Sara Bareilles has built one of the most uniquely respected careers in contemporary music. She has seamlessly navigated the worlds of Grammy winning pop songwriting and Tony nominated musical theater. Her work, whether penned for herself or for the stage show “Waitress,” is characterized by emotional honesty and narrative depth. This artistic profile makes her the perfect artist to convey the complex emotional thread woven through Apple Original Films’ documentary, “Come See Me in the Good Light.”
The film, which premiered in select theaters and began streaming globally on Apple TV+ on November 14, 2025, is a deeply personal love story about the poets Andrea Gibson and Megan Falley. It follows their journey as they face an incurable cancer diagnosis with “joy, wit and an unshakable partnership,” transforming mortality into a celebration of resilience. The documentary has garnered significant critical acclaim, including Sundance’s Festival Favorite Award, Hot Docs’ Audience Award, and the Seattle International Film Festival’s Best Documentary Award.
For the documentary’s emotional closing note, Bareilles teamed up with Brandi Carlile to perform the original song titled “Salt Then Sour Than Sweet.” This collaboration is far more than a professional commission; it is deeply rooted in Bareilles’s own widely discussed experiences with anxiety, mental health, and the profound grief she has been processing in her personal life.
The resulting track is a masterful study in paradox. The title itself, a meditation on conflicting flavors, perfectly reflects the film’s theme that “beautiful and terrible things are sometimes the same thing.” This philosophy is crystallized in the lyrics, where the offering of devotion is made against a backdrop of personal decay: “Wanna kiss you and write those names / On my crumbling walls / Lay them at your feet / With the rest of me.” This is an act of complete surrender, one that requires facing life’s fragility without flinching.
Bareilles immediately recognized the “medicinal nature of Andrea’s work” and the universal struggle it tackles. She explains, “There was no world in which I was going to write a song that was going to be like, woe is me… I think the song carries some ache, which is intentional, but ultimately the song is about love. It’s a love song.” She reveals how her own current artistic focus, a new record entirely dedicated to the subject of grief, provided the necessary catharsis and emotional foundation for her work on the documentary, stating, “I am going full bore headfirst into it [grief], and it’s been a real ride.”
Sara Bareilles spoke to Awards Focus about the creative challenges of crafting a love song that defies easy sadness, the unique collaborative process with Brandi Carlile, the influence of musical theater structure on her narrative songwriting, and how allowing herself to go “full bore headfirst” into her own grief made her the essential voice for this awards contending story.
Awards Focus: Hi, Sara. My name is Ben Lei, and I’m here with Awards Focus. It’s nice to meet you.
Sara Bareilles: Hi, Ben. How are you?
AF: Thank you for being so vulnerable and public about your own stories around grief and anxiety; that context feels very tied to this project. I appreciate that as someone who also has dealt with anxiety and occasional panic attacks. How did you get involved, and what was your connection to Andrea and Meg prior to being asked to write the song?
Bareilles: Well, first of all, thank you for sharing that. I feel you, but I also love talking about the mental health component, and I don’t think it’s disconnected from Andrea’s work. I love talking about it because I think we’re all under the impression that we are the only worst people in the world, but there are a lot of us.
I got introduced to Andrea’s work through their videos on Instagram. I was very quickly blown away by their vulnerability and this sort of devotional attention to life—the good, the bad, and the ugly. As someone who has had a lot of mental health challenges, learning to love what is difficult, or to have a loving attitude towards what is difficult, is a huge part of learning to be a human being on earth. I just found them to be a radical teacher of that kind of perspective.
I ended up in Colorado during the time that Andrea was having those last two shows that are featured in the film. I went because a dear friend of mine was also going. I ran into Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach there, and we were sharing our love of Andrea’s work. Not long after, I received an email from Glennon and Abby asking if I was interested in joining the executive producing team and helping this film come to fruition. It felt like a really easy, fast, electric yes for me. I really believe in the medicinal nature of Andrea’s work. And then I saw the film, and I was absolutely overwhelmed with how good I think this work is.
AF: You helped with the final stretch of production. Was that something you had done before in your career?
Bareilles: Helped is a generous term. I helped out financially, but I also helped out with promoting and loving up this film, which is something I am excited to sign up to do.
It also pretty quickly developed into the possibility of a collaboration with Andrea and Brandi Carlile, as she was also an executive producer. Andrea had been gathering snippets of a poem, hoping to have an original poem featured in the film, but by the end of the filming, Andrea’s health was not so great. The promotion was taxing. So I think it ended up being an opportunity to call in some reinforcements.
Brandi and I were both given these couplets and musings, kind of unfinished poetry. I spent the better part of an afternoon moving things around and making a jigsaw puzzle out of what was already so beautiful and so there. I added a few interstitial lines to tie it all together and got Brandi’s feedback. It was done in just a couple of days. It was really incredible.
AF: You transformed Andrea’s original words into the song, “Salt and Sour, Then Sweet.”
Bareilles: That’s exactly right.
AF: The song’s tone is striking; it starts with a hopeful beat, avoiding the typical melancholic sound often found in sad films. What was the general emotion you were trying to express?
Bareilles: It’s one of the things I love so much about Andrea’s poetry: they sort of straddle the paradox that lives in life. Beautiful and terrible things are sometimes the same thing. Andrea talks about getting their cancer diagnosis as being an event that actually launched them into a period of time where they felt an overwhelming experience of gratitude, because touching mortality in a very real way awakens you to the extraordinary gift of being alive.
There was no world in which I was going to write a song that was going to be “woe is me.” I think the song carries some ache, which is intentional, but ultimately the song is about love. That was also a direct request from Andrea: they didn’t want people to leave this film brokenhearted. The hope was that instead of being brokenhearted, you are sort of broken open into what is just true about being alive—that it is a very complex experience, that whole range of emotions. I wanted it to feel hopeful and romantic and also carry a kind of determination and grit because I feel like that just lives in Andrea’s essence as well.
AF: You mentioned actively processing grief after losing a close friend. How do you maintain your emotional balance when working on content so focused on loss?
Bareilles: What I have learned about grief—I have a record coming out next year, and the entirety of the record is about grief in all of its forms. I actually have a theory that what’s going on for us culturally and politically is unprocessed grief. We just don’t know what to do with pain.
I think the most painful thing about grief is when you try to avoid it. That is the way to make it the hardest and the most devastating. I have learned so much from my experience of grief. I find it so tenderizing. It’s so soft when you get near it because it’s just love. It’s loss of love, and it’s so universal. No, I have not found anything good has come from trying to avoid my grief. I am going full bore headfirst into it, and it’s been a real ride.
AF: Was working on this project a cathartic experience for you?
Bareilles: Oh, tremendously. Yes. It’s all I want to do. All I want to do is talk about and create art that reflects what’s true. So it feels really good to be in community around telling stories around just what is true, which is that grief is a leveling experience, and again, so universal.
AF: When writing for another artist like Brandi Carlile, you could easily sing the song yourself. How did you approach the collaboration, especially regarding vocal phrasing and cadence?
Bareilles: I look at these collaborations as casting. It’s like casting a great actor. The thing you want is for them to feel free to bring their interpretation. When Brandi was singing the verses, there were little cadences and phrasing that shifted, and it feels like the magic trick that artists can do, which is like, “Oh, that’s so uniquely Brandi.” That’s the gift. To me, there’s no value in trying to control or hinder that expression in any way. It feels like the best we can do for each other as artists is to invite each other into the most fully expressed we can become.
I haven’t written a lot for other artists. The only space in which that’s really come to fruition is in musical theater. The thing I like so much about it is that you are ultimately serving this other thing. We are serving this higher purpose. There might be things that I feel precious about, but usually, it’s around a storytelling beat. For example, on my song for the musical “Waitress,” “She Used to Be Mine,” I’m a stickler about people not riffing too much on the run at the end because the storytelling beat is not that this woman is so empowered.
AF: You’ve written for narrative film and musical theater. Do you approach writing for a documentary differently?
Bareilles: My sole purpose was trying to feel into Andrea’s essence, and trying to translate that into musical form. There’s something sort of earthy and gritty about Andrea that felt like, okay, acoustic guitar. It’s an open D tuning. It’s chuggy. It’s got boots on. It was just about trying to sort of collect a sonic image.
I cared less about that it was a documentary or not a documentary. It was more about just trying to capture the essence of this person that I have really fallen in love with, and what they wanted for the end of the film, which was to leave people with great hope and great love. So it was a love song.
AF: When you consider the legacy of this song and how it ties into Andrea and Meg’s love story, what does it mean to you to have been able to contribute to their time capsule?
Bareilles: I like thinking about it like that. This has been a profoundly moving experience. It’s been sort of a before-and-after moment for me. I did not anticipate this experience showing up in my life in this way. It’s a great testament to the power of vulnerability and the courage to show up wholeheartedly, even in pain. So, yes, it’s very, very meaningful to me to have contributed to any piece of the storytelling of this film. I just think it’s a really special work of art.
AF: Thank you so much for talking to me today. I hope your song gets the recognition it deserves.
Bareilles: Thank you very much. I really appreciate that.