Sara Bareilles Announces New Album, Reveals First Single "Home"

Staff
Jun 3
3 min read

The singer-songwriter's seventh studio effort 'Good Grief' arrives in August

Sara Bareilles has announced her upcoming seventh studio album Good Grief. The album is slated for release on August 28 through her longtime label, Epic Records. Alongside the announcement, the GRAMMY-winning, Tony and Emmy-nominated singer-songwriter has revealed the record's lead single "Home."

Stream the new track below now.

Good Grief marks Bareilles’ seventh studio album and her first since 2019’s Grammy-winning Amidst the Chaos, opening a new chapter to her 20-year career. True to its title, the 14-track collection is a reckoning with loss, yet even its darkest moments are threaded with an insistent, luminous pull toward hope.

“This whole collection of songs felt like transmissions rather than a deliberate attempt to make sense of the world,” says Bareilles. “My deepest hope is that Good Grief provides some kind of comfort or catharsis.”

“Home,” the album’s first single, was inspired by a conversation between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper about grief and loss on Cooper’s podcast. Bareilles shares, “It feels like an invitation and a tone setter for the specificity and depth of this record. It just feels really essential right now. In order for us as humans to really know and understand each other, we have to listen to each other’s stories.”

Good Grief spans remarkable thematic ground, all of it rooted in Bareilles' own experience—from intimate tributes to lost friends, to defiant anthems for women's rights, to unexpected moments of lightness found in the darkest of times. Produced by Bareilles herself, the album was mostly 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. Later sessions took place alongside co-producer Aaron Dessner at his Long Pond Studios in the Hudson Valley, NY, with assists from engineer and mixer Bella Blasko. The collection also features contributions from Brandi Carlile, Andrea Gibson, Ingrid Michaelson, Joe Tippett and Megan Falley.

The making of the album was captured in the documentary, Sara Bareilles: Good Grief, which will make its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival this week. The film offers an intimate, unfiltered portrait of Bareilles’ return to the recording studio with close friends for the first time in seven years—a cinematic document of her creative process that becomes a profoundly personal, ultimately hopeful meditation on loss, grief and the power of music to heal. A masterclass in creativity, community and vulnerability, the documentary serves as a reminder of music’s extraordinary power to connect us to ourselves and to each other.

The album, tour and documentary add to a landmark year for Bareilles. Her song “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” co-written with Brandi Carlile and the late poet and activist Andrea Gibson, appears in the Peabody Award-winning documentary Come See Me in the Good Light, on which Bareilles also serves as executive producer. The song was shortlisted for Best Original Song and the film for Best Documentary at the 98th Academy Awards.

The track also appears on Good Grief.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvfNLSytHzI