Sara Bareilles Turns Panic Into Rebirth on Uptempo Summer Disc

March 1st, 2010 by Caryn Ganz Leave a reply »

Photo: Michael Case Gordon

When Sara Bareilles finally finished touring behind her major-label debut Little Voice and sat down to start her next album, she was overcome with one dominant emotion: panic. “There’s that cliché phrase, ‘You have your whole lifetime to do your first record and you have to do your second one overnight.’ I was really torn with the writing,” she admits. Her pal Matt Hales from Aqualung gave her some valuable advice — “You can’t polish a turd, you obviously need more time” — so she scrapped the tunes she’d written over the summer and started from scratch.

Though she dismisses her first stabs at the new album as simply “shitty,” early songwriting sessions introduced her to an eccentric slate of potential collaborators, including Mr. Slave 4 U, Pharrell: “I drove up in my bird-shat-on, banged-up Honda Accord, and I was like, ‘Is that your Ferrari outside?’ ” She jammed with the Roots in New York, and teamed with Weezer at an Los Angeles show (”It was rad, I felt like I joined the band for 4.2 seconds”). She also spent time listening to Phoenix and Kings of Leon, soaking up what she praises as the “bombastic sonic quality” of Only By the Night.

But her most fruitful team-up has been with producer Neal Avron (Fall Out Boy, Say Anything), who has helped her shape the new batch of songs into an uptempo, layered album she describes as “revitalizing,” packed with attitude and sonically darker than her previous work. Bareilles says her hit single “Love Song” was the last track she tossed together for Little Voice, and its equivalent on the upcoming disc is “King of Anything.” “It just poured out of me,” she says, explaining the track — which is brightened ...

Article Source: Rolling Stone : Rock and Roll Daily

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