{"id":847097,"date":"2026-09-14T04:38:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-14T04:38:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/847097\/"},"modified":"2026-09-14T04:38:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-14T04:38:12","slug":"sara-bareilles-on-her-good-grief-album-and-gaining-wisdom-in-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/847097\/","title":{"rendered":"Sara Bareilles on Her ‘Good Grief’ Album and Gaining Wisdom in Loss"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tShe could have called it \u201cGreat Grief,\u201d but that would have been immodest. Sara Bareilles<\/a>\u2018 \u201cGood Grief,\u201d her first new studio album in seven years, is one of the year\u2019s finest achievements from a singer-songwriter\u2026 and its purely musical delights are such that you might feel that way about it even if you haven\u2019t been through some shit, as they say. <\/p>\n

\n\tIf you have, all the better to relate to the record and its sometimes somber, sometimes playful meditations on a whole catalog of grief (and grievances): losing best friends to death at too early an age, dealing with fertility struggles, running to and away from the precipice of love, eroding women\u2019s rights, mental health issues, and the challenges of continuing to believe in the promise of America. <\/p>\n

\n\tVariety had an in-depth conversation with Bareilles about the new album and many of the tough or inspiring issues related to it \u2014 along with touching on a recently released documentary film that captures some of the making of the record, \u201cSara Bareilles: Good Grief<\/a>,\u201d and her first real tour of the 2020s, which has just gotten underway and includes dates Sept. 18-19 at Radio City Music Hall and Oct. 12-14 at L.A.\u2019s Dolby Theatre. (Scroll down to see a full list of tour dates.)<\/p>\n

\n\tYou\u2019ve gone a pretty long time between solo albums now. Of course you\u2019ve had \u201cGirls5Eva\u201d and composing your next stage musical (\u201cThe Interestings\u201d) and plenty of other things occupying yout time. Does it feel any different putting this one out into the world now than in times past?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt does feel different. It\u2019s been a minute since I\u2019ve done this. \u2026 But I feel pretty peaceful with the \u201cit takes the time it takes\u201d kind of method around this part of my life. I tend towards a pretty hefty amount of time between records anyway. It takes me a long time to have something else to say. It\u2019s been seven years since my last record, and hopefully it was somewhat worth the wait. I was writing about this this morning; I journal every morning. I found so much catharsis and healing in the making of this record, just going through this period of time with the loss of friends and just the hardships that have happened over the last handful of years in my own personal journey. I felt so grateful to get to put some of those experiences somewhere. So it feels like the timing is right on time, for me personally. I\u2019m hoping it lands for the audience in that way as well.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are \u201cmature themes\u201d on this record. A lot of your audience has sort of grown up with you and dealt with at least some of these same things you\u2019re writing about. Do you suppose you have to have a certain amount of life experience to relate to an album like this? Or if someone is 20 and hasn\u2019t really lost anybody yet in this life, can they still be impacted by it the same way?<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s like, yeah, did I make an old person\u2019s record? [Laughs.] In some ways, yeah, I think what I was attuned to when I was much younger, in my late teens and 20s, the stuff that really kept me up at night, it usually had to do with matters of the heart, like a fixation on a romantic love. But I do feel like, as like a global community, the world feels like it has, I would say, wisened. I think I mean we\u2019ve all sort of aged up a little bit together. I feel this in my young nieces and my younger sister and friends that I have that are much younger: There is a kind of awareness about things that I was not as attuned to. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s about the existential drama of life and death, but I do think that there is a kind of antenna turned towards bigger-picture themes than maybe I was quite aware of when I was that age. I see these young people dealing with the climate crisis and watching what\u2019s happened politically and how divided our world feels. And the way they feel amid the emotionality of the drama of your youth \u2014 I do feel like there\u2019s a lot of grief in there. And I don\u2019t think anybody ever called it that for me. But I\u2019m really curious to hear feedback about who relates to this and who doesn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

\n\tThis album is kind of bookended with songs at the beginning and end that deal with grief in a more obvious way, maybe, with death and loss. But you touch on a lot of subjects. Is there a way in which you thought of \u201cGood Grief\u201d as kind of a concept album where even the songs that aren\u2019t so overtly about that are also themed to grief?<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a line in the sons called \u201cLadies in a Line,\u201d and the lyric is \u201cGrief is the blanket, and it covers everything.\u201d I do think that grief is sort of like the mothership of this record. It\u2019s like the home base for all of these experiences\u2026 I think that what I\u2019ve learned about grief in my own personal relationship to the experience of it is that it\u2019s not just one thing. It carries joy, it carries release, it carries hope and optimism and connection and a lot of really buoyant themes. So yeah, I think that even a song like \u201cIdiot Heart,\u201d which is about wanting to be led to the edge by a kind of an urgency towards love, there is grief in that too, because what we love, we lose. And so I can kind of find it in everything. But I don\u2019t look at it as a somber experience. I just look at it as a really rich experience.<\/p>\n

\n\tI was recommending the album to a young woman who had lost her mother not that long ago and still has some trauma over that, and when I described it as an album largely inspired by grief, she was like, \u201cIs this gonna destroy me?\u201d And I answered, \u201cNo, I don\u2019t think it is, actually.\u201d It\u2019s like, the song about losing your best friend, \u201cJust a Kid,\u201d is so joyful, in its way. That\u2019s followed by \u201cStill Crying,\u201d which is sort of a happy-sounding song, even though it\u2019s about not being able to stop weeping. So the album has this upbeat spirit and does not get bogged down in sorrow, even though it\u2019s kind of unflinching at the same time.<\/p>\n

\n\tI thought so. Well, thanks for sharing that. I\u2019m really sorry for the loss. Talk about a transformative moment to be going through\u2026 I don\u2019t know. I think I was always really afraid of the big feelings, especially when I was younger, just afraid that I wouldn\u2019t be able to hold the bigness of feeling. And it\u2019s been interesting \u2014 I think a lot of people relate to that. We\u2019re sort of afraid of sadness and afraid of grief, and it\u2019s so understandable, but there\u2019s a lot of wisdom\u2026 a lot to get out of it, too.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe songs that deal overtly with grief on this are not all about the same person, or even all from your personal point of view. You have separate songs for two of your best friends, Chad and Gavin. But the opening number, \u201cHome,\u201d was inspired by a podcast conversation between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper. Which I completely did not realize the first time I listened to the album and wrote something public about it. I did realize that a person in the song talked about being 54 and having a son, but I was still slow in picking up the clues this was not about you\u2026<\/p>\n

\n\tSorry!<\/p>\n

\n\tNot your fault! It should have been clear enough at a point. Anyway, articles like this help fill in the backstory for other people. So, in being inspired by this conversation between Colbert and Cooper, would you say you were recreating what they said in your own words for the song?<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s exactly right. I listened to their incredible conversation on Anderson\u2019s podcast called \u201cAll There Is,\u201d and it\u2019s just a beautiful, tender offering. It was very moving to me to hear two men discuss grief in great detail, and how the echoes of loss lived inside their physical homes as children and then as adults. I was really struck by, I think it\u2019s Stephen in the conversation \u2014 I have to go back and refresh my memory \u2014 but one of them starts talking about just how important it is to tell the story. How important re the stories about our own lives, about what we lose, about just who we are \u2014 that\u2019s what we have to gift each other. It became sort of a thematic cornerstone to the record, and the song \u201cHome\u201d is kind of the invitation. It\u2019s the first song for a reason: it\u2019s the invitation into this exchange of stories.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tHave you had a chance to talk to either Cooper or Colbert, to tell them that they\u2019re in this song?<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, I\u2019ve shared it with both of them. I got a chance to go on Anderson\u2019s podcast, actually, and I played it for him live on the podcast.<\/a> He had a beautiful, very emotional reaction to it. And Stephen, I sent it to him via email, and we had a sweet exchange. They both remarked how uncanny it is that a conversation can transmute and become something totally different \u2026 that a conversation they had on a podcast would turn into a piece of music. I love that. I love that about music in general, that the seeds for these songs and these ideas come from all kinds of places.<\/p>\n

\n\tFor me, maybe the most powerful number is the second track, \u201cJust a Kid.\u201d It\u2019s a great example of how the personal can be universal, since nearly every line in it is something specific related to your late friend, and we can\u2019t co-sign all of those exact experiences you had of him. Yet it\u2019s all the better for being something so grounded in reality. The lyrics have kind of a fun writing trick where you have quick and sometimes contrary lines, like \u201cMy first best friend \/ I\u2019ll never see again \/ You never got to get married\/ And I hate where you\u2019re buried.\u201d It\u2019s got some mirth as well as being sad, and if you were writing your next musical, it feels like it could be the 11 o\u2019clock number.<\/p>\n

\n\tOh, that\u2019s awesome. It was such a love letter to my friend Chad, and there\u2019s a lot of nostalgia in this song, conceptually, in wanting to honor the period of time where we really were attached at the hip. This was like early aughts, and going on tour for the first time, and we were roommates, and we did literally everything together. It\u2019s like a sense memory, a felt kind of timeline. We were listening to a lot of Frou Frou and Counting Crows and the Wallflowers. Like, the soundtrack to our lives was very particular. And so I wanted to dip into the feeling of that time and make it feel like a celebration of his life, which it really ended up being. It\u2019s a heartbreaking lyric for me to sing, because it was born of loss, but it\u2019s so joyful because it just brings his whole essence to mind, and I love getting to sing about him from the mountaintop, so to speak. I love getting to share his legacy in song.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tThere\u2019s a slightly meta aspect to \u201cJust a Kid\u201d in that you have the chorus, where you\u2019re describing the experience of singing into your phone as you are writing the song on a city street, and not caring what onlookers think. It sounds like you were unafraid to be in front of strangers having this kind of personal musical experience.<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah, totally. I was on my way home from the grocery store, and my hands were full, and I just could feel the arrival of this song. But it was more of just a sense of Chad. I felt that there was something like a transmission happening. And I put my grocery bags down and started singing into my phone on the street.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt also brings to mind a couple of times I\u2019ve talked to friends about things like this. And I had an experience with my grandfather where I was singing. I knew he was going to pass, and I was across the country and wouldn\u2019t be able to get there in time, so I was singing \u201cAmazing Grace\u201d into the phone. I just think of all those times, so many people, who we can\u2019t physically be with each other. If you happen to know someone\u2019s at the end, how many people are singing or saying something into a phone and just counting on those telephone wires to carry the love? I guess they\u2019re not telephone wires anymore; they\u2019re digital pixels in the air. But just that idea of crossing a great amount of distance. And I think about that between the living and the dead, but also between the living and the living, too.<\/p>\n

\n\tJust to take a little bit of a thematic turn: \u201cHands Off My Body\u201d makes its studio-recording premiere on this album after you debuted it at the Hollywood Bowl a couple of summers ago. Andthat gets into a different kind of grief\/anger. Was there was a particular prompt that inspired either that or the other sort of faintly political song, \u201cHeartland,\u201d which seems to be sung from the point of view of the Statue of Liberty.<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah. Oh my God, a litany of reasons. \u201cHands Off My Body,\u201d the seeds of that particular song were actually born after the Iranian women\u2019s movement, after Mahsa Amini\u2019s death and the Women, Life, Freedom movement that I found to be just an extraordinary showing of strength and resilience. And then, in terms of timeline, I had written that song back then, but then Roe v. Wade fell, and abortion rights started getting repealed all over, and women\u2019s health initiatives were stripped away, and the Epstein files come out. It was just one thing after another, after another. I think there is a side of grief that is rageful, and that\u2019s a lot of rage around the oppressive and consistent lack of respect and autonomy for women and their bodies. So I think I\u2019m glad I had a place to put some of that. I still feel rageful about that.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tAnd to speak about \u201cHeartland,\u201d I think as we\u2019ve watched this second Trump administration unfold with such recklessness and cruelty, frankly, I just started thinking about how sad I am that the idea of patriotism has been co-opted. I do still love this country, flaws and deeply problematic history and all, and I grieve that there isn\u2019t more space for that sometimes I believe in the ideals that we\u2019re building towards. So writing a song from the perspective of the Statue of Liberty or from the perspective of the Constitution and these ideas and words on a page that I think are still worth fighting for \u2014 it\u2019s complicated. It\u2019s not one thing or another, but I do believe that fighting for the ideas that this country is built on is still a worthy pursuit.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tTry to tell a younger person that you are considering putting a flag in the flagpole for a major holiday and that is an invitation to get an incredulous look.<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah. I think it\u2019s important to remember that we have to be able to hold both in our minds, that we have to love something that is complicated. And I\u2019m not diminishing the depth to which there are really problematic parts of the way our systems run and the way the country was formed and founded. But I don\u2019t want to throw it all away. So I grieve the feeling that you have to sometimes.<\/p>\n

\n\tWith \u201cLadies in a Line,\u201d which is a song about feelings coming up at a fertility clinic, I was thinking about how great it would sound in the middle of a musical\u2026<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah. I didn\u2019t get that far in my mind about it.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut do you think that writing for the theater has changed the way you write for a singer-songwriter record?<\/p>\n

\n\tOh, I\u2019m for sure thinking that it has. It has absolutely made a massive impact on my writing. I just am not thinking, \u201cAm I making a musical out of this material or not?\u201d But no, I feel it deeply. Even just from a form perspective, a lot of these songs don\u2019t follow a more traditional pop song format, which I tended to stick more closely to in my past writing. Lots of these songs are a little more formless, and they\u2019re telling a story. There\u2019s less repetition and less in the way of, like, classic choruses. So that just feels like an evolution of my writing that has definitely been influenced by the theater.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut with that song, I really wanted to name the experience of fertility and what is hard about it and what is universal about it. Well, I don\u2019t know about entirely universal, but it is certainly a very deeply shared experience with millions and millions and millions of women and families trying to conceive all over the world. It just struck me during my own continued journey with fertility that there\u2019s a lot of people here, and I just didn\u2019t have a sense of how many, many, many, many people need support. So even though you\u2019re having this really quite typical, un-unique experience, it can feel very lonely. So my hope was just to \u2014 I don\u2019t know \u2014 name it. Just name it for the sake of naming it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tIn another song, \u201cCapsize Me,\u201d you have a line that perhaps describes how you think of yourself in relation to your audience sometimes: \u201cAnd the part of me who shudders can be a lighthouse for the others who need to find the shore when they are lost at sea.\u201d That seems to sort of accept responsibility, or at least awareness, that you can be a stand-in or an avatar for a lot of people who are going through heavy experiences and that you\u2019re grateful accept that as part of what you do, whether it\u2019s the initial impulse or not.<\/p>\n

\n\tHmm. Yeah. I appreciate you saying that. I take a lot of really deep pride in that piece of it. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s pride; it\u2019s comfort. I do feel a kind of responsibility to speak really honestly about the places in my life that carry hardship, and the places where I feel fear, and vulnerability, and anxiety, and all of those things. And if my struggles can bring comfort to someone else, I\u2019m so happy to have them. Well, \u201chappy to have them\u201d is maybe an overstatement. But I am willing to have them because I think that it\u2019s a real privilege to get to try to translate some of these experiences into something that might bring a little bit of comfort. That\u2019s my great hope for this record, is that it just brings a little bit of comfort.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the past, occasionally, you\u2019ve been on social media being public about mental health struggles. Fans might think that there\u2019s such wisdom in your songwriting, and you\u2019re married, and of course you seem like the consummate pro as a musician, to the point of imagiing that you are too together and have too much going for you to have those same issues with it they do. But of course you can be wise and you can be a pro and those things are still not always buffers against being a mess.<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah. I feel like the thing I keep learning over and over again is that there is no \u201cyou figured it out\u201d plateau. When I was younger, I really, in all my naivet\u00e9, thought there was a kind of happiness plateau, that you figure out how to be happy in this life. And it\u2019s been a really mind-opening experience to understand, and then understand yet again and yet again, that there is no plateau, that we\u2019re just on this very dynamic, often volatile, often uncomfortable roller coaster ride of being alive. And sometimes we\u2019re hanging on for dear life, and sometimes we\u2019re thrillseekers with our arms up, enjoying the descent, you know? I really am trying to just embrace all of it, to stay really open and willing to receive what\u2019s kinda coming at me, and coming at all of us.<\/p>\n

\n\tThere are so many things that can be a carrot on a stick \u2014 finding love, employment, financial security\u2026 and fixing yourself can be a carrot on a stick, too.<\/p>\n

\n\tYes. Truly, truly. Nothing to fix.<\/p>\n

\n\tA question that has less to do with the emotional content of the album and just how you completed it: When we spoke when your documentary was premiering at a film festival some months back, you said that people should be aware that the initial recording sessions that were captured in the doc did not represent the entire recording at all, and the finished product would not necessarily sound like what is in that film, but that it captured a important moment in time. Then, of course, you went on and worked with Aaron Dessner, and did a lot of overdubbing on the raw tracks we see in the movie as well as additional songs. So you felt comfortable having a snapshot of the album in progress, as something that you spent a lot more time on.<\/p>\n

\n\tYeah. Even with that idea, though, we\u2019re always changing, too. Like, if I finished the record this month, I would probably make a million different decisions. It is the thing that I love about making records, though. It\u2019s like it really is, as you said, just a snapshot. It\u2019s a snapshot of a set of circumstances and the way you are feeling in a moment, and you do the best you can to make something that you think you can live with for a while. But inevitably, you change, and your feelings about the song itself changes. I mean, I\u2019m even noticing that as we prepare to go on tour, where there\u2019s just little things that live differently in the space and time of putting it on stage live. So it will be, yet again, another snapshot of a song that will hopefully go through a lot of evolution in its lifespan.<\/p>\n

\n\tSo, yeah, I feel really good at this stage in my life, and for where I am kind of spiritually and emotionally, about transparency, and just letting people can see where things began. And I appreciate the opportunity to have people trust that I\u2019m gonna try to take you somewhere where I want the song to live. And if anyone\u2019s seen me in concert, they know I keep fucking with these songs till the end of time, so they\u2019re very different now on stage than they were when they were recorded. But that\u2019s part of the fun.<\/p>\n

\n\tAre you enjoying having that proximity of the album and the film coming out pretty close together, so that a lot of your fans are experiencing the two things pretty close to simultaneously?<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019m loving it. It feels like a giant art project, the whole thing \u2014 \u00a0the album, the tour, the film and this installation we\u2019re doing at Lincoln Center to celebrate the album release. I think we\u2019re taking really good care of the music, which is the thing that matters the most to me. So I think delivering the process of creation and especially getting to tell the backstory a little bit as to where these songs actually came from, to me, it\u2019s really honoring what this whole record is about. Which is, you know, about trying to metabolize and make sense of great loss and great pain, and hopefully turn it into something beautiful.<\/p>\n

\n\t(To read our previous interview with Bareilles<\/a> talking about the \u201cGood Grief\u201d documentary, click here<\/a>. For a review of the \u201cGood Grief\u201d album<\/a>, click here<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

\n\tSara Bareilles 2026 tour dates:
September 9\u2014Boston, MA\u2014MGM Music Hall at Fenway
September 12-13 \u2014Washington, D.C.\u2014The Anthem
September 15-16 \u2014Toronto, ON\u2014Massey Hall
September 18-19 \u2014New York, NY\u2014Radio City Music Hall
September 21-22 \u2014Philadelphia, PA\u2014The Met Philadelphia presented by Highmark
September 24\u2014Atlanta, GA\u2014Fox Theatre
September 25\u2014Cincinnati, OH\u2014Taft Theatre
September 27-28 \u2014Chicago, IL\u2014Chicago Theatre
September 30\u2014Minneapolis, MN\u2014Orpheum Theatre
October 2\u2014St. Louis, MO\u2014Stifel Theatre
October 4\u2014Denver, CO\u2014Bellco Theatre
October 6\u2014Austin, TX\u2014Bass Concert Hall
October 7-8 \u2014Houston, TX\u2014The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts
October 12- 14 \u2014Los Angeles, CA\u2014Dolby Theatre
October 16-17 \u2014San Francisco, CA\u2014Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
October 19-20 \u2014Seattle, WA\u2014The Paramount Theatre<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She could have called it \u201cGreat Grief,\u201d but that would have been immodest. Sara Bareilles\u2018 \u201cGood Grief,\u201d her…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":847098,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216,10484,351273],"class_list":["post-847097","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\/847097","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=847097"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/847097\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/847098"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=847097"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=847097"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=847097"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}