Sara Bareilles performs "Home" on stage during "Sara Bareilles: Good Grief" Premiere - 2026 Tribeca Festival at Beacon Theatre on June 04, 2026 in New York City. (Photo by Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tribeca Festival) Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tribeca Festiva Ahead of the Aug. 28 release of her new album, Good Grief, Sara Bareilles has only publicly performed the songs a couple of times. And when it came to her second performance, Bareilles found that she could not make it through one of the numbers, “Forever,” without crying, which then brought up a wave of other emotions.
“I was like, ‘Oh God, what am I doing? Like should I hide under a rock for a little while longer and then figure it out?” Bareilles says. “But I’m making this conscious choice to try to share from a place that is messy, and it’s really uncomfortable sometimes. But that’s what I’m doing.”
Related Stories
Movies Tribeca Festival 2026 Lineup: Katie Holmes-Joshua Jackson Reunion Movie 'Happy Hours,' Films With Susan Sarandon, Dustin Hoffman, Quentin Tarantino
Movies Tribeca Festival Adds Slick Rick Visual Album, 'Twinless' New York Premiere
In her seventh album, Bareilles moves through the grief that she’s been processing the past several years, after the death of her close friend and former manager Chad Joseph in 2020, the passing of another dear friend, Broadway actor Gavin Creel in 2024 (the subject of “Forever”) and her difficult journey through IVF treatments, all set against current political climate and backdrop of the pandemic.
It’s not all directly related to her own grief – the first song, “Home,” was inspired by a podcast conversation between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert about their own losses – and as always, Bareilles injects some dark humor into the songs and the process. But in total, it’s an intimate, revealing portrait of where Bareilles is at.
While recording the album, Bareilles allowed a crew to film at Dreamland Recording Studios in upstate New York. The documentary, which premiered at Tribeca and is now set for more theaters, offers a raw look at the process of putting together the album in the retrofitted church, including deep, tear-filled conversations with her band members and friends about having to move on from IVF to possible egg donation (before recording “Ladies in a Line” and joking that “oddly” there are not many songs about IVF clinics) and the toll grief has had on her mental health.
As for what’s motivating Bareilles to be so open about her personal life and journey with grief — a topic she notes is typically met with discomfort — the singer behind “Brave” and “Love Song” said she’s emboldened by a desire to tell the truth.
“I’m 46 now, and really feel this in my 40s that I’m just not interested in a dog-and-pony show about trying to project something that doesn’t feel authentic,” she says. “I’m so comforted by people being courageous enough to show me who they really are that I’d like to put my money where my mouth is.
“I must, on some level, feel that there is healing for me in the sharing of this too,” she adds. “Because the alternative would be to go hide away for a long time and try to figure it out on my own. But I just don’t think there’s any answers for me there. I think the answers are all in this kind of excavation of the dark matter and trying to share it.”
There has been catharsis in writing the songs, Bareilles says. Some early ideas began in 2020 and were finished in recent years, as was the case with “Still Crying,” a country-inspired ballad, and “Nervous Breakdown,” a humorous, jazzy tune which Ingrid Michaelson helped her complete. Meanwhile, “Just a Kid,” a pop-influenced number reflecting on her long friendship with Joseph, sprang out of her as she was returning from the grocery store, leading Bareilles to start singing into her phone in transit and then finish writing at home.
For Good Grief, Bareilles also wanted to experiment with a new format, and instead of hiring an album producer, she acted as lead and asked her fellow musicians and bandmates to weigh in on songs and make suggestions. This came, in part, because Bareilles said she had always felt deferential to producers she hired in the past. With this experience she was more in the driver’s seat, while also asking for input from collaborators across the country.
And it meshed with her overall philosophy for the current political climate.
“This was my little political statement. I was trying to divest from sort of the corporate greed structure. I was trying to do something that was antithetical to so much of what I see in our culture, which is that we gather the power into a few people, or one person has all the power and the money,” Bareilles says. “And so I was interested to see what it would feel like to make music in a different way.”
With this many collaborators, Bareilles said the process could sometimes be circuitous, as she weighed their ideas and feedback, but was ultimately rewarding. The majority of recording was conducted at Dreamland, as well as at Long Pond with Aaron Dessner, with a few songs recorded at a studio in Brooklyn.
This is Bareilles’ first album since 2019, when she released her politically-inspired album Amidst the Chaos. She notes she typically goes several years between albums, and happily, Epic Records, which Bareilles has been with since the beginning of her career, has not pressured her to release more. “Nobody’s banging down my door saying like, “You ready to make a record?” Bareilles says.
But she’s also had a busy past several years, after writing the score and starring in the Tony-nominated Waitress on Broadway for stints from 2017 to 2021, appearing on Broadway in Into the Woods and starring in Meredith Scardino and Tina Fey’s streaming series Girls 5 Eva. Even while working on this album, she’s been writing her next musical, an adaptation of Meg Wolitizer’s novel The Interestings, which is slated for its world premiere at Berkeley Rep. this winter.
“It’s a 500-page novel that follows this group of kids over 45 years of their life, so to do that in a musical is a tall order,” she says. “So we’ve just really had our work cut out for us. But it’s been a joyful pursuit.”
When it comes to balancing acting, writing for musical theater and creating her own music, Bareilles said there’s no formula, or prioritization of one over the other.
“For better or for worse, I don’t really have a long view. It’s like things come, and then it’s all I’m thinking about,” Bareilles says. “But I was never angling. I haven’t been angling to get, you know, into any of these positions. But I’m so glad each thing presented itself.”
For now, Bareilles is gearing up for her fall tour, which begins Sept. 9 in Boston. She isn’t sure yet what it will feel like to perform these songs in front of big crowds, and says she wonders how it will feel professionally, if she isn’t able to get through certain numbers. “Forever” continues to be tough, as the song ruminates on losing Creel, a vital stage performer and close friend of Bareilles who died months after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and speaks to his continued presence in her life and music.
“It feels like a dream that he was ever here, and a dream that he’s gone,” she says. “It’s just so surreal.”
Overall, Bareilles is envisioning the concerts as a “joyful grief ritual,” that includes songs from the new album and old favorites, and a collective catharsis for the crowd.
A few weeks ago, Bareilles also set up a grief hotline, inviting fans to share their stories with her. So far she’s received thousands of voicemails, ranging from grief over the loss of a parent to bemoaning a loss of a sense of self. Bareilles isn’t exactly sure what she’ll do with these stories yet, but knows she wants to find a way to share them.
“It’s really comforting if you’re someone who’s grieving, even if it’s not the exact same kind of grief,” Bareilles says. “It’s really comforting to hear what other people are holding, just to know that we’re all holding something.”
THR Newsletters
Sign up for THR news straight to your inbox every day
Subscribe Sign Up
