Sara Bareilles: Good Grief [Tribeca Festival Review]

by Mike McGranaghan

Sara Bareilles last made an album in 2019. Seven years is a long time for a popular artist to go without new material. Then again, life wasn’t exactly conducive to productivity. The COVID virus shut the world down for a time. Bareilles also lost her best friend to cancer and went through an arduous, unsuccessful fertility journey. All that on top of trying to manage the depression and anxiety she has previously spoken publicly about. Sara Bareilles: Good Grief, which had its world premiere at the 2026 Tribeca Festival, details her return to the studio, ready to turn pain into art.

The singer arrives at a small New York studio that used to be a church. A handpicked group of close collaborators join her. Together, they flesh out the raw demos she provides, trying to find the right sound for every song. Because of the emotional content of the lyrics, tears flow readily. “Just a Kid” is an ode to her late friend; “Ladies in a Line” is about fertility clinics. One musician jokes that the album is “songs about not-life and death.” Bareilles is not alone in exorcising demons. Guitarist Butterfly Boucher is similarly having fertility problems, while keyboardist Misty Boyce is struggling with the challenges of being a working mom.

Director Josh Alexander makes the smart choice to let us hear the songs in full, as compared to similar documentaries that just provide snippets. This allows us to absorb the content of each composition, but also to take note of the soulfulness with which Bareilles sings them. You can literally see her pouring her heart and soul into the vocals. There are moments of joy, as when random stomping on the floor provides a perfect backbeat for one tune, and moments of sadness where we aren’t sure Bareilles is even going to be able to get through a song without breaking down.

Good Grief is an illuminating film about how an album is recorded. It’s an even better film about how pain can be transformed into something healing. Bareilles and her collaborators are fearlessly open for the cameras, allowing their rawness to be captured. Recording these songs is a way of releasing the anguish so that a form of healing can take place. There is a magical quality to how Bareilles wrangles the final recordings into being so that the tragedies she’s endured will at least have some kind of upside.

Did I mention the songs are incredible? They really are. It seems clear that this will be a landmark album in Bareilles’ career – her version of Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska or Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. And there’s no doubt that seeing Sara Bareilles: Good Grief will make those songs hit even harder because you’ll know what it took to bring them into existence.

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