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Well, just how good can grief be? That’s a question raised by Sara Bareilles’ “Good Grief,” 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’s first studio album in seven years. If that focus sounds like it could make for a slog, Bareilles — who was prompted to go down this path by the death of her decades-long best friend — 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’s 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.
Not one to put off dealing with the elephant in the room, she concentrates several of the songs most overtly tied to her friend’s 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 “Home,” 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: “I was taught to bury with the dead / The presence of my grief / I see it now, but didn’t then / That silence is a thief / It made strangers out of friends / Robbed me of saving graces offered in unlikely places.”
The second number, “Just Kids,” 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 — “You never got to get married and I hate where you’re buried” — yet a weird exultation in writing about him in real time. In a meta moment, she describes herself singing the song she’s writing about him as a voice mail she’s driven to put down as a voice mail, in public: “Out on the street / Singing in the phone / They’re looking at me / There was a time / That I might have cared / But this one’s for my best friend so let ’em stare.” If this were one of her past or future Broadway musicals — say, a sequel to “Waitress” where Jenna has to plan a funeral — it would be the 11 o’clock number.
By track 3, the Aaron Dessner-co-produced “Still Crying,” she’s hovering over a deathbed: “Pray, pray to someone I used to know / I request a rescue / Tell Him that he moves too slow.” But it’s 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’s pretty clear that “Good Grief” 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.
There is a song dealing movingly with IVF struggles Bareilles has been open about, “Ladies in Line.” (Sondheim might appreciate this strange echo of the “Company” line.) She offers two numbers that touch on the grief Americans might feel about current sociopolitical currents: the dramatic, ominously percussive “Hands Off My Body,” first premiered in concert a couple of years back (“No I’m not gonna choke on a thank you / To a god I don’t pray to / Your holiness haunts me”), and “Heartland,” a defiantly hopeful patriotic ballad sung partly from the point of view of the Statue of Liberty. There’s even a devastating breakup ballad, “Say Leave,” although Bareilles is fairly recently (and apparently happily) wed; she’s not above borrowing from friends’ romantic experience to find a bonus way here to break some hearts, just in case the death stuff didn’t get you.
But fans who follow her on social media, where she’s discussed mental health struggles, will sense she’s writing more out of her own life again with “Nervous Breakdown.” The title sounds like it could be a last, harrowing straw, but it’s 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. “I’m having a nervous breakdown / Just me myself and I / You, you’re not invited!” she warns, through what sure sounds like a smile.
But of course, “Good Grief” is an invitation, to commiserate and put a dent in the cycles of misery — be they related to death, love or America, even — through the sharing of voices, starting with Bareilles’ sweetly uplifting guide vocal. And all that, as someone once said, baked in a beautiful pie.
