Sara Bareilles has placed grief at the center of “Good Grief,” a raw, tender album shaped by personal loss, mental health struggles and an ongoing fertility journey. Rather than presenting mourning as something to defeat, she approaches it as a devotional practice filled with mystery, pain and unexpected light.

“I felt like I would dissolve, like it was too much feeling,” Bareilles told singer, songwriter and writer Lauren DePino. Bareilles had lost two close friends to cancer within several years, experienced “a new depth of low” with her mental health and entered the third year of her fertility struggle.

Bareilles did not initially recognize that she was creating an entire album about grief. That realization arrived near the end of the recording process, after the subject had already found its way through the songs.

She debuted the first track, “Home,” in March on CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s podcast, “All There Is.” An earlier conversation between Cooper and comedian Stephen Colbert, including their determination not to hide sadness from their children, moved Bareilles to tears and inspired the song.

The creative process allowed Bareilles to face the frightening and awe inspiring realities of loss. “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,” she said.

Although Bareilles said “there’s essential qualities that remain similar” across her songwriting, these songs emerged before she had reached any clear resolution. “I’m not quite out in front of the grief itself,” she explained.

“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,” Bareilles said. That unresolved quality gives the album its emotional force and leaves room for listeners to recognize their own losses.

DePino, who is working on a memoir about being a funeral singer, describes the songs as sources of comfort for sorrow that cannot be solved through thought alone. To her, the music transforms sadness into something listeners can hold without denying its weight.

Bareilles also explores the fear that psychological distress can imprison people within their darkest thoughts. During a period of severe anxiety, she wrote letters to God, whom she described through “a very wide interpretation” as “a life force, the animating force, as the soul that leaves the body.”

That relationship with an unseen presence inspired “Capsize Me.” Bareilles said the song carries the assurance that “there is no version of this life where you are actually capsized,” expressing her belief that people are not breakable and grief will not destroy them.

Her approach does not demand total immersion in sorrow. “We don’t have to dive into the deep end every time,” Bareilles said, describing a gradual practice of opening to grief rather than shutting it away.

That opening can reveal emotions far beyond despair. “My experience of grief has been so many things,” she said. “It’s not just fetal position crying in the corner. It’s mystery and awe and joy and jubilation.”

The album’s penultimate track, “Forever,” adopts the perspective of “the person who’s on their way out, and what they might want to say, if they had the words.” Bareilles connects that imagined farewell with her sense that the boundary between life and death is always close.

“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” with singer Brandi Carlile and the late poet Andrea Gibson, whom she knew while Gibson faced terminal cancer. Gibson’s journey appeared in the 2025 documentary “Come See Me in the Good Light.”

Bareilles began her tour on September 9 after releasing the documentary “Sara Bareilles: Good Grief” the previous week. She hopes the performances create room for celebratory mourning, shared healing and a sense that those who have died continue through the people who love them.

She also reflected on witnessing her friend Gavin Creel’s final days and washing and clothing his body. “You realize they’re not in there,” she observed, later adding that the soul “exists outside of it” and that those who have left their bodies “are everywhere.”

For DePino, whose mother died last summer, Bareilles’ music offers a way to let grief move rather than harden. The songs present mourning as an active expression of love, allowing pain, memory and devotion to remain alive together.

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