Sara Bareilles announces seventh album ‘Good Grief’, out August 28, 2026, plus a fall North American tour and lead single ‘Home’. First LP in seven years
Seven years is a long time to carry something. On June 3, 2026, Sara Bareilles ended the wait: her seventh studio album, ‘Good Grief‘, arrives August 28, and she is heading back on the road for a North American tour this fall. The announcement came alongside the release of the album’s lead single, ‘Home’, a piano-anchored song produced by Bareilles herself and inspired by a conversation about loss she heard on a podcast between Stephen Colbert and Anderson Cooper.
‘Good Grief’ is Bareilles’ first album since 2019’s Grammy-winning ‘Amidst the Chaos’, and it lands with the full weight of the years between. The bulk of the 14-track collection was recorded in six days at Dreamland Recording Studios in Woodstock, New York. Additional sessions took place at co-producer Aaron Dessner’s Long Pond Studios in the Hudson Valley, with engineering and mixing by Bella Blasko. The album features contributions from Brandi Carlile, Ingrid Michaelson, Joe Tippett, Megan Falley, and the late poet and activist Andrea Gibson.
This whole collection of songs felt like transmissions rather than a deliberate attempt to make sense of the world,” Bareilles said in a statement. “My deepest hope is that Good Grief provides some kind of comfort or catharsis”
On ‘Home’, she expanded further: “It feels like an invitation and a tone setter for the specificity and depth of this record. It just feels really essential right now. In order for us as humans to really know and understand each other, we have to listen to each other’s stories.”
A Record Rooted in Real Loss
The emotional architecture of ‘Good Grief’ runs deeper than the album itself. The record includes ‘Salt Then Sour Then Sweet‘, a song Bareilles co-wrote with Brandi Carlile and the late Andrea Gibson. The track was short-listed for Best Original Song at the 98th Academy Awards and appears in the Peabody Award-winning documentary ‘Come See Me in the Good Light’, which Bareilles executive produced. That film was also short-listed for Best Documentary at the same awards ceremony.
The making of ‘Good Grief’ has itself been captured on film. A documentary titled ‘Sara Bareilles: Good Grief’, directed by Josh Alexander and produced by Daniel J. Chalfen, made its world premiere at the Tribeca Festival this week. The film is described as an intimate portrait of Bareilles returning to the recording studio with close friends for the first time in seven years, with studio breaks giving way to personal conversation about loss, creativity, and the state of the music industry.
Bareilles previewed the campaign publicly on June 1 with a performance in New York City, and is set to appear at the Rolling Stone Residency on June 11 at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York. She has also partnered with PLUS1 on the tour, with one dollar from every ticket sold being contributed by Live Nation toward protecting emotional health and preventing suicide among teens and young adults through The Jed Foundation.
The Good Grief Tour: Dates and Tickets
The Good Grief Tour kicks off September 9 in Boston at MGM Music Hall at Fenway and moves through theater-sized venues across North America, with confirmed stops in New York, Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. Ticket pre-sales begin Monday, June 8, with a general on-sale starting Wednesday, June 10 at 10 A.M. local time.
The tour marks Bareilles’ return to the stage in support of a new record for the first time since the Amidst the Chaos tour cycle. That campaign earned her a Grammy for Best Traditional Pop Vocal Album in 2020, and her profile has only expanded since, through her continued involvement in Waitress on Broadway and a string of high-profile collaborations. ‘Good Grief’, with its blend of Dessner’s atmospheric production instincts and Bareilles’ raw, confessional piano-pop, positions her squarely in a moment when emotionally direct song writing is resonating across audiences at scale.
Pre-order and pre-save links are available through her official website.
