By Melissa Rodman
Josh Alexander’s intimate studio documentary follows Sara Bareilles and her collaborators as they form songs of infertility, bereavement, friendship, and collective comfort.
Sara Bareilles in a scene from Good Grief. Photo: Tribeca Film Festival
The premise is quaint, idyllic: A preferred singer-songwriter and her small band lease a recording studio nestled within the quiet of Upstate New York to place collectively an album. On the floor, Sara Bareilles: Good Grief seems to be your typical “making of” documentary. But beneath swirls a musical drama of an artist’s mystical reckonings with deep loss.
Bareilles is probably greatest recognized for her catchy radio anthems “Love Song” or “Brave” or her rating for Waitress the musical, though hardcore followers would possibly cite plenty of different songs from her six earlier studio albums or from her dynamic dwell performances. As a performer, she is admired for the poignance of her piano taking part in, strengthened by her hovering mezzo-soprano vocals. Her materials attracts from her private {and professional} experiences in addition to collective areas just like the 2017 Women’s March. Good Grief, the title of each the documentary (directed by Josh Alexander) and Bareilles’s latest album explores, as she tells us within the movie, “loss and transition and change and what we let go of.” The album might be launched on August 28, the movie will display screen nationally on September 2, and Bareilles might be taking these new songs on tour this fall, opening at MGM Music Hall at Fenway on September 9 and 10.
Good Grief the documentary exudes an unfussy, unvarnished, home-movie high quality, with fly-on-the-wall type footage and self-tapes made by Bareilles. “I’m not taking the traditional producer route,” she confides on the movie’s outset, occurring to explain how inventive choices might be shared by herself and her bandmates. The recording-room conversations between Bareilles and her fellow musicians are full of the form of goofball power, off-the-cuff commentary, and hyper-sincerity that blooms amongst shut collaborators and buddies. “Oddly, there aren’t a lot of songs about fertility clinics that I have been able to find,” Bareilles jokes at one level, after the group listens again to their take of “Ladies in a Line,” a tune that mines Bareilles’s chilly, medical expertise of attempting, unsuccessfully, to have a child. Among the tune’s lyrics: “empty arms / a list of names / the cruel truth of starting late” and “life was asking different questions ‘til now.” Bareilles encourages her bandmates to play the song as if “we were building the ocean floor,” and the music swells and crests emotionally. Bareilles often reaches for humor, a cheeky remark to cut through intense pain—as with the film/album’s title. But there are additionally actual heartrending tears caught on digital camera.
In addition to fertility struggles, an expertise shared by Bareilles and one in all her bandmates, grief shadows the songs and the recording classes. Two of Bareilles’s shut buddies handed away not too long ago, each at too younger an age. Her greatest good friend from school and supervisor, Chad Joseph, died in 2020, and the actor Gavin Creel, who starred with Bareilles in productions of Waitress and a revival of Into the Woods, handed away in 2024. The documentary features a quick compilation of grainy footage from 2006, the place we see Bareilles and Joseph as younger nobodies, goofing off in a tiny tour van. There’s a “Sarah Bareilles” signal held on her dressing room door. The clips present a glimpse into their lengthy friendship that defines and haunts Bareilles’s new tune “Just a Kid,” her tribute to Joseph. “You never got to get married, and I hate where you’re buried,” she sings. The melody’s upbeat tempo propels an ongoing dialog with Joseph, Bareilles’s response to heartbreak. “Now I’m all alone, out on the street. Singing in a phone / They’re looking at me… This one’s for my best friend, so let them stare,” she sings.
“When we lose people we love, I think what I grieve is the parts that stop feeling so present,” Bareilles says throughout a brief camera-facing interview in Good Grief. “There is a piece that fades. It does, whether you want it to or not…The truth is that, you know, life moves on.” Her phrases minimize proper to the incomprehensibility of loss within the face of life’s indifference. Bareilles’s music grapples with how powerless and pissed off somebody left behind can really feel, attempting to like somebody who’s gone as in the event that they had been nonetheless right here.
At one level within the documentary—which proceeds chronologically from day one of many recording classes by day six—Bareilles describes the brand new album as a product of “the village mind,” the collective of creatives she has introduced collectively. New songs, corresponding to “Hands off My Body” and “Capsize Me,” emphasize the group’s harmonizing, demonstrating how braided a number of voices resonate with communal power. Visitors like singer-songwriter Emily King and Bareilles’s husband, the actor Joe Tippett, additionally drop by the studio to take heed to the work-in-progress, underscoring the shared ambiance of the venture, whereas pictures of the panorama—bushes rustled by the wind, an empty street—counsel a quiet reverence for existence.
As a movie, Good Grief is sleepier than different current pop music spectacles, corresponding to Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft: The Tour (Live in 3D) (Arts Fuse review) and Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour.” In truth, the movie comes off as considerably incidental — it’s complementary to the album, not the primary attraction. Watching Bareilles and her band tune their devices after which launch into a tune makes it clear that the music is paramount — the whole lot else serves it and the solace it could deliver. “My prayer for this music” Bareilles says, “is that it offers comfort to other people who might be feeling the same way.”
Melissa Rodman is a journalist and critic based mostly in New York.