Updated September 17, 2026 at 4:45 PM EDT
"Love Song" made Sara Bareilles a star in 2007. Nearly two decades later, she is writing from a more complicated place, where grief does not resolve so easily.
Good Grief, her first studio album in seven years, arrives alongside a documentary of the same name.
"I was managing a lot of loss and ache since 2020, so that's really what this record is," Bareilles told NPR's Leila Fadel. "It's kind of excavating grief in all of its forms."
Bareilles lost two close friends: her former manager Chad Joseph, who passed away in 2020, and her frequent collaborator, Broadway actor Gavin Creel, who died in 2024. She also went through an IVF journey, alongside the upheaval of the pandemic and a political and cultural climate she described as increasingly divisive.
Looking closely at grief changed the way she understood some of the anger around her. Bareilles said it opened up a measure of compassion for people whose political views she does not share.
"I love the world, I love people," she said. "And it has been hard to walk through a time where I feel so much rage."
One of the album's songs, "Ladies in a Line," began in a fertility clinic, where Bareilles sat waiting for a blood draw beside a row of women carrying the same quiet hope.
"There wasn't a lot of conversation from women who had had a hard time getting pregnant until they had a healthy baby," she said. "So people were willing to talk once they had their family success."
Bareilles said she understood why. But while she was still living inside the uncertainty, she found few stories that looked like her own.
"I felt really lonely," she said.
The experience made her think about the shame infertility can carry, especially the feeling that the body has failed at something that is supposed to come naturally.
"I think there's a lot of shame embedded into when you can't get pregnant naturally," she said. "Like your body's supposed to be able to do it. It's as natural as it comes."
When Bareilles wrote "Ladies in a Line,", she imagined that by the time the album came out, she would have a baby and would be telling the story from the other side.
Good Grief does not try to give experiences like that a tidy ending.
Bareilles grew up singing and performing in Eureka, Calif., and taught herself much of what she knows at the piano. On Good Grief, the music often leaves space around her voice, allowing the words to carry much of the weight. But the album does not stay in one register. It circles what won't leave, turns pain into motion, hardens into a demand and, on "Idiot Heart," lets the heart run wild.
"Home" grew out of an episode of Anderson Cooper's podcast "All There Is," in which Stephen Colbert spoke about losing his father and brothers. The song begins with a life measured against a father's, with one lyric noting, "I am one day older than my father was."
The song moves through the silence that can settle over a family after loss before opening into an invitation to tell one another our stories. Near the end, the father returns. "When I speak his name my voice gives out," Bareilles sings.
That movement runs through much of Good Grief. Loss becomes a kind of geography: an ocean floor in "Ladies in a Line," rising water in "Capsize Me," weather in "Wind Is the Weather" and, here, a way of finding home.
Bareilles said Cooper's podcast captures something she values in stories about grief — the willingness to tell them plainly.
"I think it gives a permission structure for other people to acknowledge that, like most of our lives live in the gray matter," she said. "We are in this really complex, non-binary world of what is easy and what is hard to hold."
Bareilles is also writing the score for "The Interestings," a new musical based on Meg Wolitzer's novel, set to premiere at Berkeley Repertory Theatre early next year.
And Good Grief is already finding its way into other people's stories.
"I feel so much comfort when people share," she said. "There is really something that is touching, some kind of truth that I can really feel in the response and the reaction to the music."
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