Sara Bareilles is experiencing a โpinch me momentโ times a million these days.
โWaitress,โ her first-ever shot at composing for theater, has turned into stage gold, with four Tony Award nominations the year it opened on Broadway in 2016.
Itโs still running on Broadway and on many nights, tickets are hard to come by.
โMy hopes and dreams were all wrapped up into having one good, sort of fatted-calf year where weโre not crawling across the finish line,โ she said during a phone call last week from New York, where she and her teenaged half-sister were shopping for prom dresses. โOne year where we have a really solid show and the audience to come and see it.โ
Well, one year is now three and the show is on the road including a stop next week in Tucson and next year in London.
โIt is beyond my wildest imagination. I am so immensely grateful to the fans and the supporters of the show who have really embraced us and made us their own,โ Bareilles said. โIt is just incredible.โ
So how does a pop singer-songwriter (โLove Song,โ โBrave,โ โGravityโ) make that giant leap from deeply personal 3ยฝ-minute radio-friendly songs to composing the soundtrack for a 2ยฝ-hour stage show?
Look outward.
โI think the biggest difference for me was having to write from a perspective that wasnโt just telling my own story,โ she explained. โIt was about finding my way into the mindset and the psychology of other characters.โ
The process: โI am really used to, as a songwriter, writing from the first-person perspective and in how it relates to my ideas of the world. I had to practice what I refer to as โradical empathyโ and find my way into some of these other charactersโ life experiences and imagining what they might be feeling. The biggest challenge was the characters that kind of lived further away from myself. I found my way into the character Jenna (the lead waitress) probably the most easily. But the abusive husband was a challenge, and the crotchety old man was a challenge. But I found over the course of writing for the show, I found a lot of love and caring for each of the characters. It was a really interesting experiment.โ
The freedom to create: โI really got so much beautiful freedom from my creative partners. It really was about a gut instinct and an initial reaction to the feeling and the tone of what music would serve which character. It evolved over time. I think certain characters sort of had their own personalities that came out in the music. For example, Ogie, who has a song called โNever Getting Rid of Me,โ itโs probably the most comic sounding song in the show and thatโs because he is our most obvious comic relief in the show.โ
Defining each characterโs musical soul: โEach character had these bold, broad strokes that kind of wanted to live in the music. So Becky, whoโs this soulful, sassy waitress whoโs kind of been around the block, I wanted to give her something that she could kind of sink her teeth into that had a lot of attitude. So it ended up being kind of a bluesy, rock song for her because it felt like it had a lot of power in a certain way. Jenna, her songs kind of lived in a place that felt soulful but also sort of pensive and introspective and I tried to give her musical themes that showed that she had this vivid imagination that was also constrained and protected in certain ways.โ
Back to her music: Bareilles released the first single, the feminist homage โArmor,โ off an album she will release early next year. She recorded it last summer in Los Angeles with legendary producer T Bone Burnett. โItโs been a minute โ itโs been a long minute,โ she said of the five years since she released her last studio album. Of course, those five years were spent working on โWaitress.โ The record, whose title is still a work in progress, is a hodgepodge of styles deeply influenced by her experience on โWaitressโ and working with Burnett, the award-winning producer, whose work with movie soundtracks (โO Brother, Where Art Thou?โ โCold Mountain,โ โWalk the Line,โ โCrazy Heartโ and โRaising Sandโ), earned him seven of his 16 Grammys. โI think what he brought more than anything โ because I think the album ends up sounding more eclectic โ he really values performance over perfection,โ she said.
