From Variety · Chris Willman · · 2m
Sara Bareilles made a grief record that isn't sad
Seven years after her last album, Sara Bareilles built a record where loss carries joy, and says the timing was right on time.
In brief
Seven years after her last album, Sara Bareilles built a record where loss carries joy, and says the timing was right on time. Grief isn't only sorrow. It comes bundled with joy, release and connection, and songs can hold all of it at once. Originally reported by Variety.
Seven years, one album
"Good Grief" is Sara Bareilles' first studio album since 2019, and it lands as one of the year's strongest singer-songwriter records.
Not just great, good
The title is a deliberate half-step down from "Great Grief." Calling it great would have been immodest, so good it is.
A whole catalog of loss
The songs move through friends dying young, fertility struggles, eroding women's rights, mental health, and the strain of still believing in America.
It takes the time it takes
Bareilles filled the gap with "Girls5Eva" and her next stage musical, "The Interestings." She needs a long stretch before she has something new to say.
“It takes me a long time to have something else to say.”
Journaling her way through
She writes every morning, and found catharsis in the making of this record after years of losing friends and moving through personal hardship.
“I felt so grateful to get to put some of those experiences somewhere.”
Did she make an old person's record
Asked whether you need life experience to feel it, she laughed at the question, then pushed back on it.
“It's like, yeah, did I make an old person's record?”
Young people already know
Her nieces, her younger sister, her younger friends all have an antenna up for bigger-picture things she missed at that age: climate crisis, political division.
Nobody called it grief
The drama of being young carries real grief inside it, she says. She just never had a word for it back then.
“I do feel like there's a lot of grief in there. And I don't think anybody ever called it that for me.”
Grief is the mothership
A line in "Ladies in a Line" gives the album its thesis. Every song sits under it, even the ones not obviously about loss.
“Grief is the blanket, and it covers everything.”
Love means losing
"Idiot Heart" is about an urgent rush toward love, and she counts it as grief too, because what we love we lose.
“I don't look at it as a somber experience. I just look at it as a really rich experience.”
Joyful songs about weeping
"Just a Kid" mourns a best friend and sounds joyful. "Still Crying" is upbeat about not being able to stop. The record is unflinching without sinking.
Afraid of the big feelings
She used to fear she couldn't hold feeling that large. Most people share that fear of sadness, and she thinks there's wisdom waiting on the other side of it.
“We're sort of afraid of sadness and afraid of grief, and it's so understandable, but there's a lot of wisdom.”
The big picture
Grief isn't only sorrow. It comes bundled with joy, release and connection, and songs can hold all of it at once.
