Singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles, 46, has released a new album, "Good Grief," built entirely around loss after losing two close friends to cancer within a few years, facing what she described as a new depth of low in her mental health, and entering the third year of a fertility struggle.
Bareilles told CNN's Lauren DePino that she had felt she would dissolve, as though she were carrying too much feeling, describing the wave of grief she had been enduring.
Bareilles, who also works as an actress and producer, said it was only near the end of recording that she realized the entire album was about grief. She debuted the first track, "Home," in March on CNN anchor Anderson Cooper's podcast "All There Is," which explores grief and loss.
She said the song was inspired by an earlier episode in which Cooper spoke with comedian Stephen Colbert. Their openness about their own grief, and their shared commitment to not hiding sadness from their children, had moved her to tears.
Bareilles said songwriting had always felt like a truly sacred ritual to her, a kind of faith in the unknown and in the mystery of how music moves people, as well as faith in God and the universe. She said the new songs differ from her past work because she is not ahead of her own grief. She is still mourning her friends and still grieving her fertility journey, and said she is trying to share from a place where she genuinely does not have answers.
Songs That Speak to Our Sadness
DePino, reflecting on Bareilles's grief-centered songs in her CNN piece, wrote that they help listeners reconcile in their hearts what exhausted souls cannot resolve through reason alone, describing the music as spiritual and timely while also evoking older songs of praise and mourning.
Writing Letters to God
Bareilles said that during a severe period of overwhelming anxiety, she wrote letters to God, whom she described with what she called a very broad interpretation, as a life force, an animating force, like the soul that leaves the body. She said she told that benevolent presence that she did not know how to find her way back to herself.
She said her growing trust in something invisible, unknowable and immeasurable inspired the track "Capsize Me." She explained that the song reassures listeners that there is no version of this life in which they truly capsize, that people are not fragile, and that grief does not kill and never will.
Once people come to terms with that, Bareilles said, they can open the door to grief a little at a time. She said it does not require diving into the deep end every time, but rather a kind of devotion to the practice of opening up to it gradually.
She said it takes only a pinch of trust to welcome the surprising forms grief can take, which are very different from the usual despair. Bareilles said her own experience of grief had been many things, not just crying in the fetal position in a corner, but also mystery, awe, joy and jubilation.
A Glimpse of What Lies Beyond
Bareilles said her penultimate track, "Forever," was written from the perspective of the person who is departing, imagining what they might want to say if they had the words. In the ethereal ballad, she said she revives the sacred role of ancient Greek lead mourners, who saw their songs as spells capable of calling the dead back.
She said there is a lot of talk about the veil being thin at the moment of loss, but that the longer she spends examining grief in all its forms, the more she feels the veil is always thin. She said she has found a great deal of comfort in that idea.
Bareilles wrote the song "Salt Then Sour Then Sweet" with singer Brandi Carlile and the late poet Andrea Gibson, whom she grew close to while Gibson was facing terminal cancer. Gibson's story was told in the 2025 documentary "Come See Me in the Good Light."
Bareilles said one of the things Gibson used to say was that dying is reincarnating into the people you love while they are still alive. She said she thinks often about that idea of changing planes of existence, in which someone leaves one form for another but goes on living in the people they loved and the people who loved them.
An Open Space for Grief
Bareilles began her tour on September 9, after releasing the documentary "Sara Bareilles: Good Grief" the week before. She said she hopes the tour becomes a place to create space where the veil feels exceptionally thin, saying that is the world she believes people live in.
She also told DePino that she believed her connection with audiences on tour would enrich her own healing.
Bareilles said people often describe grief as love with nowhere to go, and that she believes that is true, but she also believes love has somewhere to go everywhere. She said she keeps thinking about projecting what she called the bright absence of love onto other people and seeing what that does for their grief.
For Bareilles, the word absence carries more nuance than simply someone no longer being there. After witnessing the final days of her close friend Gavin Creel, and washing and dressing his body, she said she realized that they are simply no longer there.
She called that the craziest thing to her, explaining that there is a soul that animates a person's physical form but does not exist within it. She said it exists outside the body, which is why she believes the concept of a thin veil simply means that people are no longer in their bodies. They are, she said, everywhere.
