Sara Bareilles is not your grief guru

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Set us as preferred Sara Bareilles almost got through this interview without crying.Almost.

Her eyes started brimming with tears during the final question, revealing that her last sob session occurred just that morning.“I’m having a little bit of a grief spike,” she said over a video chat from Chicago while on tour.“The end of September is rough.”Sitting on a cream-colored couch with her ever-present dog Louie snuggled beside her lap, Bareilles explained the pummeling anniversaries approaching: the birthday of Chad Joseph, her best friend from college and former manager who died in 2020 after a Stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis, and the 2024 death of Gavin Creel, another dear friend and her co-star on Broadway in “Into the Woods.”The pain of losing both men in quick succession, along with the uncertainty of the lockdown phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, the cancellation of her Tina Fey-produced comedy series “Girls5Eva” and years of disappointing fertility treatments (“I fully thought I would have a baby by now,” the 46-year-old said.) bubble over in “Good Grief,” the singer-songwriter’s first solo album in seven years.In the parlance of “She Used to Be Mine,” from Bareilles’ Tony Award-nominated “Waitress” score, the new album’s excavation of anguish, rage, joy and everything in between is “mixed up and baked in a beautiful pie.”So it’s understandable that Bareilles felt “wobbly” even trying to say her friends’ names while making the rounds (with plenty of tissues on hand) to promote the album and its accompanying making-of documentary, now in theaters.

“There’s just something that starts to crumble,” she said of consistently revisiting this emotional state.“I was making jokes about there will be a compilation at some point of ‘This b— can’t stop crying.’”Beca...