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How Sara Bareilles’ “Good Grief” Turns Loss into Connection

Picture of music and guitar with title of blog post "How Sara Bareilles’ 'Good Grief' Turns Loss into Connection"

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.

Quote that says "Grief can coexist with joy."

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.

Quote from song "Capsize Me" on the album Good Grief by Sara Bareilles that says “I carry so much but my back don’t break. It never lets me down. I worry so much, but the worry don’t change what I worry about.”

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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Kesha Became Nobody on Gag Order but Found Her Voice

A few weeks ago, I saw that Kesha had a new album out, so I listened immediately. What I heard didn’t sound anything like the Kesha I knew, even though I hadn’t become a fan until her most recent albums. I was certainly familiar with her party girl anthems from a decade ago; honestly, how could you miss them? But it was the songs written after Kesha went public with her allegations against Dr. Luke that got my attention. Sure, they were fun and brash, but there was also hard-earned wisdom too and a stubborn refusal to look on the bright side even amidst so many shadows.

Perhaps I implicitly expected Kesha’s next album following Rainbow and High Road to get closer to her music from the past. I thought she’d follow the trend of so many other pop artists post-pandemic to offer something that sounded celebratory. The album title – Gag Order – and cover, which appeared to show Kesha’s face stuffed into a plastic bag, disabused me of that notion right away.

Even so, I still expected to at least hear Kesha singing in the opening lines. I didn’t. Instead, the first track “Something to Believe In” had the ironic mantra-like quality of Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place” from their genre-busting album Kid A.

Intrigued, listened on still expecting the Kesha I knew to reveal herself. I soon realized that she was revealing herself but in an entirely new way. The tracks never veered into her old party mode and they seemed directed away from typical pop beats featured prominently in her prior albums. Instead, on Gag Order, Kesha danced through genres, mixing and matching electronica, pop, country, and even hip hop as she pleased. Though the musical combinations may have seemed playful, the lyrics were dead serious.

The second track aptly likened her experience with Dr. Luke to a bad acid trip, another perfectly conveyed the sound of rumination and depression, and the tracks that followed expressed the difficulties of living in the public eye. The most upbeat songs on the album are “Only Love Can Save Us Now”, which sounds like a dire version of “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” and “Peace and Quiet”, that sounds airy and fun until the lyrics hit you with the truth that love can be damn hard for women with histories.

Here’s the kicker: buried in the last half of the album is a clip from Ram Dass’s Becoming Nobody. As I wrote last year, Kesha isn’t the first popular musician as of late to sample a famous spiritual teacher. Kendrick Lamar extensively sampled Eckhart Tolle on last year’s release, Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers. Unlike Lamar, though, Kesha used only one clip from Ram Dass and slowed and distorted it to emphasize a single idea that is at the very essence of human life: that love and pain are intertwined so living a full life calls us to open to both.

This clip perfectly prepares the listener’s attention for my favorite track on the album, “Too Far Gone”. A simple reading would call it a song about lost love, but I call it the sound of the Buddha’s Second Noble Truth (humans suffer because of constant craving that arises from constant change). It’s a song about searching for safety and stability in life but not finding it because the nature of life is to be unstable.

Some may think this sounds depressing. Some critics have simply called it “angry.” I think both of those views miss a whole lot because I found it inspiring and uplifting. Sure, there are angry lyrics, there is a ton of sadness, and there are direct references to mental health struggles, the fact that the world is so messed up, and ended relationships. But sadness, anger, and pain aren’t the only themes running through Gag Order. The other themes are not giving up on life, the relentless search for peace, and the lesson that loving yourself is essential precisely because you can’t count on much in life lasting.

I also loved the album because it showed Kesha’s willingness to go beyond merely taking control of the narrative with her history with Dr. Luke. The variety of genres on Gag Order suggest that she’s willing to explore the limits of identity and isn’t beholden to anyone’s idea of who she should be or how her music should sound. In this respect, Ram Dass may have been selected to make this point. His sampled clip was taken from a lecture series where he specifically and (hilariously) lambasts how we humans cling to our identities.

Ram Dass’s history gave him the street cred to do this so well, since like Kesha, life pushed him to radically shift his identity. What better teacher could help Kesha cope with the unfairness and unexpected twists and turns of life than a man who went from Harvard researcher (named Richard Alpert) to counterculture leader (with Timothy Leary) to spiritual guru in less than a decade?

If Ram Dass can make the lemons of life into this unbelievable lemonade, why can’t Kesha too? And, hell, why can’t the rest of us? I listened to Kesha’s new album hoping to find more of what I liked about her other works, and I am thrilled to say I didn’t. While I’d love it for her if she at some point can write music again that is just fun and celebration, we also need music to help us get through life after the party ends. Kesha’s latest album doesn’t sound like the old Kesha at all, but it made me a huge fan of the new one.

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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