How a Sara Bareilles 'Good Grief' listening event hit home

Sara Bareilles’s new album, Good Grief, releases on August 28. And while the publicity machine behind the two-time Grammy winner will have plenty of tricks up its sleeve, one particular move went back to the basics.

Bareilles partnered with 86 record stores across the U.S. to host listening events. I went to Rock and Soul in Midtown Manhattan for an imperfectly perfect experience that was just as much about processing the recent death of my father as it was about being enveloped by the singer-songwriter’s exquisite musicality.

Listening means different things to different people

Bareilles turned to the art form she knows best to process the losses of close friends and creative partners Chad Joseph and Gavin Creel, both of whom died of stage 4 cancer. A film in collaboration with writer-director Josh Alexander documents her creative process.

“It’s very precious to move through that stage of life with someone, and I think I thought I might be more fearful of it, but death is really alive. It’s as alive as it gets,” Bareilles says in the film.

Listening to the album with 40 or so strangers in a poorly air-conditioned DJ equipment and record shop offered its own lifeline. I attended with a close friend, whose father also recently passed. We brought tissues, assuming it would be a much-needed catharsis.

The double album reflects Bareilles’s profound musicality as singer, composer and lyricist, dating back to her first self-released album, Careful Confessions, which preceded her breakout album, Little Voice, on Epic Records several years later.

The listing piano, syncopated rhythms, and tight harmonies that would later echo in her score for the musical Waitress all resurface with a maturity and ache that comes from a life that, by nature, suffers loss.

But as Linda Loman famously says of husband Willy in Death of a Salesman, “I can’t cry. It seems to me that you’re just on another trip and I keep expecting you.”

I couldn’t help but feel my father’s presence in that room, as a mother and daughter disrupted an intimate moment with their incessant chatter, or another attendee texted with the intensity of a 9-1-1 operator. He could be easily distracted by others’ behavior—a characteristic, for better or worse, that I’ve inherited.

But others leaned against the record bins, eyes shut, letting the music wash over them. A young couple stood perfectly still for the hour’s entirety, their pinkies hooked and shoulders touching.

This chapter of my grief, still early, played out exactly as it should.