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Sara Bareilles is both throwback and contradiction. A “reluctant feminist” who
sings at the piano, she loves Broadway musicals, guards her songs
possessively and cries much too easily. In an American record industry where
sales are plummeting and big-label marketing budgets crashing in sympathy,
her debut album, Little Voice, has been a sleeper hit, selling 1m copies on
the back of cyber-buzz and live shows. No mean achievement, especially as
Bareilles is not an R&B diva, country crooner or American Idol winner.
Comparisons are always invidious, but think Tori Amos confessions coupled with
a pop sensibility, leavened by a healthy flavouring of irony. Bareilles’s
first single, Love Song, is spreading fast across British radio. Don’t be
fooled by the title, just listen to the chorus: “I’m not going to write you
a love song / ’Cause you asked for it / ’Cause you need one”.
Bareilles wrote it because she was furious with her record company, Epic. “We
had gone into the studio to start recording Little Voice,” she says. “I had
turned in some new material, but I got the sense that nobody thought it was
good. I felt insecure. I was driving to rehearsal, listening to the radio
and thinking, ‘What would the record company like to hear on the radio?’ I
was so angry that I was allowing their opinion to dictate my art. I threw up
a prayer to the universe, saying, ‘Can I just write something for me, so I
know I’m still here?’ Love Song literally tumbled out.”
Naturally, Epic loved the track, though she did have to explain to them what
it was about. They laughed because, after all, a hit’s a hit. This was not
the last battle they had. “Because I’m a young female and I sing pop music,
it would have been easier for them to fit me into the pop-princess mould —
Jessica Simpson or Britney Spears,” she says. “Music is a boys’ club, and I
never realised what a feminist I was until I saw how people would disregard
my existence, talk about me as if I wasn’t in the room. That really lit a
fire, and I’ve become stubborn in speaking up for myself. My role is to
defend and preserve my songs. That’s all I have. I have only ever wanted to
be me: the small-town, dorky tomboy with my heart on my sleeve. I’m not a
glamour girl. I have never understood why you have to pretend you’re
something else.”
Her feelings came to a head on a television show when the dress she had chosen
to wear somehow didn’t turn up and she went on wearing something Epic deemed
more suitable. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was
furious. I’m 28 years old. I’ve been dressing myself my entire life and, all
of a sudden, I started to feel I didn’t know how to put clothes on my body
any more. I was starting to doubt myself again. Artists forget that it is
absolutely your prerogative to say ‘No’. They can tell me what to wear, but
they can’t forcibly put it on my body.”
Bareilles has been doubting herself all her life: trying, failing, dusting
herself off and starting again. It’s all there in her music, intimate
snapshots about love and rejection that could have been plucked from her
diaries and re-created in song. The youngest of three girls, she comes from
Eureka, a small town in the north of California where the main industries
are logging, fishing and illegal marijuana cultivation. Her parents divorced
when she was 13: “It was as amicable a divorce as I think you can have, but
both my sisters were gone, so I did get a little more introspective.”
Bareilles loved Broadway musicals, especially the story arc in songs, and at
13 was obsessed with auditioning for Disney’s Mickey Mouse Club (which has
spawned Spears, Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake). She prepared A
Whole New World (from Aladdin) for months with a vocal coach, and her mother
drove her five hours south to the audition in San Francisco, whereupon she
forgot all her lines and blew it.
“For years, I’d rather be under the radar completely than go out on a limb and
have people tear me apart,” she says. Her face reddens, but she continues.
“I grew up a fat girl. I had to change schools at one point because the kids
were so mean to me. I still often feel I just don’t want anyone to notice
anything about me.”
These days, Bareilles knows that she’s skinny enough, that she’s intriguing
and pretty, but she still sees that fat girl in the mirror. “I lead a
healthy lifestyle now, but I didn’t know that when I was 13 and chubby, and
everyone was calling me ‘Tub-a-Lard’. It’s pretty miserable. I’m grateful
for that time. It gave me a sensitivity to what it feels like to be an
outcast, and I would never want to make someone feel the way that felt to
me.”
Bareilles sang in choirs, played Audrey in a high-school production of Little
Shop of Horrors and gave one disastrous performance of what she had believed
to be “this really heady, prolific, beautiful song”. “When I ended, people
didn’t know if they were supposed to start clapping or not. After that, I
didn’t show anybody my songs for years.”
She left Eureka for UCLA, to study communications. “It was hard for me when I
got to LA, but it felt liberating, too. I was shocked by this disregard for
the rules. Other than marijuana, which is everywhere, Eureka was pretty
mellow. You don’t see people getting high and jumping out of windows. I was
an innocent. In LA, everything felt like it was about status, and status was
represented by possessions. I don’t know where you could buy a Gucci bag in
Eureka. I’d never seen one. I knew it was expensive, but it didn’t mean
anything to me. I started to become body-conscious and self-aware — not in a
good way. I don’t subscribe to a lot of the ideals I see in southern
California. It’s a dream-chaser society. The idea is really romantic and
lovely, but, boy, there’s a lot of shit down there. It’s superficial and
ego-driven.”
Although she continued to write songs, Bareilles never played them to anyone.
In 2000, she went to study in Italy for a year. Three months in, she was
“depressed to the point of breakdown”. “I realised I was living without
music, and I called my dad, crying, and begged him to send me my keyboard.
When it arrived, I went into a music store and met a man who was the leader
of a jazz orchestra. I burst into tears and told him, ‘I sing, I miss music,
I want to get better at it.’ He played me Joni Mitchell’s Blue album and I
played him my songs. He was the first person who was really encouraging. I
started playing with him, singing jazz standards at weddings and parties. I
realised that’s what I'd been missing. Music isn’t a hobby. It’s who I am.”
When she returned to LA, she started playing small shows at Genghis Cohen, a
Chinese restaurant in Hollywood, building a regular following. She waited
tables to help pay her band until 2004, “when I was making enough money from
shows and some CD sales online — that was a really proud moment”. Bareilles
was at UCLA with members of Maroon 5, who asked her to open some dates on
the East Coast. She ended up signing with their management and, after the
usual series of rejections, was taken up by Epic.
While she’s happy to talk about her conflicts with her label, she is pragmatic
enough to know that it is their job to push and hers to resist or compromise
— and, above all, that she mustn’t cry. “There’s a phrase from the women in
my family, ‘Listen to my words, not to my tears.’ We cry about everything,”
she laughs. “Everything that’s important to me immediately triggers this. I
don’t know what to do other than burst into tears. It would happen in
business conversations, and I learnt quickly that I was gaining this
reputation as a crybaby. I’ve had to get a stiff upper lip.”
There is still no compromise over her songs, and I doubt there ever will be.
“I’m a slow writer. My songs come from an emotional place where it all wells
up inside of me. I’m incredibly possessive about my songs, because I’m the
only one who understands how they’re gonna fit together.”
Little Voice is released tomorrow
