The album opens with “Home,” which Bareilles has explained was inspired by the Stephen Colbert episode of Anderson Cooper’s podcast All There Is, where Colbert recounted losing his father and brothers back when he was only ten-years-old. The song’s refrain, “So tell me your story / I’ll tell you mine,” is the very intentional heart and mission of the album, demonstrating how the pain and difficulty of grief can become “good grief” by relying on the human capacities for narrative and memory. That transformative power can only really be accessed through sharing with others our stories and recollections of those who have passed from our lives. In the midst of inhabiting the tale of Colbert’s own losses and the wake of silence that followed in his childhood home, lines such as, “You be the universe / Nothing to hide” show how Bareilles’ aim is to widen her specific thematic focus to include and embrace all of us. That thread of far-ranging truthfulness continues on the album’s second track, “Just a Kid,” Bareilles’ homage to her college soulmate and first manager, Chad Joseph, who died young at the age of 40: “You never got to get married / And I hate where you’re buried / You never got old / You were just a kid… / This one’s for my best friend and he’s everywhere.”
Two of the album’s finest songs showcase the work of the late non-binary performance poet Andrea Gibson, who wrote unforgettably about their last few years before dying of metastatic ovarian cancer in July of 2025 at age 49, as documented in last year’s Oscar-nominated film Come See Me in the Good Light. Gibson’s voice is featured in a profound excerpt from their poetry on the song “A Love Story,” and the end-credits song from the documentary about Gibson, “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” is Bareilles’ astounding duet with Brandi Carlile that also should have been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Song. It’s followed by the album’s penultimate track, “Forever,” which finds Bareilles taking on the tender posthumous perspective of her recently departed friend, Tony Award winner Gavin Creel, with whom she co-starred on Broadway and spoke on the phone nearly every single day, right up until his death from metastatic melanotic peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma at age 48: “And if you need me / And we’re not together / Close your eyes to see me better / I’ll be here forever… / If you are the bird I am the movement / If you are the words I am the music.”
“So let me say right now for the record,
I am still gonna be here
asking this world to dance,
even if it keeps stepping on my holy feet.
You, you stay here with me, okay?
You stay here with me.
Raising your bite against the bitter dark,
your bright longing,
your brilliant fists of loss.
Friend, if the only thing we have to gain in staying is each other,
my god that is plenty
my god that is enough
my god that is so, so much for the light to give
each of us at each other’s backs
whispering over and over and over,
‘Live. Live. Live.’”
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