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t this point in her life and career, Sara Bareilles has no time for anything that’s not real. “The decade of my forties has been all about stripping away artifice,” the singer-songwriter says. “I don’t want distance in my relationships, in my conversations, [with] fans, or the music. I don’t want artifice. I think it’s very easy to hide. And I’m terrified, but I’m not hiding.”
It’s been nearly two decades since Bareilles broke out with “Love Song,” the 2007 piano ballad that was her cheeky response to her label (just think of it as the millennial version of Joni Mitchell’s “You Turn Me On I’m a Radio”). Ironically, “Love Song” became a hit and earned Bareilles two Grammy nominations, but she immediately found the life of a recording artist to be monotonous. Instead, she branched out into Broadway — beginning with 2015’s Waitress, for which she wrote the music and lyrics, and then starred in — and television, notably Girls5eva, where she was a member of a rad fictional pop group. It’s fair to say that across the last 19 years, Bareilles has lived many different lives. “I think of us as Russian nesting dolls,” she says. “We carry those parts of ourselves. We just encase ourselves as we move forward in time.”
