Sara Bareilles
speaker
42 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Sara Bareilles’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
At the New Yorker Festival a couple of months ago, we were joined by Sara Bareilles. Bareilles broke out as a star in pop music in the late aughts with the Grammy Awards to prove it, but she's gone on to have a very different sort of career writing music for Broadway.
So on the one hand, Bareilles is busy acting on stage and on television, and on the other, she's busy as a composer and a songwriter. Right now, she's adapting Meg Wolitzer's best-selling novel, The Interestings, for the stage, along with the playwright, Sarah Rule. Sarah Bareilles sat down to talk with staff writer Rachel Sein and to play a little music, too.
There are very few times I can think of where I sat down and something just sort of showed up. I really believe in this idea of kind of the muses visit the artist at work. They reward the person who creates ritual or routine around just showing up and writing. I'm finding that I'm in my 40s now, I'm 44, and my rituals have changed and the process changes, but it's evolving.
I wouldn't identify it as confidence. I think it was... a kind of desperation. I got set up on all these songwriting sort of dates with very successful songwriters who were writing songs for Avril Lavigne and Kelly Clarkson and like a lot of my sort of contemporaries. It just didn't resonate. It felt like it didn't matter if I was in the room or not.
I felt like they were just writing songs and they were just trying to find... people to sing them, and songwriting to me has... I can't think of anything more sacred. It's as intimate as it gets, and it is literally an illustration of my relationship with God. That's as close as I get to being naked spiritually for the world. And so...
The idea that I would sit in a room and have somebody hand me a sheet of paper that had like a list of song titles, a lot of them with like letters in the title, which like too good for you. It's like a gross five-minute joke. I don't think God wants to say that. So it kind of, I got, I was in despair actually. And my manager at the time,
finally heard me and was like, okay, you don't have to do it anymore. And I think this is where my heart breaks for young artists who don't realize you have the power to go home all along. I didn't ever have to do any of that. But I do think I grew from the experience.
I'm not gonna write you a love song Cause you asked for it
That's a good question. You can shove it. I wish I could have put that in there. I think you're right. That wasn't a moment of despair. That was more a moment of discovery. I was listening to the radio and I was just like trying to cop what I heard on the radio. I was trying to like mimic. I was like, oh, it should sound something like this.
And I was so angry when I caught myself in that line of thinking. And I said a prayer and I was like, please let me just return to myself somehow. Just remember why I'm doing this. Remember what I'm trying to say. And it was a diary entry. It's like head underwater and you tell me to breathe easy. This time is impossible. I don't want to give you what you're asking for.
I don't even know if I knew what I thought they were asking for, except that I knew they wanted a song that could go on the radio.
My mom was a very prominent community theater actress in Humboldt County where I grew up. And she did tons and tons of shows at our repertory theater there. And I would go to the theater and I went back not that long ago. And in my mind... It is like a palace. And when I went back, I'm like, oh, it's like a 99 seat theater. It's so small and perfect and beautiful.
And it was the happiest I ever was, was sitting in a theater seat. And then the idea that I could be a part of productions was just like mind blowing. I did productions of Little Shop of Horrors. I did Mystery of Edwin Drood. I did Charlotte's Web. And I really thought I would go into theater. And then I started writing songs. And I moved to L.A. to go to UCLA. And then my music career...
just sort of foregrounded itself. And I got on that ride. Being a touring artist is like you get on the ride and then you come home and you write a new record and then you get right back on the ride. And I started to feel like I'll hate this really soon. Well, I took this month-long rumspringa in New York. And I had a meeting with my brand-new theatrical agent.
And he's like, there are auditions for a show called Into the Woods. And I was like, I love that show. Give me the audition. And I auditioned for Cinderella for the production that was in the park. And when I tell you, I shit the bed. I shit the bed with fury. And I walked out of that room and I was like, there's not even like a world where like, maybe that went okay. Like, it was so clear.
They were like, oh, I hope you'll be okay after this. It was so terrible. And I really, I was so humbled by how little I knew about anything in this industry. And then... got the opportunity to sit down with Diane Paulus, who was the director of Waitress, and she talked to me about this project.
So I thought I would go back to theater as a performer, and then I was like, oh, I don't know how to do that, and then started writing songs.
She is my scene I was just trying the whole time to just
Like act like I knew what I was doing. I do think I have some instincts around, like it became clear very quickly that I liked being in these conversations. I liked the puzzle. I liked the questioning of motivation. And the collaboration was very new to me. You know, these songwriters that I got paired with, I think for a long time made me very fearful of collaboration.
When it's the right kind of collaboration, it can be incredible. You know, the phenomenon of something being bigger than the sum of its parts.
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