When they sat down to write a song for the documentary “Come See Me in the Good Light,” Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile had a co-writer who could not be denied. Ryan White’s film follows the last year in the life of poet Andrea Gibson, who died of cancer a few months after the movie’s Sundance premiere in January – and the starting point for the song’s lyrics was a Word document of lines from unfinished poems that Gibson had been working on in the last months of their life.
“It was a document of the bones of two unfinished poems,” Bareilles said. “Lines like, ‘Keep the Novocain out of my wisdom teeth/Wanna feel it all’ – that’s directly Andrea. It was kind of stewing and brewing, and we just moved things around like puzzle pieces on a board.”
The result is “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” an Oscar-shortlisted collaboration between the two award-winning singer-songwriters and the poet who had left the building blocks for what would become a love song to their longtime partner, Megan Falley. “We’re confronting this truth that we all deny all our lives – that everything we love, we lose,” Bareilles said. “Everything. And so we live in this denial that we’re all going to the same place.
She continued: “I’ve had a lot of loss these last five years. I lost two best friends to cancer about four years apart, and I’ve thinking a lot about what we do with the time we have. If you lose a grandparent, you are expecting that on some level. But I’m 46, and to lose my 40-year-old best friend is a different kind of grief and loss.”
For Bareilles, a multiple Grammy, Emmy and Tony nominee, the journey to “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet” began with Instagram videos of Gibson’s poetry readings. “I have a very love-hate relationship with Instagram, but one good thing it did for me was introduce me to Andrea’s work,” she said. “I started following them, and they were so frank and direct about their experience, their sickness, their illness, the good days and the bad days. There was so much love infused in everything. I think of them as a kind of prophet that came to say, ‘I want to teach you how to love the world, even when it’s going to fade away.’ It really feels like a good medicine for these days.”
While the film was in production, Bareilles attended a Gibson concert in Denver, which turned out to be one of the “comeback” shows filmed for the movie. There, she ran into executive producers Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach. “I was going through some pretty grief-stricken personal moments at that time, and we bonded over the healing power of Andrea’s work. I got an email from them a couple of weeks later that said, ‘We’re trying to curate this small group of people who love and understand Andrea. Do you want to join this team?’”
She laughed. “I was like, ‘The Lesbian Avengers? I’m in! Where do I sign?’”
She joined the film as an executive producer – and when Gibson’s cancer treatment prevented them from writing a new poem for the film, she and fellow exec producer Carlile worked on the song instead. The collaboration, she said, was surprisingly easy.
“We both had been given this document of Andrea’s work, and then I watched the first complete screening and was just leveled,” she said. “And pretty quickly I started pulling the scaffolding together to make the first draft. I sent it to Brandi, she gave some feedback, we made some adjustments. A couple of days and the whole thing was done. I think it speaks to sometimes the alchemy is good and you have the right people.”
It helped, she added, that Gibson’s poetry felt inherently musical, and that their personality inspired the musical approach. “There’s something about Andrea’s essence that feels sort of gritty and earthbound,” she said. “So melodically I was trying to think of what sounds beautiful, what’s fun to sing and what feels good coming out. But I wanted it to have a little bit of grit, too, because I think of that as very much embedded in who Andrea is.”
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