Ahead of the Aug. 28 release of her new album, Good Grief, Sara Bareilles has only publicly performed the songs a couple of times. And when it came to her second performance, Bareilles found that she could not make it through one of the numbers, “Forever,” without crying, which then brought up a wave of other emotions.
“I was like, ‘Oh God, what am I doing? Like should I hide under a rock for a little while longer and then figure it out?” Bareilles says. “But I’m making this conscious choice to try to share from a place that is messy, and it’s really uncomfortable sometimes. But that’s what I’m doing.”
In her seventh album, Bareilles moves through the grief that she’s been processing the past several years, after the death of her close friend and former manager Chad Joseph in 2020, the passing of another dear friend, Broadway actor Gavin Creel in 2024 (the subject of “Forever”) and her difficult journey through IVF treatments, all set against current political climate and backdrop of the pandemic.
It’s not all directly related to her own grief – the first song, “Home,” was inspired by a podcast conversation between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert about their own losses – and as always, Bareilles injects some dark humor into the songs and the process. But in total, it’s an intimate, revealing portrait of where Bareilles is at.
