Seven years after releasing the Grammy-winning Amidst the Chaos, Sara Bareilles returns to the studio not simply to make another record, but to process a life irrevocably altered by grief, transition, and time. In director Josh Alexander’s deeply moving documentary Sara Bareilles: Good Grief, the creation of an album becomes something far more intimate: a communal act of healing.
Shot across six days during the recording in March of 2025 at Dreamland Studios in Woodstock, NY, the film unfolds with remarkable emotional transparency. Alexander positions the audience directly inside the room with Bareilles and the collaborators she lovingly describes as “her favourite people” – trusted creatives and lifelong friends who become emotional anchors throughout the process. Rather than framing the sessions as polished behind-the-scenes mythology, Good Grief embraces vulnerability, uncertainty, and what Bareilles herself describes as “a little bit of a freefall.”
What makes the documentary resonate so profoundly is the way music becomes inseparable from conversation. The songs are not isolated performances; they emerge organically from deeply personal exchanges about loss, motherhood, marriage, identity, and survival. Among the film’s most affecting moments are Bareilles’ scenes with keyboardist Misty Boyce and Australian musician Butterfly Boucher, whose openness allows the documentary to drift into emotionally raw territory without ever feeling performative.
One particularly stunning sequence arrives when Bareilles shares a demo of “Ladies in a Line,” a song reflecting on her own infertility journey. The room shifts almost imperceptibly. What begins as a casual playback becomes an unguarded conversation between women confronting the realities of expectation, grief, and the changing shape of their lives. Alexander wisely resists over-directing these moments. The camera simply observes, allowing the honesty to land naturally.
Loss hangs over nearly every frame of the documentary, but never in a way that feels consumed by despair. Bareilles’ song “Just a Kid,” written for her best friend Chad Joseph following his death from lung cancer in early 2020, becomes the emotional spine of the film. Her reflections on maintaining a spiritual connection to him while simultaneously fearing the erosion of memory with time are devastating in their simplicity. There’s no grand speech or forced catharsis – just the painful recognition that grief is often tied to the quiet terror of forgetting.
Equally moving is the recording of “Forever,” inspired by her late friend Gavin Creel. Bareilles speaks beautifully about the miracle of finding profound friendship more than once in a lifetime, even as she wrestles with the cruel reality of losing it again. The film understands that grief is rarely linear; it is cumulative, contradictory, and deeply entwined with gratitude.
What ultimately elevates Sara Bareilles: Good Grief beyond a conventional music documentary is its understanding that art is rarely created in isolation. This is not a story about tortured genius or industry spectacle. Instead, it’s about community. About trusted collaborators sitting together in a room and helping one another carry the weight of being alive. The conversations during coffee breaks and recording pauses become just as emotionally revealing as the music itself, while also offering thoughtful reflections on creativity and sustaining artistry in an increasingly exhausting music industry.
The title itself becomes quietly profound by the film’s conclusion. “Good grief” stops sounding like an expression of disbelief and instead reveals itself as a philosophy – the idea that grief, painful as it is, can still lead to connection, beauty, memory, and creation. Bareilles channels loss into songs that ache lyrically while soaring sonically, and Alexander captures that transformation with extraordinary tenderness.
Warm, cathartic, and disarmingly honest, Sara Bareilles: Good Grief is less a documentary about recording an album than it is a portrait of what it means to keep creating – and keep loving – after loss.
FOUR STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
Sara Bareilles: Good Grief is screening as part of this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, running between June 3rd and 14th, 2026. For more information on the festival, head to the official site here.
