Sara Bareilles on Her Biggest Inspiration Right Now—Grief
Sara Bareilles has long been known for her powerful voice. The Grammy Award-winning singer, songwriter, and composer is one of the world’s most popular musicians—she’s sold more than 15 million singles and 3 million albums in the U.S.—and is beloved for her emotional honesty and candor.
Now, she’s at work on a new album and is opening up about a big source of inspiration for it: grief. In a moving interview on The Town Hall Spark Sessions podcast, hosted by Susan Blackwell and Laura Camien, Bareilles reflects on loss and love, how both have shaped her as an artist and a person, and why staying open to pain is essential to growth.
In a culture saturated with anxiety and disconnection, are you looking for a little more tenderness right now? This interview is like a meditation on staying soft and letting it inspire your creativity.
A CONVERSATION WITH SARA BAREILLES
How do you identify, creatively speaking?
I think as I have…blossomed, let’s say, evolved as an artist, my perspective on that has gotten wider and wider and wider, and I identify in a lot of different ways as an artist.
Usually when people ask me what I do, I just say “artist” because it encapsulates so much. But I think when I was starting out, I strictly saw myself as a singer-songwriter. And that has expanded into actor, and I feel like my activism lives in that artistry as well. Producer, author, composer. I wouldn’t say dancer yet. But I can dance.
What is sparking your creativity right now?
Grief.
Oof. Say more.
I’m working on a record right now, and it is almost exclusively about grief. And, yes, it is about losing friends. It’s really the first music I’ve put out since the pandemic, and I think since the pandemic, I really have just been steeping and stewing in grief.
Actually, I think that’s a huge part of what’s going on in our culture, and our politics. There is a lot of repressed and unprocessed grief. And what happens with that is it really poisons the well, and people get very angry and scared, and they do horrible things because they’re so scared of this ultimate unknowable, uncontrollable thing that is this life.
My therapist always reminds me in a beautiful way, even though it sounds tender, that everything we love we lose. And it’s true. That’s life. It’s the lesson we learn over and over again.
And so grief has been like a miracle. Because awe and wonder are braided through there as well. Grief and love are so intertwined. And if you can just stay open to the grief, the love that is woven through that experience is so tenderizing. It’s so soft, it’s so childlike.
Tell us a little more about your creative process.
I, like everyone else, get so bored of my own ideas. I’m like… yup, that’s the same song you’ve written fifty times before. Pick something else, Sara. Do something—do anything—else. And every once in a while if I hit something that feels especially true, I will spontaneously start crying. There’s just a resonance of truth that happens and I start crying and I’m like, “Oh, I’m onto something!”
As we blossom and bloom into these new decades of creativity, I think that idea of freedom— feeling the most uninhibited, the most honest you can be without any attachment to how it shows up or what form it fits in—that’s our job as artists.
As a creative, how are you navigating this particular moment in time?
I am trying to be intentional about how I’m metabolizing this time, which feels so fraught and so inflamed and so angry, anxious, and cruel. There’s just so much to say about what doesn’t feel great about right now, and I’m really trying to be intentional about staying soft and staying open. I’m not allowing what I think is a real cancer of the culture—this hyper individualized, I-gotta-get-what’s-mine, anti-community sentiments. I don’t want to fall victim to those thinking patterns, because I really think those are ultimately not what’s good for the world.
I’m leaning into community, face to face in the same room, breathing the same air, looking into people’s eyes, having conversations. Vulnerability, sharing, naming the pain, allowing people to see what’s painful. That’s a really intentional action right now for me. The groundswell of small coalitions and political activism and artists and just sweet people, moving through the world, doing the best they can to be kind to each other, that that is very much in play. But what is amplified and regurgiated over and over and over again is disaster after disaster after disaster. And so, I’m trying to calibrate a little bit.
Sara, you work so hard. You’re so committed to your creativity. What’s it all for?
Oh, what a beautiful question. I think it’s for love, which I feel is synonymous with God, which is synonymous with people. I really believe love is the answer to everything. I make things I love to give them as an act of love. If anything I offer strengthens the quality of a loving presence, then that’s what I feel like my life’s work is. I feel proud to be in pursuit of that.
This is an excerpt from an interview in The Town Hall Spark Sessions, hosted by Susan Blackwell and Laura Camien. You can listen to the full interview here.
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