Sara Bareilles is back, and she’s giving you permission to cry. The Grammy-award-winning artist, perhaps best known for her 2007 hit, “Love Song,” her 2013 anthem, “Brave,” and her exquisite score to the Broadway musical “Waitress,” recently released her first studio album in seven years. Bareilles, 46, debuted “Good Grief” with a free, three-day exhibit in the lobby of New York City’s Lincoln Center Theater on the last weekend of August. The event gathered hundreds of her fans together for an utterly mesmerizing, heartbreaking and completely consoling weekend musical convention for highly sensitive people—my people! 

In partnership with The Strangers Project, a New York City-based storytelling collective, the exhibit featured hundreds of strangers’ stories of grief and hope and a 30-minute, live performance by Bareilles each day of the weekend. Throughout the lobby, a mixture of anonymous handwritten and typed letters hung in clothespinned rows on black metal racks with string lights interwoven—classic Bareilles boho. A player piano, a Steinway Spirio, to be exact, sat center stage on the main floor. It serenaded fans with piano arrangements of Bareilles’s latest songs throughout the weekend when she was not there to perform them live.  

“Good Grief” emerged from Bareilles’s grief journey after losing two young, close friends. Chad Joseph, her college best friend and former manager, died of lung cancer in 2020, and Gavin Creel, who starred beside Bareilles as Dr. Pomatter in “Waitress,” passed away from an aggressive cancer of the nerves in 2024. Bareilles’s music takes on both personal struggles and larger social injustices as she attempts to reconcile her purpose in the world with her own turbulent experience within it.

I attended the exhibit for three hours on the last day. The theater lobby was noticeably alive, the same current seemingly running through everyone’s bones. Some people were laughing, some were crying; some were recounting their own stories of grief, some were writing those stories down. Very few were on their phones. The public display of laughter and mourning was balm in an age that prioritizes perfect poses and carefully curated content. A few of the anonymous letters particularly struck me.

I am a twin. Well, I was a twin. My brother passed away from cancer a few months before our 21st birthday. Being a twin—and now not being a twin—is a really different experience. Everyone spends their whole lives looking for a soulmate, but we lucky few are born with ours. Honestly I don’t know how the rest of you manage without a twin, because I certainly am not managing well. I’m 32 now and feel just as lost now as the day he died.

Tomorrow will mark my 5th anniversary in the US. I am a Syrian refugee and I live in New York City now. I hate wars and the stereotypes it creates. As a Syrian, I am not allowed to go to any country in the world. I can’t see my mom and sister who are now refugees in another country. It has been three years now. Other than this, I am a happy person and very grateful to be here. Hopefully I will be able to go home soon.

I’m nine. Age so defines me and so doesn’t…. It’s so weird to think that everyone has a life, as ridiculous as it may sound. That person who you waited in line behind at the grocery store has a life. Their own dreams, fears, problems, goals. 

(Were you that smart at 9 years old? Because I certainly don’t think I was!)

Another person’s frank honesty made me smile: “Things I think about: Sometimes it’s hard to be a mom. Does anyone REALLY floss?” (Feel free to sound off in the comments.)

And I appreciated this person’s enthusiasm: “Life is just a series of statements. YOU HAVE TO ADD THE EXCLAMATIONS.” (NOTED! I WILL!) 

Two hours later, I still hadn’t made it through half of the submissions. But out came Bareilles to perform, so I had to pause. 

I watched from the lobby balcony as Lincoln Center staff wheeled out a grand piano and stationed a microphone on the floor of the foyer. Bareilles walked out and warmly greeted her fans—hundreds of people crowded around the piano, and 15 rows of people huddled behind the outside wall of the front entrance, ready to listen to the music being piped outside. 

Without drawing much attention to herself, Bareilles immediately joked with the crowd: “Tap your nose if you can hear me!” We giggled. It is a unique experience to have a celebrity make you feel like you’re a kindergartener again. Bareilles was genuine and relatable. Her almost innocent personality, the way she humbly interacted with her audience, sold me as a fan. But her true gift was her ability to translate that radiant warmth vocally. The acoustic setting—Bareilles had only the piano, a single microphone and her voice to perform with—carried the depth of her lyrics even further than what the recorded album allowed.

“Home,” the album’s opener, begins intimately, later erupting with vocal power as Bareilles captures the anguish of living daily with her grief. The title, inspired by an interview between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper on Cooper’s “All There Is With Anderson Cooper,” refers to Cooper’s experience of freeing his own suppressed grief: “It’s about telling your story, and telling your story warts and all. [That’s] the thing that brings you back home. And I think of home as being a place of connection.” 

Cooper and Colbert shared mutual moments of grief on the episode; Colbert, a lifelong, proud Catholic, recounted his own story of losing his father and two brothers in a plane crash when he was 10 years old. Leaning heavily on his faith, Colbert gradually learned to “love the thing that I most wish had not happened.” It was a perspective that shifted his reliance on God over the course of his life. He shared the same story with James Martin, S.J., of America on an episode of “The Spiritual Life” in 2025. 

Bareilles, who later appeared on Anderson Cooper’s podcast herself, quipped that the lyrics were “pretty much plagiarism from that conversation.” The chorus of “Home” is deeply comforting, as if Bareilles were sitting next to you on the couch, embracing you in a hug. “So, tell me your story, I’ll tell you mine/ You don’t need to worry, everything’s alright/ You’ll be the universe, nothing to hide/ Anywhere you ever need to go, I can carry us home.”

“Ladies in a Line” aches with desperation as Bareilles exposes her struggles with infertility and the accompanying sense of helplessness that has weighed on her. The lyrics—“Empty arms/ With lists of names/ The cruel truth of starting late/ Life was asking/ Other questions ’til now”—grapple with the grief and impossible pressure of choosing to prioritize a successful career over motherhood. The melancholic tone yearns for someone to hear, someone to relate, someone to listen. In true fashion, though, Bareilles’s steady hope pushes through: “The thing that keeps me going/ is a quiet kind of faith/ That what is meant to find me will find me/ Anywhere I am anyway.” 

“Heartland” pierced my heart the deepest. Written from the perspective of the Statue of Liberty, the song reckons with themes of freedom, migration and reconciliation in the context of our current national identity. Bareilles’s lyrics bring to mind Christian commitments to human dignity and solidarity amid a tumultuous U.S. political landscape: “Give me your tired and poor/ Trying to be free/ Oh, huddled masses just asking for mercy/ Bring them all to me.” 

In the song, she humanizes precisely the people on the margins whom Jesus ministered to. The final few lines are a desperate plea to stay focused on preserving democracy: “Call on me, break me down/ And build me back up from these charnel grounds/ Fight for me to stay alive/ That’s the only way we survive.” 

“Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” a collaboration with American singer-songwriter Brandi Carlile, contains lyrics I just can’t seem to get out of my head: “So keep the novocaine out of my wisdom teeth/ Want to feel it all/ Salt then sour, then sweet.” Who would have thought dentistry could be so eloquent? 

The second verse centers the courage and the vulnerability necessary to “feel it all”: “I wanna cherish the trying and the living and the dying/ And make big mistakes the way kind people do.” Kind people. She could have just said people. But no, kind people. She is firm and specific. “So sweet,” the song repeats as it closes, Bareilles persistent in her search to find the light.

“My prayer for this music,” Bareilles quietly said as she stood up to leave after her 30-minute performance, “is that it offers comfort to other people who might be feeling the same way.” And indeed it did. Hundreds of people in that lobby collectively grieved, listened, hoped, wondered and found joy in the depth of each other’s lives. That is just what Bareilles does as an artist. That is what she continues to do. And that is what each of us is called to do. That’s the marvel of being human. Good grief! That, in and of itself, gives me hope.

Molly Wysocki is an O'Hare Fellow at America Media.