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Chris Willman
Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
ChrisWillman See All
Getty Images for IMDb 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.
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