Good Grief, by Sara Bareilles
Sara Bareilles has increased her insight into the adult part of adult-contemporary pop. The dark maturity of the singer and songwriter’s seventh album, Good Grief, demonstrates that she has also learned the patience to allow creativity to gestate.
In the years between this album and her previous one, 2019’s Amidst the Chaos, Bareilles did enough television and stage work to garner Tony and Emmy nominations. (She already has two Grammys.) She got married. She lost people she loved.
The losses shadow “Home,” the first track: across a very close-in strummed acoustic guitar slowly, warily joined by other instrumentation, Bareilles counts the cost of unshed tears and reaches out her arms, trusting that those she cares about will reach out in return.
Her voice embodies the reach with power strengthened by her writing and performing of musicals. That experience hasn’t dimmed her ability to hold back when necessary, as she must and does with the organ-guided sketch of a fertility clinic in “Ladies in a Line” and with the good-time, ragtime sashay of “Nervous Breakdown.”
The latter song, co-written with quirk-pop queen Ingrid Michaelson, is one of several open-hearted collaborations. Others include “Still Crying,” a subtle Orbison sequel composed with the National’s Aaron Dessner, and “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” a romantic folk-pop sonnet made more luminous by contributions from late poet Andrea Gibson and duet partner Brandi Carlile.
Bareilles doesn’t forget the pop part of adult-contemporary pop, either: “Idiot Heart” (a collaboration with husband Joe Tippett and Gibson’s wife, Megan Falley) has the smooth dancefloor throb of uptempo ABBA, and “Capsize Me” makes a clatter of uplift with self-aware white-girl grooving.
For Sara Bareilles, grief is indeed good, because she has carried and dealt with it until she could absorb it into her art. And healing from grief is always contemporary, or at least constant.
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