Well, just how good can grief be? That’s a question raised by Sara Bareilles‘ “Good Grief,” which, true to its promissory title, deals primarily with loss and death and the kind of tough stuff that folks in a marketing meeting might suggest slightly downplaying when one is releasing one’s first studio album in seven years. If that focus sounds like it could make for a slog, Bareilles — who was prompted to go down this path by the death of her decades-long best friend — is very much into finding ways to celebrate as well as mourn, or at least actively explore how those two polarizing impulses might intersect. But apart from that, there’s the matter of just how awfully spirit-lifting her earth-angel mezzo-soprano tends to be, even when backing herself into dark corners before backing her way back out again. All of which is to say: Music lovers could not ask for a better bereavement counselor.
Not one to put off dealing with the elephant in the room, she concentrates several of the songs most overtly tied to her friend’s death from cancer in the first third of the album. Counterintuitively, perhaps, this is where some of the most joyful-sounding material is found too. Bareilles starts off with “Home,” which approaches the subject matter from a different angle, paraphrasing bits of a conversation she saw Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper share on television about their own experiences with grief, and how for many of us it gets emotionally brushed under the family dinner table: “I was taught to bury with the dead / The presence of my grief / I see it now, but didn’t then / That silence is a thief / It made strangers out of friends / Robbed me of saving graces offered in unlikely places.”
