Sara Bareilles interview

“I don’t have any trouble being very honest with my lyrics,” she says of the fact that her new single King of Anything is an even more blatant kiss-off than her last hit song. But the phenomenal success of Love Song three years ago, rather than setting her free, left Sara Bareilles stuck under a self-imposed ceiling of expectations and unable to write any material she cared for. And it wasn’t until she decided to turn her frustrations into lyrics that the floodgates opened in the form of a song called Uncharted, which ultimately turned out to be the centerpiece of her new album Kaleidoscope Heart. “It helped me get over my writer’s block,” she says of Uncharted, “and it was a nice moment of connection with my producer of the first record, Eric Rosse. He and I sat and had a chat about how overwhelmed I was and stressed out about trying to produce material for the next record, and he basically was like, “You know, it sounds like that’s your song right there.” And so at his encouragement I sat down and really, for the first time in a long time, had written a song that really meant something to me.”

That the central component of an artist’s second record was written as a reaction to the success of the first record might seem cliche in a different context, but in this case it was more about addressing the issue for the sake of letting it go. “I’m so happy that I had the success that I did with Love Song, but it does mean that everything that I do from now on is gonna be measured up to the success of that song. So that was something I really had to say, and then kind of let go of to a certain extent and really divorce myself from owning that expectation and letting myself release it into the universe and move forward.”

Uncharted even goes so far as to very pleasantly drop a seemingly anti-inspirational message on listeners near the end in the form of “Compare where you are to where you want to be and you’ll get nowhere.” But even that, Sara says, is all about detaching the artistry from the expectations.

“I think it’s the idea that you end up being crippled by being so attached to the outcome. I think that’s one of the many lessons I’ve learned in my experience is that the more I’m attached to what the outcome looks like exactly, the less likely I am to actually end up there.”

But even with the role Uncharted played in bringing the rest of the album to life, it was the sonically peppy song King of Anything that Sara knew she wanted as her lead single as soon as she’d finished writing it. As upbeat as the song is, the message is nothing short of devastating, as she spends three and a half minutes telling a know it all to back off. As it turns out, her honesty as a songwriter extends to being perfectly willing to reveal what her songs are about. Whereas she famously admitted that Love Song was written as a way of telling her label that she wasn’t interested in writing a love song for her first record, King of Anything was once again aimed at her own inner circle.

“It was actually kind of ironic, because it came about in a very manner as Love Song did,” Sara says of King of Anything. “It was at a point where I felt like I had sort of finished the record from a writing standpoint, and I was just sharing the music for the first time with people that are in my inner circle, so it’s management and a couple of people from the label and bandmates. And I didn’t realize how defensive I would be about their feedback. It was totally what I was asking for, that’s the purpose of playing new music for people, is to get some sense of how does someone else hear this song? But I got really protective and really defensive, and I I remember having this moment of clarity of saying to myself, and so it begins again.”

So why the emphasis on making it the first single? “I felt like that was my message to myself and to the world right now. Not everyone’s gonna like this record, there’s gonna be people that think that I’ve gone in a direction that they don’t support or whatever, but ultimately I have to know that I love it.”

The success of King of Anything on the heels of Love Song, then, begs the question of just how it is that Sara Bareilles get away with continuing to score radio hits by smiling away while dropping lyrical bombs. “I think the trick is, if you can sort of play musically and make it sound happy, or make it sound light and bright, and kind of juxtapose the depth or the darkness of the message with something that is fun to listen to. For some reason, that kind of combination is really appealing to me. It’s funny, it honestly makes me laugh to sort of tell someone to kiss off while you’re dancing around.”

But even if her fans are prepared by now for the stern messages wrapped in pretty packaging, they might still be spooked by the appearance of another person’s on the album in a song called, appropriately enough, Not Alone.

“He’s a character out of one of his own films,” she says of the fact that none other than the late Alfred Hitchcock makes a brief cameo in the song, in the form of a quote from an interview. So how did she end up deciding to use Hitchcock’s voice of all things? “We were playing with the idea of adding a musical interlude to that song because it just sort of felt like it needed something to smooth out the transition in the middle section of the song. And so I kind of wrote this very flowery piano part, and then my producer Neal [Avron] got excited about writing a little string arrangement, a kind of 1930′s sounding, old movie string arrangement. And then so we added that part to the song, and we always felt like it was just the perfect bedrock or foundation for something else. And I thought it would be amazing to get a quote from an old movie, and so I started looking online. When I think about some of my old movies, they’re Hitchcock films. I was looking at films like The Birds, but it never felt like I found a quote that made sense. And then I started looking at interviews of Hitchcock himself, and that totally spoke to me.”

Those fans who most endeared to the earnest ballads of her first record are in luck again this time around, with songs like Hold My Heart, which “will be a single” at some point. And the theme of letting go permeates through other songs, including the hopeful Let The Rain.

“That song to me is very much about rebirth and trying to find solace in letting go. I think a big theme for me this record was all about facing challenge head on, facing fear, facing anxiety, facing your own strengths. It was all about kind of embracing what was going on on the inside. To me, the actual physical sense of being baptized is a very unique and purposeful metaphor.”

She doesn’t get a lot of credit for it, but Sara Bareilles was one of the earliest major label musicians to find her way onto Twitter, back in the middle of 2007 when most people hadn’t even yet heard of it. But, continuing with the honesty theme, when her former marketing manager at Epic Records first mentioned the emerging social network to her, “I thought it was the dumbest idea of all time. I agreed and started an account, but I was like ‘This is the most pointless thing I’ve ever even heard of.’”

But although Twitter back in 2007 still consisted largely of everyone “talking about how they eat toast in the morning,” she stuck with it over the years and has been rewarded with followers in the millions. “I’ve actually really embraced it. I like it a lot actually now. I think partially because there’s no filter. It is the direct connection between the artist and the fan. And I think that’s why fans love it so much too. There’s no middleman.”

So now that Sara’s first two major hit songs have both been of the pleasantly devastating variety, does she feel any need to go in a different direction for her next single? “It’s not something I really consider. The choices that I make when I’m writing are always to make sure that the song is coming from an authentic place. And so if there seems to be a pattern with that, it’s probably because I was going through something over and over again and had to get it out in an artistic way. So I don’t worry too much about having the same message come out.”

And as far as how those only judging her from her radio hits might perceive her as a person, “as long as the message is true and authentic to the author, I guess it’s just out of your hands at that point.”

interview by Bill Palmer

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About Bill Palmer

Bill Palmer is Editor in Chief of Beatweek Magazine. His editorial contributions include interviews with musicians and iPhone industry coverage.