In writing an album that is largely about loss and calling it “Good Grief,” singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles is clearly playing with the wording of that common phrase, finding a way to make it feel literal, not like an oxymoron. That carries over to the similarly titled documentary, “Sara Bareilles: Good Grief,” that is having its world premiere at New York’s Beacon Theatre Thursday night as part of the Tribeca Film Festival. This powerful and absorbing film is on the one hand as good a fly-on-the-wall rendering of what it’s like to be in a recording studio as you can get in a documentary, and on another hand, an unflinching look at different forms of grief and how anguish can be transmuted into art. Much tough stuff is dealt with during breaks in the studio, tears are shed, and it’s still a “good” time.
With the Tribeca premiere intending — and the Aug. 28 release date for the “Good Grief” album freshly announced — Bareilles and director Josh Alexander sat down with Variety to discuss their extraordinary cinematic collaboration. No one will be mistaking it for a typical example of the modern, record-label-commissioned “making of” album documentary. That’s due to Bareilles’ fearless dedication to the subject matter but also to the hiring of Alexander, whose previous films as a documentary director, writer and/or producer (the Al Sharpton doc “Loudmouth,” “Prescription Thugs,” the segregation-themed “Southern Rites”) have had nothing to do with chronicling the entertainment world. Fortunately, these Hudson Valley neighbors and their spouses renewed an old friendship just as Bareilles was about to go into Dreamland, a church-turned-studio in the upstate New York area, with an intimate group of musician friends and realized that the week of sessions they’d booked could result in some kind of movie and well as music kismet.
