Sara Bareilles broke out as a pop-music star in the late two-thousands. But she’s gone on to have a very different kind of career, writing music for Broadway and eventually performing as an actor on stage and on television. At the New Yorker Festival, in 2024, she played her early hit “Gravity,” and spoke with staff writer Rachel Syme about the pressures of fame, aging, and why she prefers working in theatre. “There’s so much competition in the music industry. I’m not a competitive person; I don’t understand it. It’s not that theatre isn’t competitive, but there’s this feeling—everybody’s so happy to be there. Like, ‘We got a show, guys, and we don’t know how long it’s going to last!’ ”
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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.
How do you write a song, Sarah?
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.
Reading about your first record deal, though, and how many co-writers they tried to put you with, there was a sense at the beginning maybe where they didn't let you follow your own nose or trust that you could be on your own. And I know that that was difficult. So I mean, how did you feel like you had the confidence then to sort of say, I need to be solo here?
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.
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