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She could have called it “Great Grief,” but that would have been immodest. Sara Bareilles’ “Good Grief,” her first new studio album in seven years, is one of the year’s finest achievements from a singer-songwriter…
and its purely musical delights are such that you might feel that way about it even if you haven’t been through some shit, as they say.
If 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’s rights, mental health issues, and the challenges of continuing to believe in the promise of America.
Variety had an in-depth conversation with Bareilles about the new album and many of the tough or inspiring issues related to it — along with touching on a recently released documentary film that captures some of the making of the record, “Sara Bareilles: Good Grief,” 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.’s Dolby Theatre. (Scroll down to see a full list of tour dates.)
You’ve gone a pretty long time between solo albums now. Of course you’ve had “Girls5Eva” and composing your next stage musical (“The Interestings”) 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?
It does feel different. It’s been a minute since I’ve done this. … But I feel pretty peaceful with the “it takes the time it takes” 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’s 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’m hoping it lands for the audience in that way as well.
There are “mature themes” 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’re 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’t really lost anybody yet in this life, can they still be impacted by it the same way?
It’s like, yeah, did I make an old person’s 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’ve 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’t know if it’s 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’s happened politically and how divided our world feels. And the way they feel amid the emotionality of the drama of your youth — I do feel like there’s a lot of grief in there. And I don’t think anybody ever called it that for me. But I’m really curious to hear feedback about who relates to this and who doesn’t.
This 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 “Good Grief” as kind of a concept album where even the songs that aren’t so overtly about that are also themed to grief?
There’s a line in the sons called “Ladies in a Line,” and the lyric is “Grief is the blanket, and it covers everything.” I do think that grief is sort of like the mothership of this record. It’s like the home base for all of these experiences… I think that what I’ve learned about grief in my own personal relationship to the experience of it is that it’s 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 “Idiot Heart,” 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’t look at it as a somber experience. I just look at it as a really rich experience.
I 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, “Is this gonna destroy me?” And I answered, “No, I don’t think it is, actually.” It’s like, the song about losing your best friend, “Just a Kid,” is so joyful, in its way. That’s followed by “Still Crying,” which is sort of a happy-sounding song, even though it’s 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’s kind of unflinching at the same time.
I thought so. Well, thanks for sharing that. I’m really sorry for the loss. Talk about a transformative moment to be going through… I don’t know. I think I was always really afraid of the big feelings, especially when I was younger, just afraid that I wouldn’t be able to hold the bigness of feeling. And it’s been interesting — I think a lot of people relate to that. We’re sort of afraid of sadness and afraid of grief, and it’s so understandable, but there’s a lot of wisdom… a lot to get out of it, too.
The 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, “Home,” 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…
Sorry!
Not 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?
That’s exactly right. I listened to their incredible conversation on Anderson’s podcast called “All There Is,” and it’s 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’s Stephen in the conversation — I have to go back and refresh my memory — 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 — that’s what we have to gift each other. It became sort of a thematic cornerstone to the record, and the song “Home” is kind of the invitation. It’s the first song for a reason: it’s the invitation into this exchange of stories.
Have you had a chance to talk to either Cooper or Colbert, to tell them that they’re in this song?
Yeah, I’ve shared it with both of them. I got a chance to go on Anderson’s podcast, actually, and I played it for him live on the podcast. 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 … 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. .
For me, maybe the most powerful number is the second track, “Just a Kid.” It’s 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’t co-sign all of those exact experiences you had of him. Yet it’s 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 “My first best friend / I’ll never see again / You never got to get married/ And I hate where you’re buried.” It’s 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’clock number.
Oh, that’s awesome. It was such a love letter to my friend Chad, and there’s 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’s 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’s a heartbreaking lyric for me to sing, because it was born of loss, but it’s 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
There’s a slightly meta aspect to “Just a Kid” in that you have the chorus, where you’re 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.
Yeah, 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.
It also brings to mind a couple of times I’ve 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’t be able to get there in time, so I was singing “Amazing Grace” into the phone. I just think of all those times, so many people, who we can’t physically be with each other. If you happen to know someone’s 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’re not telephone wires anymore; they’re 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.
Just to take a, a little bit of a thematic turn: “Hands Off My Body” 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, “Heartland,” which seems to be sung from the point of view of the Statue of Liberty.
Yeah. Oh my God, a litany of reasons. “Hands Off My Body,” the seeds of that particular song were actually born after the Iranian women’s movement, after Mahsa Amini’s 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’s 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’s a lot of rage around the oppressive and consistent lack of respect and autonomy for women and their bodies. So I think I’m glad I had a place to put some of that. I still feel rageful about that.
And to speak about “Heartland,” I think as we’ve 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’t more space for that sometimes I believe in the ideals that we’re 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 — it’s complicated. It’s 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.
Try 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.
Yeah. I think it’s 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’m 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’t want to throw it all away. So I grieve the feeling that you have to sometimes.
With “Ladies in a Line,” 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…
Yeah. I didn’t get that far in my mind about it.
But do you think that writing for the theater has changed the way you write for a singer-songwriter record?
Oh, I’m for sure thinking that it has. It has absolutely made a massive impact on my writing. I just am not thinking, “Am I making a musical out of this material or not?” But no, I feel it deeply. Even just from a form perspective, a lot of these songs don’t 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’re telling a story. There’s 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.
But 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’t 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’s a lot of people here, and I just didn’t have a sense of how many, many, many, many people need support. So even though you’re having this really quite typical, un-unique experience, it can feel very lonely. So my hope was just to — I don’t know — name it. Just name it for the sake of naming it.
In another song, “Capsize Me,” you have a line that perhaps describes how you think of yourself in relation to your audience sometimes: “And 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.” 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’re grateful accept that as part of what you do, whether it’s the initial impulse or not.
Hmm. Yeah. I appreciate you saying that. I take a lot of really deep pride in that piece of it. I don’t know if it’s pride; it’s 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’m so happy to have them. Well, “happy to have them” is maybe an overstatement. But I am willing to have them because I think that it’s a real privilege to get to try to translate some of these experiences into something that might bring a little bit of comfort. That’s my great hope for this record, is that it just brings a little bit of comfort.
In the past, occasionally, you’ve been on social media being public about mental health struggles. Fans might think that there’s such wisdom in your songwriting, and you’re 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.
Yeah. I feel like the thing I keep learning over and over again is that there is no “you figured it out” plateau. When I was younger, I really, in all my naiveté, thought there was a kind of happiness plateau, that you figure out how to be happy in this life. And it’s been a really mind-opening experience to understand, and then understand yet again and yet again, that there is no plateau, that we’re just on this very dynamic, often volatile, often uncomfortable roller coaster ride of being alive. And sometimes we’re hanging on for dear life, and sometimes we’re 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’s kinda coming at me, and coming at all of us.
There are so many things that can be a carrot on a stick — finding love, employment, financial security… and fixing yourself can be a carrot on a stick, too.
Yes. Truly, truly. Nothing to fix.
A 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.
Yeah. Even with that idea, though, we’re 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’s like it really is, as you said, just a snapshot. It’s 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’m even noticing that as we prepare to go on tour, where there’s 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.
So, 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’m gonna try to take you somewhere where I want the song to live. And if anyone’s seen me in concert, they know I keep fucking with these songs till the end of time, so they’re very different now on stage than they were when they were recorded. But that’s part of the fun.
Are 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?
I’m loving it. It feels like a giant art project, the whole thing — the album, the tour, the film and this installation we’re doing at Lincoln Center to celebrate the album release. I think we’re 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’s 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.
(To read our previous interview with Bareilles talking about the “Good Grief” documentary, click here. For a review of the “Good Grief” album, click here.)
Sara Bareilles 2026 tour dates:
September 9—Boston, MA—MGM Music Hall at Fenway
September 12-13 —Washington, D.C.—The Anthem
September 15-16 —Toronto, ON—Massey Hall
September 18-19 —New York, NY—Radio City Music Hall
September 21-22 —Philadelphia, PA—The Met Philadelphia presented by Highmark
September 24—Atlanta, GA—Fox Theatre
September 25—Cincinnati, OH—Taft Theatre
September 27-28 —Chicago, IL—Chicago Theatre
September 30—Minneapolis, MN—Orpheum Theatre
October 2—St. Louis, MO—Stifel Theatre
October 4—Denver, CO—Bellco Theatre
October 6—Austin, TX—Bass Concert Hall
October 7-8 —Houston, TX—The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts
October 12- 14 —Los Angeles, CA—Dolby Theatre
October 16-17 —San Francisco, CA—Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
October 19-20 —Seattle, WA—The Paramount Theatre
