In a sense, she’s not: None of the new album’s singles have charted on Billboard’s Hot 100, let alone broken into the top 40 as “Love Song” and “Brave” did.īut along with a lower commercial profile has come an increased willingness to risk “pissing people off,” she said with a laugh.Īt the beginning of her career, Bareilles “was terrified of upsetting anybody,” she said. But I just don’t feel the need to be in competition with anything.” “That could certainly be the fact that I’m no longer in my 20s. Rather than join in, “it felt more interesting to go in the other direction.” She shrugged. “Sometimes I can’t even tell the voices apart,” said the singer, who moved to New York in 2013 after more than a decade in L.A. She also said that when she refocused on pop, she found the music had grown more “processed” while she was away.ĪLSO: ‘Waitress’ proved the power of women at the box office.
This time she sang live in the studio accompanied by expert players including guitarist Marc Ribot and drummer Jay Bellerose.īurnett said his goal was a “less worked-on record” - one that simply captures “what Sara does, because she’s extraordinarily good at what she does.” And indeed for the first time you get a real sense of her talent not just as a shaper of catchy hooks but as a singer and a storyteller.Īsked what inspired this relaxation, Bareilles credited her experience in the highly collaborative theater world, which taught her “not to be so precious” with her material. “I go back and listen to my earlier records and I can feel my own rigidity,” she said. Seated in a small control room at the Village perfumed with old weed - “Can’t you smell the inspiration?” she asked - Bareilles explained that something had “relaxed” inside her recently that prepared her to record as Burnett does, with little fear of unscripted accents or imperfections. Yet she wasn’t actually ready to team up with him until now. The singer said she’d admired Burnett since she was a teenager, when his role on Counting Crows’ 1993 debut, “August and Everything After,” led her to add his name to a list of dream collaborators she kept on a yellow legal pad. “Sara makes a genuine emotional connection” on “Amidst the Chaos,” said Legend, who played the title role opposite Bareilles in “Jesus Christ Superstar.” “I was moved as soon as I heard it.”įor help carrying out her vision, Bareilles enlisted T Bone Burnett, the veteran record producer known for his work with Elvis Costello and Brandi Carlile, among many others. Here, in contrast, she strikes the right blend of style and substance in songs such as the dreamy, lovelorn “No Such Thing” and “A Safe Place to Land,” a hymn-like duet with John Legend about family separation at America’s southern border. The album that resulted from those questions coheres in a way that’s new for Bareilles, whose previous efforts could feel neither fish nor fowl: too slick for a singer-songwriter, too earnest for a true pop trendsetter. “Watching my family and my friends and my peers go through the muck of feeling like the world’s on fire, it’s like, How do you cope? How do you keep putting one foot in front of the other?”
“It made me realize that my job - my calling as an artist - is to talk about this stuff,” she said at the renowned Village recording studio in West Los Angeles, where she made “Amidst the Chaos” under the same roof that once housed the likes of Bob Dylan and Fleetwood Mac. In an interview the day before the Troubadour gig, the singer identified the Women’s March in 2017 as a “pivotal moment” that led to a “personal awakening.” ALSO: Sara Bareilles joins Alan Menken in defense of Ariel: In a post-’Frozen’ world, why the time is right for Hollywood Bowl’s ‘Little Mermaid’ »Īnd it finds Bareilles, 39, taking up heavier themes than she has in the past, including her experience with depression and her deep misgivings about President Trump’s leadership.
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