Sinatra sang that you could make a “brand new start of it” in New York, so maybe it shouldn’t come as a total surprise that Sara Bareilles is doing just that in the Big Apple. From a new home to a new band to new music, it seems the “Love Song” singer has completely shaken up her life.
Actually, correction: she currently is without a band. Bareilles is trekking across the country solo with the “Brave Enough” tour, the first time she has ever performed a stretch of dates alone on stage.
“I think I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve played a show by myself,” Bareilles told “The Ralphie Show” during an in-studio visit. “And I think I hide behind (the band) in a lot of ways, so it’s very raw.”
The California-born songstress admitted she’s worried.
“I don’t really know how to prepare for this, but there’s a part of that that’s actually really exciting to me,” she elaborated. “It’s gonna be a communion with the audience.”
Bareilles is flying solo again in more than one way. She says that she “recently out of a long relationship” and separated from her band mates, permanently. Her former band includes now ex-boyfriend Javier Dunn.
“All of these splits were really amicable and really loving but just feeling like I needed to move in to some new directions,” she explained. “It’s been a really introspective year from me. A lot of heart break, and heart ache but I feel a lot of expansion.”
This is ironic, because she surely doesn’t have the square footage in lower Manhattan that she had back in California. Even if she does, Bareilles noted that everyone is “on top of each other” in New York. She doesn’t seem to mind.
“There’s something about the energy here,” the singer observed. “I’ve just been super-inspired by literally just walking the streets and seeing graffiti and then hearing music pour out of the windows.”
Bareilles fell in love with the city last fall while working on her forthcoming LP, The Blessed Unrest, due out this July. It spawned the appropriately-titled first single, “Brave,” which Sara worked on with fun.’s Jack Antonoff. She eventually moved to Manhattan in January, and the drastic climate change was a bit of a culture shock to her.
“I don’t know if you guys are aware, but it’s quite cold here in January,” she joked. “There were some brutal days. I’m used to 70 degrees and sunny all the time. So when I’m crying (while) walking down the street carrying my laundry, I’m like, ‘What am I doing here?’”
Yes, I followed up on this, and Bareilles does in fact carry her laundry to and from her apartment. She drops it off at a wash-and-fold, but still, her modesty and girl-next-door persona have not vanished through all of this change. Nor has her sailor’s mouth.
“I even tweeted, ‘The subway’s my b-tch!’” recalled Bareilles, shortly before she would go on to miss her stop and end up lost. “I have no idea where I was about to end up.”
She could probably say the same for other aspects of her life. And like she’s doing with her music, and her personal life, she figured it out, and moved on.
