American singer Sara Bareilles is not your grief guru

Sara Bareilles almost got through this interview without crying. Almost. Her eyes started brimming with tears during the final question, revealing that her last sob session occurred just that morning. “I’m having a little bit of a grief spike,” she said over a video chat from Chicago while on tour. “The end of September is rough.”

Sitting on a cream-coloured couch with her ever-present dog Louie snuggled beside her lap, Bareilles explained the pummeling anniversaries approaching: the birthday of Chad Joseph, her best friend from college and former manager who died in 2020 after a Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis, and the 2024 death of Gavin Creel, another dear friend and her co-star on Broadway in “Into the Woods.”

The pain of losing both men in quick succession, along with the uncertainty of the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cancellation of her Tina Fey-produced comedy series “Girls5Eva” and years of disappointing fertility treatments (“I fully thought I would have a baby by now,” the 46-year-old said.) bubble over in “Good Grief,” the singer-songwriter’s first solo album in seven years. In the parlance of “She Used to Be Mine,” from Bareilles’ Tony Award-nominated “Waitress” score, the new album’s excavation of anguish, rage, joy and everything in between is “mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie.”

So it’s understandable that Bareilles felt “wobbly” even trying to say her friends’ names while making the rounds (with plenty of tissues on hand) to promote the album and its accompanying making-of documentary, now in theaters. “There’s just something that starts to crumble,” she said of consistently revisiting this emotional state. “I was making jokes about there will be a compilation at some point of ‘This b— can’t stop crying.’” Because grief “feels like the blanket that everyone is tethered to in some way,” Bareilles doesn’t hold anything back in these lyrics or performances.

She broke down at the piano during a recent taping for SiriusXM, singing “Forever,” an aching, imagined promise from beyond, allowing the wave of paralysing sadness to pass before continuing the song’s repeated mantra (“I’ll be here forever”) and commanding the stoppage be kept in. On “Just a Kid,” which sounds as jubilant as her breakthrough 2007 hit “Love Song,” she risks strangers’ stares to dictate a voice note in a fit of inspiration about Joseph’s footprint in the world.

“I am so interested in truth telling. I’m so desperate for it in the world. I’m so grateful when I find it in other people,” she affirmed. “I felt for my own healing there wasn’t anything to get from not telling the truth.” Rejecting the idea that she’s now some kind of grief guru who’s been through the fire and come out on the other side, she sees herself and her band more as “grief sherpas” — there to uphold listeners.

“I’m just a student of grief,” she offered. “I would be lying if I felt like I had any kind of expertise to offer. I just am very willing to share my very honest experience.” And Bareilles extends the same invitation to everyone. “Tell me your story and I’ll tell you mine,” she sings against a languid dulcimer on “Home,” the opening track spelling out the thesis of the album and this “art project” of a tour. Her team set up a hotline (888-282-4062) for people to leave voicemails and fans can write — anonymously or not — to prompts like “What do you carry with you always?” and “What keeps you from feeling totally free?” on gift tags that hang on an installation erected in the lobby of each tour stop.

Some of the voicemails, excruciating in their honesty, air during the show as transitions between songs while Bareilles and her band (keyboardist Misty Boyce, guitarist Butterfly Boucher, multi-instrumentalist Rich Hinman, bassist Joe Ayoub, percussionist Mona Tavakoli and drummer Derrek Phillips) play within a set structured to look like the bones of a house while sheer draperies above undulate like a jellyfish, sometimes taking the shape of meringue peaks.

Tribune News Service