Sara Bareilles is speaking candidly about the years-long fertility journey behind her new album and documentary, both titled Good Grief, revealing a side of the project she says almost no one talks about publicly.
On The Zach Sang Show and NPR's Wild Card with Rachel Martin, the Grammy-winning singer opened up about trying to conceive with her husband, actor Joe Tippett, for the past three years - including multiple rounds of IVF that were unsuccessful.
"I really wrestled because I found so little material out in the world of people talking about their fertility struggles," Bareilles said. "I found a lot of evidence of people talking about how hard it was to get pregnant once they had a healthy baby in their arms, but I didn't find a lot of people talking from the sort of messy middle."
She described the emotional weight of the process in stark terms: "There is this total sense of surrender and powerlessness that you just have to make peace with, because this is not something that is entirely in my control."
Bareilles said she and Tippett are now considering an egg donor as their next step, a decision she called deeply emotional. "I really had to grieve that... that it won't be mine," she shared.
Her honesty reflects a broader theme running through Good Grief - that pain and hope can coexist, and that surrender isn't the same as giving up.
For anyone walking a similarly uncertain road, Bareilles' willingness to sit in the "messy middle," rather than rush to a neat resolution, offers something rarer than answers: companionship in not knowing.
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