{"id":829387,"date":"2026-08-29T04:12:10","date_gmt":"2026-08-29T04:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/829387\/"},"modified":"2026-08-29T04:12:10","modified_gmt":"2026-08-29T04:12:10","slug":"sara-bareilles-good-grief-album-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/829387\/","title":{"rendered":"Sara Bareilles ‘Good Grief’: Album Review"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tWell, just how good can grief be? That\u2019s a question raised by Sara Bareilles<\/a>\u2018 \u201cGood Grief,\u201d which, true to its promissory title, deals primarily with loss and death and the kind of tough stuff that folks in a marketing meeting might suggest slightly downplaying when one is releasing one\u2019s first studio album in seven years. If that focus sounds like it could make for a slog, Bareilles \u2014 who was prompted to go down this path by the death of her decades-long best friend \u2014 is very much into finding ways to celebrate as well as mourn, or at least actively explore how those two polarizing impulses might intersect. But apart from that, there\u2019s the matter of just how awfully spirit-lifting her earth-angel mezzo-soprano tends to be, even when backing herself into dark corners before backing her way back out again. All of which is to say: Music lovers could not ask for a better bereavement counselor.<\/p>\n

\n\tNot one to put off dealing with the elephant in the room, she concentrates several of the songs most overtly tied to her friend\u2019s death from cancer in the first third of the album. Counterintuitively, perhaps, this is where some of the most joyful-sounding material is found too. Bareilles starts off with \u201cHome,\u201d which approaches the subject matter from a different angle, paraphrasing bits of a conversation she saw Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper share on television about their own experiences with grief, and how for many of us it gets emotionally brushed under the family dinner table: \u201cI was taught to bury with the dead\u00a0\/ The presence of my grief\u00a0\/ I see it now, but didn\u2019t then \/ That silence is a thief\u00a0\/ It made strangers out of friends\u00a0\/ Robbed me of saving graces offered in unlikely places.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tThe second number, \u201cJust Kids,\u201d is where she begins to bring her own experiences with loss in, going in completely on her late BFF, college bestie and former tour manager Chad Joseph, finding some wryness in the details \u2014 \u201cYou never got to get married and I hate where you\u2019re buried\u201d \u2014 yet a weird exultation in writing about him in real time. In a meta moment, she describes herself singing the song she\u2019s writing about him as a voice mail she\u2019s driven to put down as a voice mail, in public: \u201cOut on the street \/ Singing in the phone \/ They\u2019re looking at me \/ There was a time \/ That I might have cared \/ But this one\u2019s for my best friend so let \u2019em stare.\u201d If this were one of her past or future Broadway musicals \u2014 say, a sequel to \u201cWaitress\u201d where Jenna has to plan a funeral \u2014 it would be the 11 o\u2019clock number.<\/p>\n

\n\tBy track 3, the Aaron Dessner-co-produced \u201cStill Crying,\u201d she\u2019s hovering over a deathbed: \u201cPray, pray to someone I used to know \/ I request a rescue \/ Tell Him that he moves too slow.\u201d But it\u2019s not arranged as the somber ballad you might expect, but as a waltz-tempo ode to emotional exhaustion that sounds weirdly romantic, almost like an old-fashioned doo-wop tune, but with tearlessness replacing true love as the ideal end game of all this striving. (Bareilles cites Roy Orbison as the reference point in interviews.) At this point it\u2019s pretty clear that \u201cGood Grief\u201d will never be a grind to get through, however tough the stuff it deals with is, and with the album just getting started, and a lot of potential showstoppers scattered throughout in a variety of moods and styles, the clock will not get run out too exhaustingly or early. <\/p>\n

\n\tThere is a song dealing movingly with IVF struggles Bareilles has been open about, \u201cLadies in Line.\u201d (Sondheim might appreciate this strange echo of the \u201cCompany\u201d line.) She offers two numbers that touch on the grief Americans might feel about current sociopolitical currents: the dramatic, ominously percussive \u201cHands Off My Body,\u201d first premiered in concert a couple of years back (\u201cNo I\u2019m not gonna choke on a thank you\u00a0\/ To a god I don\u2019t pray to\u00a0\/ Your holiness haunts me\u201d), and \u201cHeartland,\u201d a defiantly hopeful patriotic ballad sung partly from the point of view of the Statue of Liberty. There\u2019s even a devastating breakup ballad, \u201cSay Leave,\u201d although Bareilles is fairly recently (and apparently happily) wed; she\u2019s not above borrowing from friends\u2019 romantic experience to find a bonus way here to break some hearts, just in case the death stuff didn\u2019t get you.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut fans who follow her on social media, where she\u2019s discussed mental health struggles, will sense she\u2019s writing more out of her own life again with \u201cNervous Breakdown.\u201d The title sounds like it could be a last, harrowing straw, but it\u2019s actually a track that breaks the noble mood as a purely fun, semi-comical jazz shuffle that delves into high anxiety over the ironic comfort of a cabaret-style stand-up-bass-and-piano combo. \u201cI\u2019m having a nervous breakdown \/ Just me myself and I \/ You, you\u2019re not invited!\u201d she warns, through what sure sounds like a smile.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut of course, \u201cGood Grief\u201d is an invitation, to commiserate and put a dent in the cycles of misery \u2014 be they related to death, love or America, even \u2014 through the sharing of voices, starting with Bareilles\u2019 sweetly uplifting guide vocal. And all that, as someone once said, baked in a beautiful pie.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Well, just how good can grief be? That\u2019s a question raised by Sara Bareilles\u2018 \u201cGood Grief,\u201d which, true…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":829388,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216,10484,351273],"class_list":["post-829387","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-sara-bareilles","tag-sara-bareilles-good-grief"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=829387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/829387\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/829388"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=829387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=829387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=829387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}