Sara Bareilles hadn’t planned on becoming an executive producer on a documentary about mortality, love, and incurable cancer. She just went to a poetry show in Colorado as a fan. That’s usually how these things start—someone walks into a room needing one thing and leaves carrying something much heavier, and somehow lighter too.
“This feels like a total cosmic gift,” Bareilles said, still sounding a little surprised it all happened this way. She was talking about Come See Me in the Good Light, the Apple TV+ documentary centered on Colorado poet laureate Andrea Gibson and their wife, Megan Falley, as they face a terminal diagnosis with humor, devotion, and an almost defiant openness. Bareilles signed on as an executive producer without even knowing a film existed. “I didn’t realize any of this was happening,” she said. “It just felt like a tremendous gift.”
She first encountered the project in the most accidental way possible—by showing up. “I ended up at Andrea’s show in Colorado,” she said. “I went as a fan. I’d never been to a poetry show before, never gone to a spoken word show, and it felt like a full-out rock concert. People were crying, saying lyrics back to Andrea as if they were singing their favorite song. It was transcendent.”
That night eventually led to an email asking if she’d like to join the executive producing team. Only later did the full weight of the story reveal itself. “When they started filming,” Bareilles said, “Andrea had said to the director, ‘You’re going to film my death.’ I didn’t know the ins and outs of their diagnosis at first, but I knew it was hard. You couldn’t deny the resonance of Andrea themselves, and of their work.”
By the time Bareilles was fully inside the process, the filmmakers had already landed on a deceptively simple description: a comedic love story about mortality. It sounds impossible until you watch it happen. “That’s a pretty perfect summary,” she said. “Andrea was all about inviting people into their higher selves. They wanted people to leave the theater uplifted and hopeful.”
That intention carried over when the conversation turned toward music. The film was always meant to end with an original poem by Gibson, but once Bareilles and Brandi Carlile joined the team, the question shifted from if the poem could become a song to how. “It felt like a perfect baton pass,” Bareilles said. “Is there a world where Andrea’s work gets to live on in another form too?”
After watching the first cut of the film, Bareilles knew she had to try. “I was speechless,” she said. “The intimacy of this portrait of Andrea and Megan’s love, and Andrea’s devotion to life—even in great pain—just wrecked me.” She started rearranging Gibson’s words like puzzle pieces. “Moving around the couplets, seeing what would rhyme. Trying to make something romantic and hopeful, but also earthbound and gritty.”
It wasn’t her usual process. “I usually write my own lyrics,” she said. “So it was strange and exciting to start from this template. Here’s a bunch of incredible poetry—what can you make from it?” She drafted an initial version, sent it to Carlile, and trusted the feedback. “Brandi always has really sage advice,” she said. “It was a fast collaboration. We were scrambling to get it into Sundance.”
The result—Bareilles and Carlile singing Gibson’s words together—feels inevitable in hindsight. “She’s not hard to sing with,” Bareilles laughed. “Let me tell you.”
The experience bled directly into Bareilles’ own songwriting, which had been slowly resurfacing after a long, heavy stretch. “I’d been going through a lot of grief in my personal life,” she said. “Loss of friends. The pandemic. I didn’t quite know what to say about what we were witnessing until now.” Seeing Gibson perform in Colorado sparked not just the documentary song, but another track on Bareilles’ upcoming record—one that actually features Gibson’s voice. “I don’t think that song would have happened if I hadn’t gone to that show.”
The new album, still unfinished, is her way of processing everything she couldn’t articulate before. “It’s probably my most personal record,” she said. “I’ve lost two of my very best friends in the last five years. In light of mortality, who cares? I just care about making music that matters to me.”
She’s blunt about the rest. “Selling records is hard. I’ve got this whole other life with film and television and Broadway,” she said. “It stopped feeling urgent to add a record to the mechanism just so I could stay relevant. I don’t give a—you know. It’s an illusion of control anyway.”
Music, like poetry, became medicine. “Having a place to put these big feelings has been really helpful,” she said. “I think culturally, we’re still processing mass grief. People don’t know what to do with their pain, so it comes out sideways.”
That’s where community enters the frame. “Grief is not meant to be carried alone,” Bareilles said. “It’s impossible to do it. You need other people.” Which also explains why comedy—something she understands deeply thanks to Girls5eva—matters more than it gets credit for. “We shot the first season in fall 2020,” she said. “My best friend had just passed away. It taught me how unfrivolous comedy is. How medicinal it can be. It was lifesaving.”
As for what’s next, she’s hopeful but unhurried. “Apparently I just work very slow,” she said. “I’ve got a couple more days in the studio. It still feels like the record is missing a song. I don’t know what it is yet.” She smiled. “But my goal is to get it out soon and go sing songs for people again.”
And that's good news for all of us.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
