MUSIC • ALBUM REVIEW • CULTURE
The Proof That Love Mattered
Sara Bareilles returns after seven years with “Good Grief”—a brutally honest, beautifully bittersweet album about loss, mortality, and the grace of saying goodbye.
MUSIC • ALBUM REVIEW • CULTURE
Sara Bareilles Sings About Loss
In “Good Grief,” the singer-songwriter confronts death, loss, and the messy beauty of saying goodbye—and it’s beautifully bittersweet.
| ell, just how good can grief be? That’s the question raised by Sara Bareilles’ “Good Grief,” which, true to its promissory title, deals primarily with loss and death and the kind of tough stuff that folks in a marketing meeting might suggest slightly downplaying when one is releasing one’s first studio album in seven years. |
But Sara Bareilles has never been one to shy away from emotional truth. This album is no exception. It’s a masterclass in vulnerability—a deeply personal meditation on mortality, memory, and the strange grace that comes from facing what we’d rather avoid. “Good Grief” doesn’t offer easy answers. Instead, it offers something rarer: honesty.
Seven years is a long time between albums. In that time, Bareilles has written for Broadway, raised a family, and lived through the kind of life changes that reshape a person. “Good Grief” is the sound of an artist who has earned the right to write about loss—because she’s lived it.
“Grief is not the opposite of love. It’s the proof that love mattered.”
The album opens with piano—stripped down, intimate, unadorned. Bareilles’ voice, weathered and beautiful, carries the weight of someone who has something to say. Track after track, she peels back layers of sorrow, anger, acceptance, and ultimately, peace. This is not wallowing. This is survival. This is the work of turning pain into art.
In a world that wants us to move on, to “get over it,” to be fine, Sara Bareilles gives us permission to sit with our grief. To name it. To feel it. And in doing so, to understand that good grief—genuine, honest, unflinching grief—is the most human thing we can do.
Listen to Sara Bareilles
