The singer and songwriter joined the ‘Zach Sang Show’ to reflect on her career

NEED TO KNOW

• Sara Bareilles wrote her song “Gravity” at 18, inspired by heartbreak from her high school boyfriend

• She describes music as a cathartic outlet, calling herself a vessel for emotions and creative expression
• Bareilles says sharing the deeply personal song taught her the power of connection through vulnerability

Sara Bareilles was just 18 years old when she wrote “Gravity,” which she said is “crazy” to think about decades later.

The 46-year-old singer-songwriter recently joined the Zach Sang Show to talk about her career and most recent album, Good Grief. While reflecting on the heartbreaking ballad — which first appeared on her 2004 independent debut album, Careful Confessions, and was later re-recorded for her first studio album, Little Voice, in 2007 — Bareilles admitted “it feels like another lifetime” when she wrote it.

“My philosophy really about music, and I’ve said this before, is that it’s not mine. It’s just like the thing I was like the portal; I was like the available channel that that music was looking for to come through,” she said. “I really believe that we’re just vessels, but I’m so proud of that 18-year-old girl to be open to those big feelings and kind of capturing it that way. I think that’s really special.”

When Sang asked what motivated the teenager version of Bareilles to write the song, she said it was her “ex-boyfriend, my high school boyfriend, who broke my heart.”

Bareilles noted that she didn’t have “another choice” than to express how she was feeling by writing her feelings down, turning to songwriting as a form of therapy.

“It wasn’t a conscious decision. It was just like I have so much ache, and I don’t know where to put it,” she explained. “Music was always like the receptacle for that. Music was always the place I would go, even just as a listener, to try to make sense of the world.”

“Then when I started writing, like really writing, like I wrote since I was pretty young, but when I really started writing, I could feel that there was some kind of catharsis in that, but that I felt better when there was a way to sort of hold it somehow,” she added.

Bareilles said that she “learned a lot from that song.”

“I learned a lot from that song because it felt so personal, and so sharing it was kind of scary,” she admitted. “But the affirmation I got around the sharing — because people would relate to it and it was very personal for them — but I was like there’s like a connective thing that happens when you share something that’s quite intimate, in a way that I don’t think I was entirely aware of.”

Bareilles’ newest album, Good Grief, is out now.

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