Sara Bareilles – Home
Last week GRAMMY-winning, Tony and Emmy-nominated singer-songwriter and Epic Records recording artist Sara Bareilles sets her new album, Good Grief, for August 28 and released the new single “Home.” Today she releases the video for “Home.”
Good Grief marks Bareilles’ seventh studio album and her first since 2019’s Grammy-winning Amidst the Chaos, opening a new chapter to her 20-year career. True to its title, the 14-track collection is a reckoning with loss, yet even its darkest moments are threaded with an insistent, luminous pull toward hope.
“This whole collection of songs felt like transmissions rather than a deliberate attempt to make sense of the world,” says Bareilles. “My deepest hope is that Good Grief provides some kind of comfort or catharsis.”
“Home,” the album’s first single, was inspired by a conversation between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper about grief and loss on Cooper’s podcast. Bareilles shares, “It feels like an invitation and a tone setter for the specificity and depth of this record. It just feels really essential right now. In order for us as humans to really know and understand each other, we have to listen to each other’s stories.”
Good Grief spans remarkable thematic ground, all of it rooted in Bareilles’ own experience—from intimate tributes to lost friends, to defiant anthems for women’s rights, to unexpected moments of lightness found in the darkest of times. Produced by Bareilles herself, the album was mostly recorded over six days at Dreamland Recording Studios in Woodstock, NY, alongside a band of longtime collaborators: drummer Charley Drayton, guitarist Butterfly Boucher, keyboardist Misty Boyce, bassist Solomon Dorsey, multi-instrumentalist Rob Moose and co-producer, recording engineer and mixer Jonathan Low. Later sessions took place alongside co-producer Aaron Dessner at his Long Pond Studios in the Hudson Valley, NY, with assists from engineer and mixer Bella Blasko. The collection also features contributions from Brandi Carlile, Andrea Gibson, Ingrid Michaelson, Joe Tippett and Megan Falley.
The making of the album was captured in the documentary, Sara Bareilles: Good Grief, which made its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival last week. Directed by Josh Alexander and produced by Daniel J. Chalfen, the film offers an intimate, unfiltered portrait of Bareilles’ return to the recording studio with close friends for the first time in seven years—a cinematic document of her creative process that becomes a profoundly personal, ultimately hopeful meditation on loss, grief and the power of music to heal. A masterclass in creativity, community and vulnerability, the documentary serves as a reminder of music’s extraordinary power to connect us to ourselves and to each other.
The album, tour and documentary add to a landmark year for Bareilles. Her song “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” co-written with Brandi Carlile and the late poet and activist Andrea Gibson, appears in the Peabody Award-winning documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, on which Bareilles also serves as executive producer. The song was shortlisted for Best Original Song and the film for Best Documentary at the 98th Academy Awards. The track also appears on Good Grief.
SARA BAREILLES LIVE
September 9—Boston, MA—MGM Music Hall at Fenway
September 12—Washington, D.C.—The Anthem
September 15—Toronto, ON—Massey Hall
September 18—New York, NY—Radio City Music Hall
September 21—Philadelphia, PA—The Met
September 24—Atlanta, GA—Fox Theatre
September 25—Cincinnati, OH—Taft Theatre
September 27—Chicago, IL—Chicago Theatre
September 30—Minneapolis, MN—Orpheum Theatre
October 2—St. Louis, MO—Stifel Theatre
October 4—Denver, CO—Bellco Theatre
October 6—Austin, TX—Bass Concert Hall
October 7—Houston, TX—The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts
October 12—Los Angeles, CA—Dolby Theatre
October 13—Los Angeles, CA—Dolby Theatre
October 16—San Francisco, CA—Bill Graham Civic Auditorium
October 19—Seattle, WA—The Paramount Theatre
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