Sara Bareilles On: The Feelings You Fear Might Destroy You, What Antidepressants Actually Did to Her Creativity, and Why There's Nothing to Fix

What It Covers

Grammy-winning songwriter Sara Bareilles speaks with Dan Harris about her album *Good Grief*, built around losing three close friends — Chad Joseph, Gavin Creel, and poet Andrea Gibson. She addresses antidepressant use, creative silence, fertility struggles, grief as transformation, and the practice of staying present with painful emotions rather than suppressing them.

Key Questions Answered

• •Grief as presence practice: Grief functions as what poet Andrea Gibson calls "a shortcut to the truth" — it strips away distraction and forces acute awareness of the present moment. Bareilles describes grief producing a rawness that bypasses the mental editor, creating a state similar to what meditation teachers cultivate deliberately. Sitting with overwhelming emotion, rather than fleeing it, produces a tenderizing effect that changes perception of daily life.
• •Medication and creativity: Bareilles held a years-long fear that Lexapro would suppress her artistic voice or distance her from authentic emotion. Her actual experience was the opposite — she describes the medication as a return to self-recognition rather than suppression. The more useful question, she argues, is not whether one is "enlightened enough" to go without medication, but whether the absence of it prevents any meaningful functioning or creative output at all.
• •Name it to tame it: Verbalizing fear or emotional wobbliness — rather than isolating with it — reduces its intensity. Bareilles applies this directly: she found that press interviews about grief-themed material became the antidote to pre-release anxiety, because naming the feelings in conversation with others diminished their power. The principle maps directly onto the therapeutic concept of affect labeling, which reduces amygdala activation.
• •Clearing the channel for creative work: Bareilles describes her songwriting philosophy as treating herself as a portal rather than an author — the music exists in the ether and arrives through a cleared channel. Practically, this means ejecting the internal editor during drafting, staying in the mystery of the process, and releasing ownership of the output. Several songs on *Good Grief*, including "Say Leave" and "Wind Is the Weather," arrived nearly fully formed through this approach.
• •Acceptance versus resignation in fertility: After years of unsuccessful fertility treatments, a failed egg retrieval in Colorado, and a miscarriage in early 2025, Bareilles distinguishes between accepting circumstances and surrendering to them permanently. She frames unexpected outcomes — including a failed retrieval that produced no egg — as containing embedded value: the Colorado trip led to involvement in Andrea Gibson's documentary *Come See Me in the Good Light*, which she describes as life-altering.
• •Patriotism and grief as overlapping experiences: Bareilles wrote "Heartland" from the perspective of the Statue of Liberty and the Constitution as personified figures, framing political disillusionment explicitly as grief rather than anger. The distinction matters practically: grief allows for continued love of an ideal alongside clear-eyed acknowledgment of failure, whereas anger tends toward either all-caps outrage or resignation. Naming political loss as grief opens a path that neither denial nor despair provides.