Sara Bareilles has returned with her first studio album since 2019, an emotional exploration of grief and healing titled, Good Grief. Co-produced by Bareilles and Aaron Dessner, the collection traces a line through loss to hope, with a sharp focus on mental health both inside the songs, and surrounding the project.
LISTEN NOW: Audacy Check In with Sara Bareilles
Sara recently stopped by the Hard Rock Hotel New York for an Audacy Check In with host, Mike Adam, to talk about the making of the album, her upcoming tour, and her connection to organizations furthering the mission of helping those struggling with their own mental health.
First recommended to Bareilles by Brandi Carlile, Sara shared her “gentle” experience working with the highly intuitive producer, Aaron Dessner. “There's just something incredibly facile and easy and flexible about working with him,” shares Sara. “He's not imposing at all. It just feels very easy. It's really easy to work with him.”
With so much of Good Grief centered on Sara’s journey through healing, it was important for Bareilles to team with organizations, NAMI and The Jed Foundation, in an effort to pay it forward and support the work they are both doing in the mental health space for this album and upcoming tour.
“My goal for this tour is to donate a million bucks to charity,” Sara reveals. “I'm someone who has really struggled with my mental health over the years. I require a lot of support. I require medication, meditation, therapy, you name it, good friends, all of it, so I'm just trying to sort of pay it forward as best I can, and I think it's a really important time, you know, the world feels crazy, people are struggling, we're carrying a lot, and I think that helping ourselves get help is what I want.”
When asked by Adam about finding the line of using pain and struggle to create, versus it being too unhealthy, Sara admits that she found herself on the latter side in 2020. “When I knew it was too unhealthy was in 2020,” she says. “I have my now husband but then partner, Joe Tippett, to sort of thank for this, that he was like, ‘we gotta figure something out.’ I was just beside myself with anxiety all the time, ruminating thoughts, fixation, bad sleep, a kind of paranoia.”
“There's one song that actually is on the record that I wrote on my birthday of that year,” Sara adds. “This is like as bad as I've ever been. And it's the only experience I've had of feeling like I channeled something. I was sort of desperate and saying a prayer of just like, ‘I'm not OK,’ and I put my voice memo on record and I sat at the piano and the song, ‘Wind Is The Weather,’ sort of arrived and it arrived in completion.”
“It was all about that idea of writing a letter to your wiser self, or writing a letter to God, or the universe, or whatever your belief is, and the wisdom that comes back is, ‘whatever it is you can handle this, you're not broken, there's nothing to fix, you are OK you can hold this too.’ So I guess, yeah, something good comes out of it sometimes, but it's not comfortable. It's painful, it's scary.”
Bareilles will headline the Good Grief Tour across North America this fall, kicking off September 9. For more on Good Grief, check out the full Audacy Check In above.
The singer’s seventh studio album is now available everywhere
The singer’s seventh studio album is now available everywhere
