Sara Bareilles Returns With ‘Good Grief,’ an Album Forged in Crisis

The return is not a return to form. It is something rawer. Sara Bareilles will release Good Grief on Aug. 28, her first studio album in seven years, a stretch that effectively knocked the machinery of her career off its axis and left her, by her own account, unable to make anything. The pandemic arrived in 2020 and brought what she calls a “seismic reorientation.” Mental health spiraled. A close friend died. Where other artists found a sudden surplus of output, Bareilles hit silence.

That silence shaped the record. “The decade of my forties has been all about stripping away artifice,” Bareilles said, speaking to Rolling Stone ahead of a June residency at New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre. “I don’t want distance in my relationships, in my conversations, with fans, or the music. I think it’s very easy to hide. And I’m terrified, but I’m not hiding.” The line is not promotional framing. It reads like the thesis of a project that exists because the alternative was creative numbness.

Bareilles has spent the years since her 2007 breakout “Love Song” systematically unbundling the identity of a hit radio pianist. She composed the score for Waitress, acted on Girls5eva, and built a career that looked less like a straight line and more like a series of deliberate pivots. That restlessness now seems prescient. Good Grief lands not as a musician returning to the factory setting, but as someone carrying all the nested versions of herself—what she calls “Russian nesting dolls”—into a body of work that started from a place of real collapse.