Sara Bareilles: Good Grief is a Beautiful Musical Therapy Session

Grief is a very complicated and confusing emotion and everyone handles if differently as an emotion that is never really resolved. Losing my father was one of the most devastatingly horrific moments of my life. Yet, my coping mechanism was to throw myself full throttle into work.  But, what happens when the outlets don’t seem to work anymore and you have to face the love and pain associated with such an insurmountable loss.

Grammy winning singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles returns to the studio with dear friends to begin recording her most intimate album yet, born of profound personal loss and grief in a cinematic portrait revealing the most private corners of Sara’s creative process as well as her personal life. What unfolds in front of the camera is the incredibly raw experience of mining one’s own pain to create art, and the hope that carries an artist forward.  Sometimes in sharing what is broken in oneself, we are ultimately bring us closer to healing and repair.

“This whole collection of songs felt like transmissions rather than a deliberate attempt to make sense of the world. My deepest hope is that Good Grief provides some kind of comfort or catharsis,” Bareilles shared.

The first single, “Home” was inspired by a conversation between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper on Cooper’s podcast. Hearing their stories of loss, I started feeling more courageous to tell mine…for me, this encapsulates the message of this record – sharing the thing that’s the most true, and through that building threads of connection between you and the people around you. It’s why we’re all here,” Bareilles continued.

Director Josh Alexander allows Sara and every member of her band to celebrate a life well lived while honoring what has been loss and plays very similar to Road Diary: Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Witnessing this journey allowed me to process my grief for the first time with rain falling down my tear stained face like a thunderstorm of emotions I had suppressed for over a year.

For the first time in seven years, Bareilles hits the road this fall with her Good Grief tour Sept. 9th in Boston and scheduled through Oct. 19 in Seattle. Pre-sale tickets start at 10 a.m. local time on June 10 with one dollar of every ticket purchased going to the The Jed Foundation, which works to prevent suicide among teens and young adults.

As crazy as this sounds, grief can be good allowing us to grow and evolve into a version of ourselves as better humans from just being in the orbit of someone who we loved and who loved us. Good Grief illuminates the way like that brightest star in the orbit just waiting for the chance to shine.