NBC’s ‘The Sing Off’ hits #1 on iTunes: Sara Bareilles, Ben Folds talk hit show

by Dana Feldman

NBC’s all vocal competition series ‘The Sing-Off’ has struck a chord with music lovers everywhere. With the many changes in today’s entertainment industry, and the new YouTube social media onslaught of talented artists getting instant fame, ‘The Sing-Off’ is another avenue for people to travel on their way to success and hopes of stardom. In its third season, the weekly show was expanded to a twelve episode run which began on Monday, September 19th with the new weekly format including two-hour episodes throughout the fall season. The show started off with sixteen featured a cappella groups all of whom perform weekly without any back up music or instruments, only their voices.

The show has also impacted the iTunes Soundtrack charts holding nineteen spots on the iTunes Soundtracks Top 100 Chart, which is more than any other television series. Included is Dartmouth Aires’ medley of classic tunes from the legendary Queen thus taking the number one spot as well as a recent weekly album from ‘The Sing-Off’ taking one of the top three spots on the Soundtrack Albums chart.

Proven as a regular presence on the iTunes Soundtrack charts, the show showcases some of the most talented vocalists on television week-after-week. Groups have performed popular superstar medleys from artists including Billy Joel, Janet Jackson and Elvis Presley. Many genres including Classical Rock and Country have been performed further proving the versatility of these artists.

Hosted by multi-platinum recording artist Nick Lachey, the show welcomes new judge Sara Bareilles (“Love Song” and “King of Anything”) as well as returning talent, judges Ben Folds (Ben Folds Five) and Shawn Stockman (Boyz II Men). Unique in that this is a show with a singing competition of live a cappella music, Lachey describes its intrigue as, “I have performed this type of music since I was a teenager with 98 Degrees.” Saying how they were signed to Motown from this genre, he goes on to further explain that, “There is nowhere to hide with this type of music. We are educating people about a cappella and that it can be anything.”

Stockman adds, “The significance of the show is that it symbolizes harmony. This is a feel-good show.” He acknowledges the seriousness and what is at stake as the competition is for a Sony Music recording contract, as well as a $200,000 cash prize. A lot is on the line for these singers. Adding, “There is a circle of respect and this show truly promotes camaraderie.”

Per Folds of his reasons for joining as a judge, “I was compelled to do this as I want to champion this type of music, it has a special vibe.” Saying how different this show is than any other TV music competitions currently on the air, he says of it, “The show is different due to the fact that these are people who are singing together — a cappella is a genuine community.”

The addition of Bareilles brought in many viewers, as well, and for her it was a no-brainer to do this show. “First and foremost, I am a fan of this genre of music as it showcases one of the hardest things to do — to arrange a familiar song this way is very unique and difficult.” She feels that her job as a judge is to not only be articulate, but to judge the range of dynamics and back-stories of the talent. “My job is to help them to perfect their technique and give my opinion. It is not my job to tell people to give up music. I give technical advice and constructive criticism. I am not here to be a dream killer. I want to show them where there might be room for growth.”

“The Sing Off” airs Mondays from 8 to 10PM ET. Tune in for the live finale on Monday, November 28th where the winner will be announced and on Monday, December 5th for the holiday special.

Sara Bareilles follows her “intuition” with new Uncharted single

For her second single from her second album Kaleidoscope Heart, Sara Bareilles has chosen the song Uncharted and released the accompanying music video today. The song, as Bareilles explained to Beatweek late last year, documented her own struggle with writer’s block after Love Song from her first album became a major hit. At the time of the album’s release she hadn’t yet decided on a single, but she did tell Beatweek that “Uncharted is obviously a very special song to me, so there’s a part of me that feels very drawn to follow my intuition and put that out there.” She also revealed that Gonna Get Over You was “in the running” and that Hold My Heart “will be a single at some point.”

Sara Bareilles is currently on tour in Europe and will be returning to the U.S. for tour dates starting in April. In the meantime the music video for Uncharted, which features guest appearances from artists including Josh Groban, Ingrid Michaelson, Pharrell Williams, Adam Levine, Ben Folds, and many others, can be seen here. And Beatweek’s in depth interview with Sara Bareilles from late 2010 is right here.

Beatweek Magazine January 2011 Double Issue: Carlos Santana and much more

Beatweek Magazine’s January 2011 Double Issue highlights:

• Carlos Santana cover story interview: his new album Guitar Heaven, Las Vegas residency, how he puts his iPad to good use, and more

• The top iPad and iPhone accessories of the year including iPad and iPhone batteries and iPad keyboards

• Interviews with Sara Bareilles, Smashing Pumpkins, Jason Derulo, Fefe Dobson, and The Black Crowes

• Macworld 2011 conversation with Paul Kent

• Much more in this massive 120-page double issue!

Read this issue now

Subscribe for free

Sara Bareilles: Beatweek 2010 Artist of the Year

When 2010 started, Sara Bareilles had one hit song to her name and had seemingly waited too long to follow up on it. But by the time the year was over that had all changed, as her September release Kaleidoscope Heart debuted at number on one the charts, spawned a new Grammy-nominated hit single of its own with King Of Anything, and contains a treasure trove of other potential hits which will fill the radio airwaves throughout 2011. The trick to it all, as Sara told Beatweek at the time of the album’s release, was to get past her long running writer’s block by witting a song called Uncharted which cleverly documented the awkward position that her first hit Love Song had placed her in career-wise. Not coincidentally, Uncharted has been pegged as her next single.

Other albums and tours sold more this year, but no one did more in 2010 to establish themselves as an artist who will be with us for a generation than Sara Bareilles. Not bad for an artist who back in 2007 was, comically in hindsight, tagged as a one-hit wonder by many a music pundit. As such, Beatweek is pleased to name Sara Bareilles our Artist of the Year for 2010. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take her another three years to come up with her third album. Here’s our conversation with Sara Bareilles.

Black Friday: Sara Bareilles Kaleidoscope Heart for $1.99 on AmazonMP3

Sara Bareilles probably doesn’t need to be practically giving away her new album, as it already debuted at number one on the Billboard charts back in September. But she’s doing just that, or at least Amazon is, as Kaleidoscope Heart is currently available online through AmazonMP3 for a mere $1.99 as part of the online retailer’s Black Friday efforts. While Amazon hasn’t come close to competing with rival iTunes in terms of digital music sales marketshare, it’s generally regarded as the only mainstream competitor that’s actually succeeding on any level, and that’s most often credited to bargain bonanza prices on popular releases such as this.

Sara Bareilles is, of course, she of the cover of Beatweek Magazine’s 83rd issue, and you can find our full interview with Sara right here.

The downside to buying Sara’s chart topping followup to her first album Little Voice? Amazon MP3 music is full compatible with iTunes but it’s a pain in the you know what to not only shop via Amazon’s clunky digital music interface, but then have to shuttle those purchases into iTunes – and Amazon is still inexplicably selling music in the fully obsolete MP3 format, which is still playable in iTunes but doesn’t sound as longtime standard AAC, which iTunes has been using since 2003. The upside: you get to put eight bucks back into your pocket, as Kaleidoscope Heart sells for ten bucks through iTunes.

The official Sara Bareilles quote regarding her deeply discounted album: “That’s turkey for ya.” You can find Kaleidoscope Heart, which includes hit single King of Anything and forthcoming single Uncharted, right here for $1.99.

Sara Bareilles gets shrimp marinara named after her

Sara Bareilles was recently presented with the option of ordering a dish which had been named after her, thanks to a restaurant she encountered in her travels during her current tour. The restaurant’s specials board listed the “Sara Bareilles Shrimp Marinara” which had presumably done in honor of her arrival in town, along with various soups. Of the occurrence, Bareilles tweeted “Thank you to the sweet lil spot next to the venue who named dinner after me. Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

Sara Bareilles is currently on tour in support of her new album Kaleidoscope Heart, which debuted last month at number one on the Billboard and iTunes charts, and includes the hit single King of Anything. Her past hits include Love Song and live favorite Gravity. Sara recently spoke with Beatweek about her new album and more.

Beatweek Magazine issue #83: Sara Bareilles, Ping, Anberlin, Twitter for iPad, Jessie James, Kirsten Price

New in the 83rd issue of Beatweek Magazine:

• Sara Bareilles interview: uncharted territory and her first new album in three years

• inside the iTunes Ping social network

• Anberlin interview: light and dark and the art of the impossible

• hands on with the new Twitter for iPad app

• Jessie James interview: the country pop singer on her next album

• interview with indie singer-songwriter Kirsten Price

Read this issue now

Subscribe for free

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

Learn more at SaraBareilles.com • iTunes • Twitter • Facebook

Sara Bareilles talks Uncharted, Kaleidoscope Heart, King of Anything

After a three year wait, the new album from Sara Bareilles is less than two weeks away from seeing the light of day. Beatweek spoke with Sara this week about her new record entitled Kaleidoscope Heart and the song “Uncharted” which inspired not only the album title but also opened the floodgates to allow her to create the rest of the album after having been “stuck under this ceiling” as she described in it the lyrics of the song. “I sat down and, really, for the first time in a long time, had written a song that really meant something to me,” Bareilles told Beatweek while chatting from her tour bus. The song explores the uncharted territory she found herself in when she sat down to start work on this album knowing that any song she wrote was “most likely gonna end up being compared to Love Song,” her smash hit song from her previous record in 2007.

Sara also revealed to Beatweek who her new hit single “King of Anything” is really about – and you can read all about it (and much more) in the cover story interview with Sara Bareilles in the September 7th issue of Beatweek Magazine. Not coincidentally, that’s the same day Kaleidoscope Heart is set for release.