Sara Bareilles “found catharsis and healing” by writing about the “hardships” she’s suffered for new album Good Grief.
The 46-year-old singer is returning to the charts with her first new record in seven years following the release of Amidst the Chaos in 2019 and her new songs explore themes of grief after the death of two close friends and Sara admits she feels “grateful” to have been able to pour her emotions into her work.
She told Variety: “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.”
She added of Good Grief: “It’s like, yeah, did I make an old person’s record? 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 … “
One of the songs on the album, Ladies in a Line, is about her experiences struggling with fertility issues as she attempted to start a family with her husband Joe Tippett and she hopes others in similar situations will be able to relate to it.
She told the publication: “With that song, I really wanted to name the experience of fertility and what is hard about it and what is universal about it.
“Well, I don’t know about entirely universal, but it is certainly a very deeply shared experience with millions and millions and millions of women and families trying to conceive all over the world.
“It just struck me during my own continued journey with fertility that there’s a lot of people here, and I just didn’t have a sense of how many, many, many, many people need support.
” So even though you’re having this really quite typical, un-unique experience, it can feel very lonely. So my hope was just to – I don’t know – name it. Just name it for the sake of naming it.”