Sara Bareilles almost got through this interview without crying. Almost. Her eyes started brimming with tears during the final question, revealing that her last sob session occurred just that morning.
“I’m having a little bit of a grief spike,” she said over a video chat from Chicago while on tour. “The end of September is rough.”
Sitting on a cream-colored couch with her ever-present dog Louie snuggled beside her lap, Bareilles explained the pummeling anniversaries approaching: the birthday of Chad Joseph, her best friend from college and former manager who died in 2020 after a Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis, and the 2024 death of Gavin Creel, another dear friend and her co-star on Broadway in “Into the Woods.”
The pain of losing both men in quick succession, along with the uncertainty of the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cancellation of her Tina Fey-produced comedy series “Girls5Eva” and years of disappointing fertility treatments (“I fully thought I would have a baby by now,” the 46-year-old said.) bubble over in “Good Grief,” the singer-songwriter’s first solo album in seven years.
In the parlance of “She Used to Be Mine,” from Bareilles’ Tony Award-nominated “Waitress” score, the new album’s excavation of anguish, rage, joy and everything in between is “mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie.”
So it’s understandable that Bareilles felt “wobbly” even trying to say her friends’ names while making the rounds (with plenty of tissues on hand) to promote the album and its accompanying making-of documentary, now in theaters. “There’s just something that starts to crumble,” she said of consistently revisiting this emotional state. “I was making jokes about there will be a compilation at some point of ‘This b— can’t stop crying.’”
Because grief “feels like the blanket that everyone is tethered to in some way,” Bareilles doesn’t hold anything back in these lyrics or performances.
She broke down at the piano during a recent taping for SiriusXM, singing “Forever,” an aching, imagined promise from beyond, allowing the wave of paralyzing sadness to pass before continuing the song’s repeated mantra (“I’ll be here forever”) and commanding the stoppage be kept in. On “Just a Kid,” which sounds as jubilant as her breakthrough 2007 hit “Love Song,” she risks strangers’ stares to dictate a voice note in a fit of inspiration about Joseph’s footprint in the world.
“I am so interested in truth telling. I’m so desperate for it in the world. I’m so grateful when I find it in other people,” she affirmed. “I felt for my own healing there wasn’t anything to get from not telling the truth.”
Rejecting the idea that she’s now some kind of grief guru who’s been through the fire and come out on the other side, she sees herself and her band more as “grief sherpas” — there to uphold listeners.
“I’m just a student of grief,” she offered. “I would be lying if I felt like I had any kind of expertise to offer. I just am very willing to share my very honest experience.”
And Bareilles extends the same invitation to everyone. “Tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine,” she sings against a languid dulcimer on “Home,” the opening track spelling out the thesis of the album and this “art project” of a tour, which begins a three-night stand at the Dolby Theatre on Monday.
Her team set up a hotline (888-282-4062) for people to leave voicemails and fans can write — anonymously or not — to prompts like “What do you carry with you always?” and “What keeps you from feeling totally free?” on gift tags that hang on an installation erected in the lobby of each tour stop.
Some of the voicemails, excruciating in their honesty, air during the show as transitions between songs while Bareilles and her band (keyboardist Misty Boyce, guitarist Butterfly Boucher, multi-instrumentalist Rich Hinman, bassist Joe Ayoub, percussionist Mona Tavakoli and drummer Derrek Phillips) play within a set structured to look like the bones of a house while sheer draperies above undulate like a jellyfish, sometimes taking the shape of meringue peaks.
“We’re learning as we go,” she said about the responsibility of shouldering these physical manifestations of people’s hearts. “They’re all safe and sound. We keep them all.” She’s noticed how often the messages seem to repeat one another. “We feel so singular in our pain, lonely in our pain in a way and then you realize it’s very much a shared experience,” she said.
She senses it when approached in public now. It’s almost like there’s an unlimited thirst from anyone in her proximity to lay down their own brush with the incomprehensible at her feet. “It does not feel burdensome at all,” Bareilles said. The diverted focus from autograph and picture requests is a “gift.”
“Not that you shouldn’t get a picture, but when I’m reduced to just the transactional, I find that much harder to bear,” she confessed. “It’s a very dissociative experience for me, so the people coming to share their tenderness is like, bring it on!”
That attraction to compassion tracks with poet Megan Falley’s description of Bareilles as “unabashedly heartfelt.” The two met when the singer collaborated with Brandi Carlile on “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet” for the Oscar-nominated documentary “Come See Me in the Good Light,” which centers around the life and career of Falley’s partner, the late poet laureate of Colorado Andrea Gibson in the face of a terminal ovarian cancer diagnosis.
“Both of us have been resisting the idea that ‘grief is love with nowhere to go’ and instead, actively putting our grief, our love, into our art,” Falley said in an email exchange. “We’re challenging the buttoned-up paradigm of burying the dead. We’re keeping our dead alive through art, through talking about them always.”
Bareilles gave Falley a songwriting credit on “Idiot Heart” for a snippet about Gibson “becoming the moonlight.” Falley said only a faint trace of her original line — “Dancing in the moonlight is wild now that you are the moon” — made it into the song but speaks to the singer’s “wildly generous” nature that her name is included at all. Also listed on the credits? Bareilles’ husband, “Mare of Easttown” actor and songwriter in his own right, Joe Tippett.
“Idiot Heart” gives the album a luminous (and much needed) dance break, but that wasn’t what Tippett had in mind when he first sent the lyrics to Bareilles. “We had to really negotiate it,” she said.
“He was like, ‘I wrote it and I also wrote music to it and I think I like mine better,’” she related with uproarious laughter. “And I was like, ‘No, we’re putting this on my record.’”
She faced another personal negotiation on how forthcoming to be about undergoing IVF treatments. Ultimately, she decided speaking from the “messy middle” made the most sense, even disclosing to the New York Times that she experienced her first miscarriage earlier this year and revealing in the “Good Grief” documentary she’s considering egg donation.
“I don’t have shame about the fact that it’s been hard. I have never met a more humbling experience,” she said with an outsize emphasis on “never.”
The stark “Ladies in a Line,” with harmonies that verge on a holy meditation, carries the women with “empty arms with lists of names” who wait, hushed and nervous, for seemingly endless appointments with “fine-tipped needles.” Reddit threads abound with fertility playlist suggestions and Bareilles’ addition to the canon doesn’t go unnoticed. She singles out Martika’s 1991 collaboration with Prince, “Love … They Will be Done” as her own anthem. “It’s just about surrender.”
The Eureka, Calif., native, who now resides in Brooklyn, embarks on her second go as a musical theater composer with “The Interestings,” an adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s 2013 novel about six teens who form a bond at an arts camp in the ‘70s they carry into complicated adult lives.
“I am ravenous about this show. I love it so much. The world that Meg created, I find to be so vibrant and intoxicating and delicious,” Bareilles gushed.
With a world premiere scheduled at Berkeley Repertory Theatre with performances beginning on Jan. 31 and opening night on Feb. 17, the show is reflective of her deeper relationship with Broadway than a decade ago when she worked on “Waitress.” She’s proud of the score’s “stretchiness” and the evolution of her craft. Mostly, she’s taken by the material’s timeless theme, which dovetails with all she’s tried to convey on “Good Grief.”
“It’s about the ache of growing up … and that we get to grow up at all,” Bareilles said. “It’s the gift.”
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