Seven years is a long time to go quiet. For Sara Bareilles, those years were anything but empty — they were filled with Broadway stages, television sets, personal loss, and a slow, deliberate reckoning with what it means to grieve. Now she is ready to bring all of it into a room, and “Home,” the official music video released this month as the lead single from her forthcoming album Good Grief, is where that conversation begins.
The song arrived on June 3, marking Bareilles’ first new solo music since Amidst the Chaos dropped in 2019, and the response from fans has carried the particular warmth that comes when an artist returns not just with new music, but with something that actually needed to be said. “I’m so happy to finally share new music after almost 7 years,” she wrote on Instagram upon announcing the single. “This new work is deeply personal, unlike all my other stuff.”
The video matches that admission entirely. Understated and intimate in the way that only genuinely felt things can be, it does not reach for spectacle. Instead it sits with the weight of the song, allowing Bareilles the space to deliver one of the most quietly powerful vocal performances of her career. The track itself moves gently, built around soft instrumentation that creates room for the lyrics to land without interference. And land they do. “What is broken cannot heal ’till it’s known and loved by name,” she sings, a line that cuts straight through. CNN
Where the Song Came From
“Home” was inspired by a conversation between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper on Cooper’s CNN podcast All There Is, in which the two shared their experiences with grief and loss. Bareilles, who had been navigating significant losses of her own, heard something in that exchange that she could not let go. She wrote the song as a way of processing what it stirred in her, and months before its official release, she shared it live for the first time on the podcast itself. Cooper, who had not heard it in advance, described being incredibly moved by what he heard. Sony Music Canada + 2
Among the losses Bareilles has carried through this period is the death of her close friend and Broadway collaborator Gavin Creel, the Tony Award-winning actor who passed away in September 2024 from a rare and aggressive form of sarcoma. Bareilles honored him at the 2025 Tony Awards, and his presence is felt throughout the emotional framework of the album she has since built.
The Making of Good Grief
Good Grief arrives August 28 as Bareilles’ seventh studio album and her first since Amidst the Chaos. Produced by Bareilles herself, the bulk of the album was 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. Additional sessions took place alongside co-producer Aaron Dessner at his Long Pond Studios in the Hudson Valley. Rolling Stone + 2
The collection also features contributions from Brandi Carlile, Ingrid Michaelson, Joe Tippett and Megan Falley. Among the album’s 14 tracks is “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” the acclaimed collaboration with Carlile co-written with the late poet and activist Andrea Gibson, which was short-listed for Best Original Song at the 98th Academy Awards and appears in the Peabody Award-winning documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, which Bareilles executive produced. Sony Music CanadaSony Music Canada
“This whole collection of songs felt like transmissions rather than a deliberate attempt to make sense of the world,” Bareilles said in a statement. “My deepest hope is that Good Grief provides some kind of comfort or catharsis.” Pop Vulture
A Career That Has Never Stood Still
Bareilles is a two-time Grammy winner who has also earned three Tony and three Primetime Emmy nominations. She composed the music and lyrics for Broadway’s Waitress and later stepped into the lead role both on Broadway and the West End. She earned a Tony nomination for her performance as the Baker’s Wife in Stephen Sondheim‘s Into the Woods and an Emmy nomination for playing Mary Magdalene in NBC’s Jesus Christ Superstar Live! Most recently, she appeared as Dawn Solano in the Emmy-nominated Netflix musical comedy series Girls5eva. Sony Music Canada
The Good Grief era represents something different from all of that, though. It is a return to the songwriter’s chair after years of inhabiting other people’s stories, and the results suggest that the distance only deepened what she has to say.
Coming to a Stage Near You
Bareilles will hit the road this fall for the Good Grief Tour, kicking off September 9 in Boston with stops at theaters in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and beyond. The shows will blend new material with catalog favorites, offering what promises to be an evening shaped entirely around the kind of emotional honesty that “Home” sets as the standard. Rolling Stone
The making of the album was also captured in the documentary Sara Bareilles: Good Grief, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival on June 4, directed by Josh Alexander. The film offers an unfiltered look at the recording process, framed as a meditation on loss and the specific, irreplaceable way music allows people to find their way back to themselves.
