a couple of inversions.
The chorus gives E-flat and A-flat two bars apiece, then moves through C minor, G minor over B-flat, A-flat, G minor, and back to A-flat. In Roman numerals, that’s I, IV, vi, iii6, IV, iii, IV. Under that second half, the bass walks down by step from C to G before climbing back to A-flat, and the short tag at the end of each chorus repeats the C, B-flat, A-flat descent under C minor and E-flat over B-flat.
There is no B-flat major chord anywhere in the arrangement, so the song never makes a V to I cadence. It returns to E-flat from A-flat or C minor, and the last bar gets there by way of A-flat, a plagal IV to I that holds the tonic under a fermata. Dean Olivet flagged the missing V chord when he broke the song down for Soundfly’s Flypaper in 2017, and he singled out the G minor iii chord as the moment the chorus lets its momentum sag a little and leaves room for reflection. He also noted the chorus melody stays almost entirely inside the major pentatonic scale.
The notation separates the singer and the rapper right on the vocal staff. Kesha’s chorus uses standard noteheads and enters on an offbeat after an eighth rest. Macklemore’s verses are written in x-shaped noteheads that fix the rhythm of his delivery without assigning pitches. The piano changes with him. Under the chorus, the left hand mostly sustains whole and half notes, and once a verse starts, it switches to steady eighth notes on the chord roots, which is how the reduction carries the drums Billboard heard kicking in with his first verse. The bridge, sung mostly on “oh” syllables, trades E-flat and A-flat and nothing else.
Hal Leonard’s arrangement fits a four-minute song into 68 measures by leaning on a segno and a D.S. al Coda, with first and second endings handling the turnarounds. The second and third verses appear as additional lyrics printed below the final system.
