In facing the truth of her losses, Sara Bareilles embraces a faith in her own grief

CNN

By Lauren DePino, CNN

(CNN) — Singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles knows what it’s like to live in fear of her grief eating her alive.

“I felt like I would dissolve, like it was too much feeling,” Bareilles told me of the deluge of grief she’d been enduring. Not only had she lost two close friends to cancer within the span of a few years, but she’d faced “a new depth of low” with her mental health. She also revealed she’s heading into year three of a fertility struggle.

Yet the more Bareilles, a multi-hyphenate actor-composer-producer, surrendered to her grief in its many forms, the more she began to perceive mourning as a kind of devotional practice, as a miracle to behold.

It wasn’t until the end of the recording process of her raw and tender new album, “Good Grief,” that it dawned on Bareilles that she was writing entirely about grief. She debuted the first track, “Home” in March, on CNN Anchor Anderson Cooper’s podcast, All There Is. Cooper’s conversation with comedian Stephen Colbert in an earlier episode had inspired Bareilles to write the song. The men’s radical openness about their own grief and shared pledge to not keep their sadness hidden from their own children had moved Bareilles to tears.

It was only fitting that the process of creating the album helped her lean into the terrifying and awe-inspiring truths about her losses. For Bareilles, songwriting and grief are bridged by a holiness, a mysticism even — a belief that resonates with me.

“I’ve always felt like songwriting is a really sacred ritual, a kind of faith in the unknown, and a faith in the mystery of how music works and moves and God and the universe,” Bareilles told me recently.

While “there’s essential qualities that remain similar” with all her songwriting, these songs differ in one fundamental way. “I’m not quite out in front of the grief itself,” she said. “I’m still grieving my friends. I’m grieving my fertility journey. … I’m trying to share from a place of not really having any answers.”

Songs that speak to our sorrow

As someone who sings for people during the bleakest times in their lives, I see Bareilles’ loss-centered songs helping us reconcile in our hearts what our wearied souls cannot solve with our brains, no matter how hard we try. More than ever, we need comfort songs that speak to our snowballing sorrows — of losing a parent, losing a future we’ve planned for, losing a peer we’ve known for decades. Bareilles’ music fills this need and then some; her songs are modern, timely spirituals but also reminiscent of ancient songs of praise.

Her music contains a sacredness that transcends institutional religions without dismissing them, accomplishing what every effective mourning hymn does. These songs take our sadness, transmute it and hand it back to us, not only as something we can hold but as something we want to hold.

For fleeting moments, they awaken our pain in tones and textures, in vocal inflections and modulations. When the last notes of these songs ring out, I feel the ache and love for those I’ve lost magnified in equal measure, filling me with hope as my grief transforms into something I no longer perceive as sinister. The songs let me befriend my grief enough to understand that it’s not there to hijack my joy, but to remind me of it. Instead of sharpening my pain, grief’s presence softens it. And the longer I can sit with this grief, the more gifts I discover.

Writing letters to God

There is another kind of grief that Bareilles sings about — it has to do with confronting the belief that our psychological distress can cage us in a making of our own dark thoughts.

During a dire period of staggering anxiety, she penned letters to God, whom she describes with “a very wide interpretation” as “a life force, the animating force, as the soul that leaves the body,” revealing to this benevolent entity that she didn’t know how to navigate her way back to herself.

This relationship between Bareilles and her growing “trust in something that is unseeable, unknowable, unmeasurable,” she said, inspired the track “Capsize Me.” The song assures us, she explained to me, that “there is no version of this life where you are actually capsized” — that we’re not breakable, that grief does not and will not kill us.

Once we come to terms with these freeing realizations, Bareilles said, we can crack the door open to our grief. “We don’t have to dive into the deep end every time,” she said, but commit to “… being sort of devoted to the practice of opening up to it a little bit at a time.”

It takes only a hint of trust to welcome in the surprising iterations that grief can embody, ones vastly different from habitual despair. “My experience of grief has been so many things,” Bareilles said. “It’s not just fetal position crying in the corner. It’s mystery and awe and joy and jubilation.”

A glimpse of what’s beyond

Grief for her also means glimpsing beyond the threshold. For instance, her penultimate track, “Forever,” is written from what Bareilles said was the position of “the person who’s on their way out, and what they might want to say, if they had the words.” In the ethereal ballad, Bareilles resurrects the hallowed role of song leader, like the ones in ancient Greece. These empowered female mourners saw their songs as spells that could summon back the dead.

“I know there’s so much speech around the veil being thin around the time of loss, and I just feel the more time I spend really examining grief in all its forms, the veil is thin always,” she said. “I have found so much comfort in that.”

Bareilles wrote “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet” in collaboration with singer Brandi Carlile and the late poet Andrea Gibson, whom she got to know when Gibson was battling terminal cancer. Gibson’s journey was featured in the 2025 documentary “Come See Me in the Good Light.”

“One of the things Gibson says is that to die is to be reincarnated in the people you love while they’re still alive,” Bareilles said. “I think about that so much, this idea of changing planes of existence. Someone leaves this form for another form, but they live on in the people that they loved and the people who loved them.”

An open space of mourning

Having kicked off her tour on September 9 and released the documentary “Sara Bareilles: Good Grief” the week prior, Bareilles hopes to create a space for more of that celebratory mourning. “If this tour is a place to create a space where the veil feels exceptionally thin, I am here for it, because I really think that’s actually the world we live in.”

Bareilles also told me she thought her communion with the audience would enrich her own healing. I can envision an exuberant communal catharsis taking place at each of her concerts.

More broadly, I see Bareilles upending our cultural aversion to mortality and death, as well as our avoidance of open grief — of both showing it and opening a space for it to be displayed. For her, grieving is an active, often heartening endeavor.

“People talk about grief as love with nowhere to go, and I really think that is true. But I also think love has everywhere to go,” she told me. “I wonder about this idea of shining absence in the form of love onto other people and seeing what it does for their grief.”

The word “absence” to Bareilles feels more nuanced than someone we love simply not being here anymore. After bearing witness to her dear friend Gavin Creel in his final days and washing and clothing his body, she observed, “You realize they’re not in there.

“That is the craziest thing for me,” she said. “There is this soul that animates our physical form that doesn’t exist inside of it. It exists outside of it, and that’s why I feel this veil-is-thin concept is just like, well, they’re not in their bodies anymore. They are everywhere.”

Grieving my own mother

With every mention of the thinning veil, I think about my mom, who died last summer, who told me my whole life that the dead are never really gone. I was not with her when she died. The goodbye my mother would have chosen, had she had the chance, would have been anything but a hard and final end; it would have been paradoxically windowed, as Bareilles’ song “Forever” suggests.

Within my mother’s goodbye would have lived the promise of light — a forever-togetherness, invoked by her indestructible love for me and her conviction in her ability to still reach me, from wherever she has gone. This is the power of mourning music that I’ve known as a funeral singer; it lets grief sing.

I believe my mother took some part in arranging this conversation with one of my all-time favorite artists. And now that I’ve talked to Bareilles, I also see that my own grief had been mounting. That reminded me of what I often remind others — if we don’t let our grief move through us, we accumulate stone and grit that hardens us.

But a better option is becoming living, feeling, fluid monuments to the beings who we love. A better option is letting ourselves be sung to and letting these songs work their magic. If grief can come alive inside the music that is meant to hold its ever-shifting shape — no matter how sharp and mountainous — it can sing. And that itself is a miracle.

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