{"id":622543,"date":"2026-09-12T15:16:16","date_gmt":"2026-09-12T15:16:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/622543\/"},"modified":"2026-09-12T15:16:16","modified_gmt":"2026-09-12T15:16:16","slug":"in-surrendering-to-her-grief-sara-bareilles-discovers-great-hope","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/622543\/","title":{"rendered":"In surrendering to her grief, Sara Bareilles discovers great hope"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n Lauren DePino<\/a> is a singer, songwriter and writer working on a memoir about being a funeral singer.\n<\/p>\n

\n Singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles knows what it\u2019s like to live in fear of her grief eating her alive.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI felt like I would dissolve, like it was too much feeling,\u201d Bareilles told me of the deluge of grief she\u2019d been enduring. Not only had she lost two close friends to cancer within the span of a few years, but she\u2019d faced \u201ca new depth of low\u201d with her mental health. She also revealed she\u2019s heading into year three of a fertility struggle.\n <\/p>\n

\n Yet the more Bareilles, a multi-hyphenate actor-composer-producer, surrendered to her grief in its many forms, the more she began to perceive mourning as a kind of devotional practice, as a miracle to behold.\n <\/p>\n

\n It wasn\u2019t until the end of the recording process of her raw and tender new album, \u201cGood Grief,\u201d that it dawned on Bareilles that she was writing entirely about grief. She debuted the first track, \u201cHome\u201d in March, on CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper\u2019s podcast, All There Is<\/a>. Cooper\u2019s conversation with comedian Stephen Colbert in an earlier episode<\/a> had inspired Bareilles to write the song. The men\u2019s radical openness about their own grief and shared pledge to not keep their sadness hidden from their own children had moved Bareilles to tears.\n <\/p>\n

\n It was only fitting that the process of creating the album helped her lean into the terrifying and awe-inspiring truths about her losses. For Bareilles, songwriting and grief are bridged by a holiness, a mysticism even \u2014 a belief that resonates with me.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI\u2019ve always felt like songwriting is a really sacred ritual, a kind of faith in the unknown, and a faith in the mystery of how music works and moves and God and the universe,\u201d Bareilles told me recently.\n <\/p>\n

\n While \u201cthere\u2019s essential qualities that remain similar\u201d with all her songwriting, these songs differ in one fundamental way. \u201cI\u2019m not quite out in front of the grief itself,\u201d she said. \u201cI\u2019m still grieving my friends. I\u2019m grieving my fertility journey. \u2026 I\u2019m trying to share from a place of not really having any answers.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"sarabareilles_thumb4.jpg\"<\/p>\n

Sara Bareilles learned something new about anxiety\n <\/p>\n

Sara Bareilles wrote an entire album about grief in all forms. Before she headed out on tour, she spoke to CNN about the light she discovered in her own deep anxieties. For more of her interview, head to CNN.com<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Sara Bareilles learned something new about anxiety<\/p>\n

1:36<\/p>\n

\n As someone who sings for people during the bleakest times in their lives, I see Bareilles\u2019 loss-centered songs helping us reconcile in our hearts what our wearied souls cannot solve with our brains, no matter how hard we try. More than ever, we need comfort songs that speak to our snowballing sorrows \u2014 of losing a parent, losing a future we\u2019ve planned for, losing a peer we\u2019ve known for decades. Bareilles\u2019 music fills this need and then some; her songs are modern, timely spirituals but also reminiscent of ancient songs of praise.\n <\/p>\n

\n Her music contains a sacredness that transcends institutional religions without dismissing them, accomplishing what every effective mourning hymn does. These songs take our sadness, transmute it and hand it back to us, not only as something we can hold but as something we want to hold.\n <\/p>\n

\n For fleeting moments, they awaken our pain in tones and textures, in vocal inflections and modulations. When the last notes of these songs ring out, I feel the ache and love for those I\u2019ve lost magnified in equal measure, filling me with hope as my grief transforms into something I no longer perceive as sinister. The songs let me befriend my grief enough to understand that it\u2019s not there to hijack my joy, but to remind me of it. Instead of sharpening my pain, grief\u2019s presence softens it. And the longer I can sit with this grief, the more gifts I discover.\n <\/p>\n

\"VFT00035<\/p>\n

Time to talk: Sara Bareilles (right) on how she discovered that grief is evidence of great love\n <\/p>\n

\"VFT00035<\/p>\n

Time to talk: Sara Bareilles (right) on how she discovered that grief is evidence of great love<\/p>\n

9:51<\/p>\n

\n There is another kind of grief that Bareilles sings about \u2014 it has to do with confronting the belief that our psychological distress can cage us in a making of our own dark thoughts.\n <\/p>\n

\n During a dire period of staggering anxiety, she penned letters to God, whom she describes with \u201ca very wide interpretation\u201d as \u201ca life force, the animating force, as the soul that leaves the body,\u201d revealing to this benevolent entity that she didn\u2019t know how to navigate her way back to herself.\n <\/p>\n

\n This relationship between Bareilles and her growing \u201ctrust in something that is unseeable, unknowable, unmeasurable,\u201d she said, inspired the track \u201cCapsize Me.\u201d The song assures us, she explained to me, that \u201cthere is no version of this life where you are actually capsized\u201d \u2014 that we\u2019re not breakable, that grief does not and will not kill us.\n <\/p>\n

\n Once we come to terms with these freeing realizations, Bareilles said, we can crack the door open to our grief. \u201cWe don\u2019t have to dive into the deep end every time,\u201d she said, but commit to \u201c\u2026 being sort of devoted to the practice of opening up to it a little bit at a time.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n It takes only a hint of trust to welcome in the surprising iterations that grief can embody, ones vastly different from habitual despair. \u201cMy experience of grief has been so many things,\u201d Bareilles said. \u201cIt\u2019s not just fetal position crying in the corner. It\u2019s mystery and awe and joy and jubilation.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"Sara<\/p>\n

\n Grief for her also means glimpsing beyond the threshold. For instance, her penultimate track, \u201cForever,\u201d is written from what Bareilles said was the position of \u201cthe person who\u2019s on their way out, and what they might want to say, if they had the words.\u201d In the ethereal ballad, Bareilles resurrects the hallowed role of song leader, like the ones in ancient Greece<\/a>. These empowered female mourners saw their songs as spells that could summon back the dead.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI know there\u2019s so much speech around the veil being thin around the time of loss, and I just feel the more time I spend really examining grief in all its forms, the veil is thin always,\u201d she said. \u201cI have found so much comfort in that.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Bareilles wrote \u201cSalt Then Sour Then Sweet\u201d in collaboration with singer Brandi Carlile and the late poet Andrea Gibson, whom she got to know when Gibson was battling terminal cancer. Gibson\u2019s journey was featured in the 2025 documentary \u201cCome See Me in the Good Light.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cOne of the things Gibson says is that to die is to be reincarnated in the people you love while they\u2019re still alive,\u201d Bareilles said. \u201cI think about that so much, this idea of changing planes of existence. Someone leaves this form for another form, but they live on in the people that they loved and the people who loved them.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"Sara<\/p>\n

\n Having kicked off her tour on September 9 and released the documentary \u201cSara Bareilles: Good Grief<\/a>\u201d the week prior, Bareilles hopes to create a space for more of that celebratory mourning. \u201cIf this tour is a place to create a space where the veil feels exceptionally thin, I am here for it, because I really think that\u2019s actually the world we live in.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n Bareilles also told me she thought her communion with the audience would enrich her own healing. I can envision an exuberant communal catharsis taking place at each of her concerts.\n <\/p>\n

\n More broadly, I see Bareilles upending our cultural aversion to mortality and death, as well as our avoidance of open grief \u2014 of both showing it and opening a space for it to be displayed. For her, grieving is an active, often heartening endeavor.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cPeople talk about grief as love with nowhere to go, and I really think that is true. But I also think love has everywhere to go,\u201d she told me. \u201cI wonder about this idea of shining absence in the form of love onto other people and seeing what it does for their grief.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\n The word \u201cabsence\u201d to Bareilles feels more nuanced than someone we love simply not being here anymore. After bearing witness to her dear friend Gavin Creel in his final days and washing and clothing his body, she observed, \u201cYou realize they\u2019re not in there.\n <\/p>\n

\n \u201cThat is the craziest thing for me,\u201d she said. \u201cThere is this soul that animates our physical form that doesn\u2019t exist inside of it. It exists outside of it, and that\u2019s why I feel this veil-is-thin concept is just like, well, they\u2019re not in their bodies anymore. They are everywhere.\u201d\n <\/p>\n

\"Writer<\/p>\n

\n With every mention of the thinning veil, I think about my mom, who died last summer, who told me my whole life that the dead are never really gone. I was not with her when she died. The goodbye my mother would have chosen, had she had the chance, would have been anything but a hard and final end; it would have been paradoxically windowed, as Bareilles\u2019 song \u201cForever\u201d suggests.\n <\/p>\n

\n Within my mother\u2019s goodbye would have lived the promise of light \u2014 a forever-togetherness, invoked by her indestructible love for me and her conviction in her ability to still reach me, from wherever she has gone. This is the power of mourning music that I\u2019ve known as a funeral singer; it lets grief sing.\n <\/p>\n

\n I believe my mother took some part in arranging this conversation with one of my all-time favorite artists. And now that I\u2019ve talked to Bareilles, I also see that my own grief had been mounting. That reminded me of what I often remind others \u2014 if we don\u2019t let our grief move through us, we accumulate stone and grit that hardens us.\n <\/p>\n

\n But a better option is becoming living, feeling, fluid monuments to the beings who we love. A better option is letting ourselves be sung to and letting these songs work their magic. If grief can come alive inside the music that is meant to hold its ever-shifting shape \u2014 no matter how sharp and mountainous \u2014 it can sing. And that itself is a miracle.\n <\/p>\n

\n Get inspired by a weekly roundup on living well, made simple. Sign up for CNN\u2019s Life, But Better newsletter<\/a> for information and tools designed to improve your well-being.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lauren DePino is a singer, songwriter and writer working on a memoir about being a funeral singer. Singer-songwriter…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":622544,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,278],"class_list":["post-622543","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622543","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=622543"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/622543\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622544"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=622543"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=622543"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=622543"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}