I have been a fan of Sara Bareilles for many years. I love singing with her and appreciate that her music has grown with me as I get older. Even so, I was honestly skeptical when I heard that her new album would be all about grief.
Of course, I know this is a worthy subject. I also trusted her to treat the emotion with the reverence it deserves. When I heard the album title Good Grief, though, I worried it would be trite and contrived. I feared it might be trying too hard to be wise and deep.
When I played the first track, my fears flew away. This wasn’t some fake hallmark card of an album. Instead, it was the Sara I had come to know and had sung with so many times. She was just sharing a new side of herself as a person and an artist. Not only have I been listening to the album for the last month, I also saw her live last week and watched the movie about the album’s creation.
Here are the insights that I picked up from Sara Bareilles’s new album Good Grief.
Allowing Grief Is Essential
One of the most prominent insights about grief that shines through in the album is the importance of allowing it. As the first song on the album, “Home”, explicitly states, life’s holiest lesson is this:
That what is broken cannot heal
Until it’s known and loved by name.
So, of course, as I have written before this includes naming and feeling emotions. But the album gives voice to another hard truth about grief. Sometimes we have to let it take it’s time. Sometime it shows up without warning and stays longer than we want.
Even if we are “dying to let this go” like Sara sings in “Still Crying”, we can’t force it away. The good news, though, is that sometimes when loss hits us it teaches us too.
Connection Can Help Us Heal
And what is the lesson it teaches? The most prominent one from the album is that we need each other. This comes through clearly in several tracks, including “Home” and “Love Story.” Both of those tracks explicitly discuss the importance of sharing stories of loss with others.
In “Home”, Bareilles explicitly invites the sharing of stories and in “Love Story,” she talks about meeting a man on a hike who recently lost his wife. Her emotion rings through in the song because I can’t listen to it without crying myself.
Having watched the film associated with the album and the concert too, story telling and sharing about grief was part of the project of the album. Sara and her band shared their own stories in the movie. The audience listened to voicemail clips from fans in between songs at the concert and they were encouraged to write and share notes with their own stories as well.
The overarching point of this was clear: grief can help us find connection but we have to find ways to share it.
Grief Can Coexist with Joy
My favorite part of the album is that it’s not depressing. Though it’s clearly about grief, it’s often joyful and even funny. “Nervous Breakdown” is a jazzy tune that sounds like a silly song a lawyer might sing to herself to try to keep her sense of humor on a stressful day.
“Idiot Heart” is an upbeat pop anthem about falling in love in the face of past heartbreak. And “Capsize Me”, a song about resilience, is just fun song to sing.
If you watch the movie or have ever seen Sara Bareilles in concert, you will see very quickly that she’s funny. She talks to the audience in between songs and tells stories like a stand-up comic.
As a Millennial, I also appreciated the skillful use of nostalgia during the concert. Bareilles finished the songs from Good Grief and then transitioned to her hits. Before doing so, she led the audience in singing Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.”
The point, of course, is that sadness and joy can coexist. The secondary point is that good music can help us discover this for ourselves.
The Creative Power of Sadness
Finally, another strong message from the album is that there is huge creative power in sadness. This can, at times, be a double-edged sword. As Sara says in “Ladies in a Line,” the intimate track about her own struggle with infertility, “grief is a blanket. It covers everything.” Loss can rob of us of motivation and energy, at least for a time.
But eventually grief may leave us with an urge to process and understand. It seems to me that Bareilles, like a lot of songwriters, creates as a way to process their emotions. This comes through most clearly in the songs “Forever” and “Wind Is the Weather” where Bareilles seems to finally make peace and accept grief as a part of life.
I loved that Bareilles released the movie about the making of the album because I got to see this process at work. Her sadness was there throughout the process. It was pushing her forward as she tried to capture the perfect sound to fit the emotion of each song.
If you listen to the album or watch the movie, you will see how creativity offers the chance to honor feelings about the past even while moving into the future. And how it can help you restore order after instability and loss.
Whether You Are Sad or Not, Good Grief Is a Great Album
If you are a fan of Sara Bareilles, you will appreciate that her new album stays true to her style. As in her other albums, you will find lovely lyrics, a variety of musical styles, and a timeless voice. On this latest album, though, Bareilles brings maturity and depth to a human emotion that too often is ignored. Whether you are happy, sad, or just want something good to listen to and sing with, Good Grief is a great album to check out.
Want to learn more about mindfulness and compassion? Check out my new book, How to Be a Badass Lawyer, for a simple guide to creating a meditation practice of your own in 30 days. And to share mindfulness with your little one, check out my new children’s book, Mommy Needs a Minute.
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