All There Is with Anderson Cooper - Sara Bareilles: 'Life's Holiest Lesson'

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

In a new song "Home" that Sara wrote after listening to Anderson’s talk with Stephen Colbert, she sings, "What is broken cannot heal 'till it's known and loved by name." In this moving conversation she shares "Home" for the first time, and talks with Anderson about the "medicinal" nature of sharing one's grief with others. For more of “All There Is with Anderson Cooper” visit cnn.com/allthereis. Host: Anderson CooperShowrunner: Haley ThomasProducers: Chuck Hadad, Grace Walker, Emily Williams, Madeleine ThompsonAssociate Producer: Kyra DahringVideo Editor: Eric ZembrzuskiTechnical Director: Dan DzulaBookers: Kerry Rubin and Kari Pricher Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, I'm glad you're here. Welcome to a very special episode of All There Is. I'm going to be talking today with singer, songwriter, and actress Sarah Borellis. She's sold millions of albums. She's earned two Grammys, been nominated for multiple Emmys and Tony Awards. What I didn't know is that Sarah has listened to this podcast a lot and was so moved by the conversation that Stephen Colbert and I had during the first season that she's written a song about it called Home. and it's on her new album that's going to be coming out later this year. You're going to hear that song on the podcast today.

It hasn't been released yet, but Sarah wanted all of us in this community to hear it first. I sat down with her several months ago, and we talked about some recent losses in her life and listened to the song. I'd not heard it in advance, and I was incredibly moved by it, and I have to say, I'm a little embarrassed by how emotional I got. It was difficult for me to include that in this episode, but it is what it is. here's my conversation with Sarah Borealis. Thank you so much for doing this.

I'm really honored to be here. You've actually listened to this podcast. Many, many times, yes, yes. What brought you to it? I guess my own grief. There was, I feel like one of the things that I love about it so much is like, I think it's this very universal experience, but there's not as much sort of interrogation. I think in the common spaces.

So it felt really courageous to name it and to keep naming it and to find different ways to turn it over. I just had like a lot of grief in the last few years, a handful of years in my life. And I found it very powerful, very moving. It's inspired songs. You actually wrote a song based on a particular episode with Stephen Colbert.

Yes. I was walking around. I live in Brooklyn. walking around listening to the podcast. And I was so moved by the story Stephen shared about losing his father and his brother. Stephen's incredible. And that episode is so special. It's a great episode. Yeah. Stephen's father and his two brothers, Peter and Paul, were killed in Eastern Airlines plane crash when Stephen was 10 years old. Your connection in that conversation was just I found it to be really, just really inspiring. And I came home and started writing a song

about it. And then I was on a television show at the time called Girls Vive Eva, and our creator, showrunner is Meredith Scardino, who was the head writer at Stevens Show. And so I sent it to Meredith and I was like, is this weird? I wrote a song kind of about Stephen Colbert's experience as a child. And is it weird to send it to him? I have no idea. And she did and she sent it to him and we had this really beautiful exchange. And now I get to share that with you. And it's your story woven in there as well and just this idea that you share your stories. If we just continue to be brave enough to share the stories that we've lived through the connection is a part of the medicine. I do think it's the only thing that really helps. At least for me, it's the only thing

that's really helped. You realize how ununique you are and how much everyone is carrying and how I think really people want permission to share how much pain that. they're carrying at any given moment to know that it's okay to be in so much pain because I think we all are in different ways. I did an event with Francis Weller at Common Wheel and it was in front of like 200 people and it was Francis and I talking to each other and it was it was a very moving talk and I found it hard to get through actually and afterward a woman in the audience came up to me and she said she like hugged me and she looked in my eyes and she said you so want people to see you And it wasn't like you're desperate for attention.

It was you are this little kid. You want people to see you. And she was right. My mom used to quote this line. I can't remember some character says everybody wants to be seen and heard and felt. And I think in grief, that is particularly true. Even if one can't admit that or vocalize that as I could not for my entire life. Yeah.

I think we're afraid because we're afraid whatever we're going to show. is either too painful, too ugly, too messy, that it will be unwanted in some way. So the fear of being rejected for what is true because it's painful keeps, I think a lot of people just like a little bit away from that precipice of actually sharing what's just true. I just big believer in the truth. Well, also even admitting it to oneself or kind of speaking it out loud. in one's head to oneself feels terrifying. I'm not this is all about me, but let me talk about me again.

I never talked about this stuff, and now I just can't shut up. But I think that's incredible. I wrote an entire record about it. Like I couldn't, once I feel like. Your new record is centered around grief. Yeah. And not on purpose, but I actually think this is the first new music that I've written since the pandemic. And I think that especially in 2020, so I lost a very dear friend.

Chad Joseph, he was my roommate out of college, my best friend in college, my roommate, my first manager, my tour manager for many, many years, and just the beloved, like, co-pilot. And he was diagnosed with stage four cancer at the end of 2019, lung cancer. And then he was gone by the end of September 2020. That was a huge part of what I felt like I was grieving in 2020, but also I don't. I don't know if you know about the pandemic, but that also occurred in 2020. And I don't think we as a society have come to terms with the loss and the fracturing of all the bonds between people that formed society. I agree.

I think a huge part of what is moving through us culturally is grief that is just unnamed and unprocessed. and kind of misunderstood. Unrecognized grief is to me at the core of so much of the fracturing of society. I feel like since COVID, everybody saw how thin the bonds of human connection really are and how easily they can be broken. And it's a terrifying thing to see. Right. Yeah.

Life becoming unrecognizable and how disqualifying. and how dysregulating and disorienting that is. And how vulnerable we all are. Did that stop you from writing and from? Yeah. I think so. When I look back on that time, I remember feeling very,

oh, maybe envious of artists that were making things very quickly. We're singing songs. We're doing concerts online. There was just like a big push to like, how do we fill this void? Doa Lipa's album came out. I did a 60 Minutes piece on her, and all her promotion was like in her and a rented studio apartment.

And I was so grateful to have her, like, that was one of the records I listened to a lot that year. But I couldn't say anything. I was like, I don't have anything to say about this yet. Like, it felt too big. I couldn't wrap my arms around. Nothing was metabolized yet, I think, for me until just like a couple years ago. Had you had much experience with grief prior to? starting to lose friends?

I don't think so. You know, my grandmother's and my grandfather passed. And I definitely grieved them. But my 40-year-old best friend, it was jarring in this way of like this feeling of like a trapdoor of like, oh, you actually can't count on the fact that anything is going to be here. And I think there was something about that. Like, how could this possibly happen to you? Yeah, I think it took me a long time to figure out what there was to say about any of this. And really, this song called Home, that was based on that conversation you had with Stephen was another kind of cornerstone.

And then it started to, it started to take shape. I want to play part of the Stephen Colbert interview that you heard. And Steve and I are talking about how I thought I would die. at 50 because that's the age my dad died at. And Stephen had the exact same idea. He actually believed not only he would die at the same age his father had died, which was 53, but that with each of his kids, when they turned 10, which was the age Stephen was when his father died, that Stephen would die because you couldn't imagine a child who lived past 10 with a father who was still alive. Let's play that.

One thing that I have found tremendously helpful is being able to talk about it and hear other people's experiences with it. I completely agree. But that's accepting it. Talking about it is another way of making your loss real, I would say. I realized when I had kids, I did not want to pass on to them my sadness. I want them to know about, you know, their grandparents and my brother, but I don't want it to be infused with this kind of secret, hidden sadness that they feel strange about.

It will only be strange if it's secret and hidden, I would say. Yeah. What's that thing about dad that he won't share with us? Then it's secret and strange, but if you're, you know, if you share it publicly, then it's a gift. And you're explaining to them this part of the human experience and that it is possible to deal with in healthy ways and to come out on the other side. I don't think you're doing anything other than helping your child by sharing. I want to play some of the song that you wrote based on that.

Is there anything we should do to set it up? I mean, it's pretty much plagiarism from that conversation. It's called Home. It's called Home. I was really moved. I think you say it in the interview is just about, it's about telling your story. And telling your story, warts and all, is the thing that brings you back home. And I think of home as being like a place of connection that your soul is at peace and at rest when it's in connection, either with self or with others or with source or God or whatever you think. But for me, on this earth, our work is to find. ways to be like bold enough to let people, let other people see us. And telling stories is such an important part of that. Let's play at home.

My father than he ever got to be. I was 10 years old. I hug you, Anderson. That song, you brought me a lot of human conversations. I know I should have listened to it beforehand. I feel really, really honored. I told you it's plagiarism. Jesus.

It's beautiful. Thank you. It's really beautiful. Thank you. It was really powerful to hear you, to hear you both, I don't know. I just, it really unlocked something for me to be just like, to feel how, how much weight it can lift to just, let someone hear and see your own like pain and it's really helpful even though it doesn't look helpful it looks miserable but it's really helpful to move through otherwise we just get

stuck so I yeah I was just imagining someone if there was like a big glass wall in the studio and some walking by and looking and be like Jesus what is it going on and there. Really happy. Really happy interview. Oh, my God. Of course, that's immediately what I think of. What will other people think?

Yeah, right, because you're human. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break. We'll be back with more of my conversation with Sarah Borellis in just a moment. Hey, all there is fans. It's Michelle Obama, and I'm here with my big brother, Craig. To celebrate the one-year anniversary of our own podcast, IMO, we're revisiting some of our favorite episodes, including our interview with Anderson. Since all three of us have lost our moms, we wanted to have a conversation that would offer comfort and perspective for anyone navigating loss.

We talked about managing the grief process by allowing yourself to feel and how our moms prepared us to live on without them. Want to hear the full conversation? Search for IMO with Michelle Obama and Craig Robinson wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to my conversation with Sarah Borellis. It was so interesting, you know, I just started doing this because I didn't know what else to do going through the boxes my entire dead family left behind

and that you can hear something that a guest said or that I said. create that. It's incredible. I mean, I would have never imagined that. I find that to be so affirming of what I think is actually at work in life is that we're actually so universally connected and so similar and so alike and so, again, like not special in our humanness that I mean, I love that that happens. It is the common denominator between everybody. Society tells us we should be in corners and in different boxes and stuff.

And yet this is the thing that we all share. Yeah. I feel like on some level, I think we got tricked into believing that like, you know, if it's pleasure and pain, that like if you're not in pleasure, then something's wrong. but like pain is half of it. Like pain is the other half of what we do here. You were talking about Francis Weller. I love what he said to you when you spoke to him on your podcast

about like getting close, like inviting that part of yourself in. Like the parts of you that are in pain, just imagine how powerful it will feel if those parts feel held, you know, held and cared for instead of exiled. Yeah, companionship with grief or what he talks about. You also have lost, just recently in September last year, you lost a close friend, Gavin Creel. A lot of dead friends, Anderson.

Humor. It's how you get through. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Gavin was 48. And, yeah, like a soulmate in some level. How'd you guys meet? We met when we actually met singing at a benefit concert for Cindy Lopper's True Colors Foundation. So that was the first time I'd ever heard him sing. And he was like just one of the great vocalists of all time.

Like just an extraordinary gift. And then to know. I'll wipe it on my shirt. Oh, of course you have tissues. And then to know him, his talent became the least interesting thing about him. He was like a firework, just an incredible, hilarious, loving, generous, beloved friend to literally thousands of people. I spoke at his memorial at the St. James Theater on Broadway. He's a beloved Broadway actor and seats like 1,700 people.

And one of the things I said in the eulogy was that I like all 1,700 people here was Gavin's closest friend. Truly, what he left in his wake was just like an incredible amount of devastation and because there was so much love. And yeah, just another one of those. He developed like a rare form of cancer. A rare form of cancer, yeah. Peripheral nerve sheath sarcoma. From the time he was diagnosed to his death, it was just a few months, yeah, yeah. He had a really terrible experience with chemotherapy. He had a really bad reaction, and I think it became pretty evident to him early on. It was just like, I think my path is to

learn how to die. He had just finished Pama Children's book, How You Live Is How You Die. and then he got his diagnosis. And the whole year prior, he had another friend who he had been taking her to her chemotherapy appointments up in Boston. He would drive up from New York and go with her, you know, every three weeks for like a year. And, you know, hadn't had a diagnosis or anything. But ultimately, his death has, like, shaped my life. In what way? I feel how important it is.

to got the bullshit. Like how unimportant so many things, especially as someone who, you know, I'm an artist, I'm pursuing a career in commercial music, like those kinds of things. Just how unimportant all that feels, that quality of connection and relationships are literally the only thing. matter. And so, like, what are you doing to nurture relationships that you could be proud of? And it's not a straight line. And of course, I still care about, like, you know, superficial things. But it's a profound experience to walk towards the end of a life with someone. And I did it with Chad. And Gavin was really generous about his dying with us. He was so. so brave and just so open and talked about it all. And I mean, he would ask things like,

where do we, where do I go? Where am I going to go? And sometimes he would say it with childlike curiosity and sometimes, you know, he was crying and terrified because no one can tell you the answer. It's not an answerable question. We don't know. I found this video of him singing a song of yours. The most days I don't recognize me That these shoes and this apron, That place and its patrons, Have taken more than I gave them.

It's not easy to know That I'm not anything like I used to be. Although it's true, I was never, Attention, sweet center, I still remember that girl She's imperfect But she tries She is good

But she lies She is hard On herself She is broken But won't ask for help She is messy But she's kind She is lost of the time

She's all of this mixed up and baked in a beautiful She is gone but she used to be It's not what I ask for Sometimes life Just slips in through that back door And a car is out of person And it makes you believe it's all true Now I've got you

I would give it off when she's... I started out crying and then I was just smiling by the end. I watched the eulogy you gave and... I just want to play a little bit of what you said. If you were close to him, you knew that Gavin was not afraid of your darkness or your jealousy or your pettiness or your ugliness or your fear. He would pick up pints of ice cream and put up Christmas lights and sit in the muck with you.

This is when he was still eating sugar. He would welcome it in to get close and curious and try to understand it and above everything else remind you that you were not alone in any of it. Gavin deeply struggled with his own loneliness and fear. And it was not in spite of these parts of himself, but because of them that he was able to show up wholeheartedly to remind us how worthy we are of love not only in our joy, in our sorrow too. We get to be both.

Darkness and light, despair and hope. We just have to try and be true. I think this was in the eulogy that you asked Gavin to haunt you. Yes. How did he respond to that? I mean, I think he wanted to agree to it. I think we both knew it's like, sorry you can't, you know, no promises. I don't feel haunted by him.

Well, I do, what I think is beautiful is that I feel sort of haunted by him in beauty. When I see something that I think is, especially in nature, if I'm struck by just like, you know, sometimes it can just take your breath away. Just the feeling of the earth and how it changes and shifts. and Gavin was always someone who really appreciated that. So sometimes if I see something really beautiful, I feel him like in the light, the way the light hits a building or the light through the trees. But no, I was like, move a cup for me.

Like, show me where you at, man. You co-wrote a song with Andrew Gibson, the poet, and also Brandy Carlisle for the film. Come see me in the Good Light. The song is salt, then sour, then sweet. That's it. Yeah, I was a fan. And I think this movie is a miracle.

And Andrea always wanted to have a poem at the end of the film. Or they had thought, and Ryan White, the director, they had discussed having an original poem at the end of the film. And so Andrea had been, like, collecting little snatches of poetry and couplets. and eventually I just got sent a document that was a couple of pages of kind of unfinished poetry. And when I finished watching the first screening, I was so rocked by watching that film. And I sat with the pages of Andrea's work and just started kind of cobbling things together. I sent it to Brandy and I was like, do you have thoughts?

And she and I texted back and forth and were kind of shaped. sleeping things and then it all happened very quickly. I want to play some of salt, then sour, then sweet, which you co-wrote with Andrea Gibson and Brandy Carlylehow. If is the singer in my band, she's a passenger van, and a shortcut straight to the truth. Learn from the nightshade in the darkest places. Had we not been stung so many times

would we ever have arrived at this heaven? Lovely. Thanks. Is there something you've learned in your grief that you would think would be helpful for others? Hmm. There's a lot I've learned in my grief. We have time. Yeah.

I remember having a couple of experiences where I had a feeling I was, that I was scared of my grief. I felt like it was going to eat me alive, like I would actually sort of like dissolve into the unimaginable quality of this pain. And I think the learning for me is that you don't dissolve. I mean, mind you, I take medication, I do meditation, I have therapy. Like, I have a lot of resources to help me. You've talked about taking antidepressants and found it very helpful. Oh, yes.

I resisted it for such a long time. And I think for me, A, being the quality of life. And I'm not speaking as someone who feels like I'm not in touch with my grief at all. I think my fear was that there would be something suppressed, that I would be taken further away from myself or something would feel numbed out. But I actually think that the way depression and anxiety work in my system and for, I think, a lot of people, is that it actually becomes this sort of veil, this like lens you see your life through. So it creates more distance. So once I started taking Lexapro, I started feeling myself return to myself. That's what it felt like.

That's great. Oh, yeah. What a relief. I wish I would have done it 10 years ago. But all I can do is just share that it was, I'm like, I always tell people, you can try it. You can always come back to this. You know what this is. You can do this any time.

So see if there might be some relief. But I think it's an important thing to say, which is you still were able to feel. Oh, my God. Yes. I'm a mess a lot of the time, which I'm grateful for. I like my melancholy. I've grown quite fond of... I like the word melancholy.

It's not used enough. It's so delicious. But it's a part of my... The feeling tone I carry with the world. Like I feel very close to people's ache and sadness. I find that really beautiful and moving and human. It's why I write. It's why I make music.

So I wouldn't want to be far away from that feeling. But I don't want to be in the fetal position all the time. or not remember what it feels like to smile. Like, I don't want to be that person. That doesn't feel true to me either. I think the learning from my grief and Gavin and Chad and my fertility journey and all of the stuff is that it's such a beautiful teacher. To draw it close is to draw yourself closer, I think, and the sharing of grief is essential. You actually won't move through it alone.

You must find the courage to share it. And I think you'll be surprised how medicinal it is in a really good way. The sharing. You found the sharing of it beneficial and you found people who can share it with you. Yeah. Yeah. And not everybody can. Not everybody can go there.

And not everybody holds it that well. Andrea says this in the movie about the mailbox. There's this recurring gag and come see me in the Good Light where Andrea and Meg's mailbox keeps getting knocked off its post because of the snow plows. And Andrea fashions this very haphazard, like a rickety post for the mailbox. And they say, I would appreciate the trying. Isn't the trying all there is?

And I just, I think that is, that's a beautiful takeaway. Like, yeah, we're trying. for trying. We are all of us trying. I want to thank Sarah for that interview and for letting us hear her new song Home. The song is going to be on her new album coming out later this year.

Next Thursday, March 26, I hope you join me at 9.15 p.m. for my streaming show All There Is Live. It's our streaming show about loss. You can join and chat with others who are watching on our grief community page. Just go to CNN.com slash all there is on Thursday night, March 26 at 915 p.m.

If you missed the live stream, and it will be posted the following day for a week on the site. All the older episodes of that show are available on demand for CNN subscribers. If there's something you've learned in your grief that you think would be helpful for others, feel free to leave us a voicemail at 404-827-1805. Coming up on All There Is, my interview with Sarah Wildman. She's an editor and writer at the New York Times. Sarah's daughter, Orley, had a rare form of liver cancer and died in March 2023.

She was 14 years old. I came across some of the pieces that Sarah has a real. written in the times about Orlean was so moved by them, I reached out to her. I've been wanting to talk with her ever since, and we just sat down together a couple weeks ago. The doctors would say, well, what do you want? And I would say, I want her to fall in love. I want her to graduate. I want her to make mistakes.

What do you mean? What do I want? What does that even mean? I want the years that were promised to her. Outside of that, what do you mean? What do I want? I don't know how to want something more than that. I didn't realize that was asking for too much.

You know, I want her to get mad at me and not have to worry that we have to make up right away because I don't know what tomorrow is bringing. I don't want to worry that these are the only 10 good minutes and what if I take a walk and I miss them? I wanted to go out with her friends and come back too late and us argue about a curfew. I don't know. What do you want from a 14-year-old? I just wanted to get to do things. So what do you mean by what do I want?

How do you want me to live right now? how am I supposed to do this? That's Sir Wildman on an upcoming episode of All There Is. Thanks for listening. Wherever you are in the world and in your grief, you're not alone.