I stumbled upon this really interesting interview:
Sara Bareilles Speaks To MC
Almost seven years after her debut hit tune, “Love Song,” catapulted Sara Bareilles into the limelight, the singer-songwriter has sold more than a million copies of her major label debut, Little Voice, received multiple Grammy nominations and judged the singing competition TV program The Sing-Off. Early this year, the singer, known for her powerful vocals and piano-driven melodies, left her comfortable hidey-hole in Los Angeles and moved to New York in the hopes of igniting a creative spark. There, she wrote her fourth LP, The Blessed Unrest, which dropped July 12th. Typically a solitary songwriter, she co-wrote the record’s first single, “Brave,” with Jack Antonoff of Fun. and embarked on her first solo acoustic tour. In this exclusive interview, Bareilles tells Music Connection about deviating from the norm and how her new experiences have impacted her latest work.
Music Connection: We’ve heard you’ve been a Music Connection reader, especially when you first started out. How did that and other music sources influence you when you first started out?
Sara Bareilles: Music Connection was one of the very first publications to feature me back when I was still at UCLA. It may have been a modest mention, and I am pretty sure I was wearing something hideous in the picture, but it was a huge deal to me. Feeling accepted and validated within the music community, I felt attached to that moment, and it made a big impact on me. I am very, very grateful.
MC: How and where specifically did you get your music career off the ground?
Bareilles: I got started through the L.A. community. It was really supportive. I started doing open mics and really small shows around the city, and it grew organically. Molly Malone’s, Westwood Brewing, Hotel Café. There also was a place called Space 6507 that I don’t think exists anymore.
MC: How did you manage your career when first starting out?
Bareilles: I did, for the most part, but a good friend of mine was really helpful in the beginning stages. He was my roommate at the time. He would burn CDs and have the clipboard with my email list at the shows and helped make those early days possible. I was very lucky to be put in touch with my manager, Jordan Feldstein, who I met early in my career as well.
MC: You just completed your first solo acoustic tour. As a singer-songwriter, does the solo tour experience differ from touring with a band?
Bareilles: I’m sure, as anyone can imagine, it’s different. It’s solitary by nature, so it’s a very introspective experience. At first it was a little lonely, though I was sharing the road with a great crew, but the musical experience is a different rhythm when you’re not sharing a performance space with a band.
I actually ended up loving it. It made me feel incredibly close to the audience, which I had been craving, and the shows were super rewarding in that way. There was no filter between the audience and myself.
As my first solo acoustic tour, I was terrified. I was trying to fill up the space. I didn’t think that was something I could do, and with prodding and urging, I just kind of felt like it was time to embrace the challenge, and it ended up being totally okay.
MC: How has fan interaction impacted your career? How do you use social media to your advantage?
Bareilles: I don’t really have media training. I was the judge on The Sing-Off, and that was the only time I remember having formal media training. And I think social media is hugely helpful and impactful in the sense that it makes fans feel close to their artist. I’m very active on Twitter and Facebook and on my website, and I like to keep things as complete as possible. But I also think it’s important to keep the line of privacy. I’m not the kind of person who wants to share everything, though I like to share a lot of myself onstage.
MC: Why was “Brave” chosen as The Blessed Unrest’s first single?
Sara Bareilles: It felt like an obvious choice to me. I really connected to the message of that song on a deep level, and personally and professionally I wanted that to be my first statement. I felt it was a progression for me sonically. It sounded like something not quite like anything I’d done, but you could still hear me in all of it. I was really pushing for that. It wasn’t a hard battle; everyone agreed it was a good one to start with.
MC: “Brave” was co-written with Jack Antonoff from Fun. How did you end up teaming with him?
Bareilles: Sara Quin, half of Tegan and Sara, is a mutual friend, and she suggested Jack, because she had done some writing with him. I was talking to Sara about wanting to collaborate and wanted to find the right fit. So it was really serendipitous. I met him, and he was amazing.
MC: What is the co-writing experience like, particularly when the co-writer is also a prominent performing artist? What did each of you bring to the song?
Bareilles: Co-writing is all about chemistry, about whether or not you’ll feel comfortable with another person in the room. I think Jack and I had great chemistry from the get-go. If [your co-writer] is also a performing artist, it can inform the writing process in a lot of cool ways. You think of things in terms of what will happen onstage. You’re imagining playing live instead of just about what’s happening in the room. Jack was hugely helpful in helping me feel I could achieve some larger goals. Everybody works differently, and every situation is different. Jack had a track prepared, and I wrote the melody and lyrics with him involved. It felt like it was very collaborative.
MC: What was it like working with producer John O’Mahoney?
Bareilles: Awesome. It was very easy. We met through mutual friends. He’s a really thoughtful producer. He has strong opinions and doesn’t sugarcoat anything. If you work well with that, it’s a great fit. John helped me strip away some of my fear about being vulnerable and being wrong. It felt very collaborative.
MC: What about producer Mark Endert? How did his style differ from O’Mahoney’s, and why work with multiple producers?
Bareilles: Like an artist, every producer has a different style. Working with Mark, I let go of the reins a little more. He had a specific vision, so it was a practice in letting go for me. Of course I’m kind of a control freak as well, and I want to have my hands all over everything. It was very different. With John, I felt like we were building a castle block by block together, and with Mark, I felt like he constructed a lot of the castle, and I came in and made my changes. Both were rewarding in their own ways.
MC: Why do you like to co-produce your records?
Bareilles: I have concrete opinions on the way something sounds, the way the arrangement feels, the structure and foundation of the music. It’s not just coming in and singing vocals.
MC: Your voice is so pure. Were you trained to sing professionally? Do you still work with a vocal coach?
Bareilles: I wasn’t trained professionally. I did start taking lessons later in my career, which was helpful in building stamina and strength. I started singing very young as a kid. My older sister was very involved in theater; she was a singer. There was always music around the house, and I just fell into that. I’ve worked with John Deaver out of L.A. I’ve worked with Liz Caplan, and I’ve worked with Wendy Parr. Now I’m in a new environment and just seeing what teaching styles are like [in New York].
MC: What role does your record label play in your career? Is Epic Records very hands-on in working with you?
Bareilles: They are hands-on. I think one of the things they’ve done well on this record is they’ve left me to my own devices, and that was really important. Feeling a lot of pressure and like timelines are coming down on you or that you’re disappointing the business on some level is disruptive to the creative part of my brain. They were gentle and left me alone for the most part. The industry is going through so many changes and Epic is still in flux, and they made me feel like I was welcome.
MC: How has moving to New York City impacted your music?
Bareilles: I moved to New York in January of this year, and it is incredibly different. It’s different in terms of timbre and cadence and energetic vibrations, to sound really hippie dippie. It couldn’t be more opposite. It felt more chaotic, with so many people all on top of each other. There’s a web of lives and stories happening around you.
Los Angeles is much more solitary, at least for me. I had a little house there. Your car separates you from people. I think in L.A. I had a little more of a lethargic lifestyle. Some of that was good, cozy, comfortable. There was an incredible network of friends I miss dearly, but creatively I needed a jumpstart into something else, and New York gave me that leg up.
MC: How did the production and writing of this record differ from pass efforts?
Sara Bareilles: Recording this record was quite different from my previous records in that this one happened in installments. I used a variety of producers and recording studios over a period of about four months and took the whole of the record in bite-sized chunks. I think, in some ways, this was how the record stayed so fresh for me, but I have to admit that by the end of the recording process, it felt like I had been recording forever. I was happy to step away and get back onstage to connect with live performance.
Overall, the writing process and recording process were both much more collaborative for me this time around, and that was also a big difference. I ended up co-writing about half the record, and I’m very proud of that. I loved my collaborators, and I feel like I learned a lot through working with each and every one of them.
MC: Do you have a process or particular conditions for songwriting?
Bareilles: Songwriting is different each time, but the great majority of the time, I start with my piano at home. I love writing in the mornings, with a cup of coffee and no agenda. I like to see what falls out. It’s usually a melody that comes first, and then the words will follow. If I am really focused and patient, I can sometimes get through a song in one sitting, but usually it takes me a longer time than that. Sometimes years, even. That is why I enjoyed co-writing so much on this record. The process was accelerated in a really fascinating way. So fun.
MC: What influences, musical and otherwise, informed the writing of this record?
Bareilles: The influences on this record are very much inspired by the sounds of my collaborators. Jack Antonoff and his band, Fun., were a great influence on the tracks we wrote, and the songs I wrote with Matt Hales were heavily influenced by my “fangirl” relationship to the music of his project, Aqualung. In addition to that, I think the influences run the gamut of the kind of music I love––everything from Arcade Fire and Sigur Ros to Prince and Raphael Saadiq.
MC: Your debut sold over a million copies and received Grammy nominations. Your second record debuted at number one. What were your expectations for yourself for your third album? How did you realize those expectations or work around them?
Bareilles: I think it goes without saying that you hope your work is successful. For me, it’s always been a challenge to distance myself from what came before and to detach my expectations from everything. “Love Song” was an amazing first step in my career, and it’s been a huge blessing, but also the one thing that everything gets compared to. I wrote that song 10 years ago at this point. I think I wanted to allow myself as an artist, to show different sides of my creative self and allow myself to grow up a little bit, and I feel that was achieved. I’m so proud of this body of work. I think it reflects a really exploratory time in my life, and the new ones are some of my favorite songs I’ve ever written. I’m really happy with this album.
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