Sara Bareilles on Her New Duet With Brandi Carlile, ‘Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,’ Theme Song for ‘Come See Me in the Good Light’: ‘This Film Is Medicinal — It’s Easy to Want to Amplify It’
- - Sara Bareilles on Her New Duet With Brandi Carlile, ‘Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,’ Theme Song for ‘Come See Me in the Good Light’: ‘This Film Is Medicinal — It’s Easy to Want to Amplify It’
Chris WillmanNovember 14, 2025 at 11:03 PM
0
Sara Bareilles and Brandi Carlile have blended their voices on a few occasions in impromptu or concert settings, but not for an official recording until now. The occasion that finally brought them together was “Come See Me in the Good Light,” an Apple documentary coming out this weekend about the poet Andrea Gibson dealing with terminal illness. Both singer-songwriters signed on as executive producers while the film was being made, and then Bareilles embarked on a theme that would adapt Gibson’s poetry into song, bringing in Carlile as a fellow lead vocalist and co-writer on the track she’d started. Their song, “Salt Then Sour Then Sweet,” is also debuting on streaming services today.
The subject matter sounds heavy, but the theme song turns to be… to borrow a phrase… actually romantic — romantic about love, and about life itself, against some obvious odds. It takes its cues in that regard from the lightness that comes through in the doc’s portrayal of Gibson’s relationship with fellow poet Megan Falley, a strong throughline in the film.
More from Variety
CMA Awards' Performance Lineup Adds Kenny Chesney, Brandi Carlile, Miranda Lambert, Red Clay Strays and More
What Was Brandi Carlile Reciting on 'SNL'? How Thomas Jefferson's Proclamation About Separating 'Church & State' Made It Into a Blazing Rock Song
Brandi Carlile Offers a Track-by-Track Look at 'Returning to Myself' Album, From Lauding 'Joni' to the Explosive 'Church & State'
Bareilles tells Variety how the song came to be. “You know, I’m in a really beautiful, privileged position to have resources to help get art made that I love and believe in. Whether it’s investing a little bit of money in an off-Broadway show or this, I’ve been doing more of that, because I think supporting art is really important for the health of humanity — just to make it sound too grandiose. But the yes for me was that I feel like Andrea and Meg’s story is so worth being told, and then I saw a little bit of the film. The idea came up to work with this unfinished poetry that Andrea had been collecting, because they wanted to put an original poem at the end of the film.
“And then it was like, well, you got me, you’ve got Brandi Carlile — maybe there’s a world where there’s a collaboration waiting to be uncovered. And it really happened super quickly as soon as I saw the first cut of the film. It’s not the final shot in the film anymore, but it used to have these wind chimes at the very end, and I just started writing a song in the key of those wind chimes, and was looking over these pages of beautiful couplets [of Gibson’s]… There was a love poem and so I started putting things together. I sent it to Brandi, she gave me some feedback and we went back and forth. And then it was really just a matter of a few days and the whole thing was done.”
Of working with Carlile, Bareilles says, “She’s the easiest. She’s so great. And with Brandi, the power of her forward momentum is really helpful. I sent her a kind of a first draft and she’s like, ‘Yes.’ She’s a yes, and I love that about her. She’s like, ‘Yeah, and this… Oh, what if you do this, or you repeat this and then you try this again? I feel like this needs…’ I’m a big admirer of hers, as an artist and then also getting to know her, the few times that we’ve done things together — I just really have a lot of admiration and respect for her. And we’re both big fans of this project, and I think anytime you can build a collaboration based on the support of this other sort of third entity… It felt like we were coming together for the greater good of this film, so that was a nice North Star.”
Bareilles came to know Gibson and get involved in the project after having been a fan of their poetry and, coincidentally, in Colorado at the same time Gibson was doing one final live performance there, captured in the film.
“The whole evolution of my involvement with this film has felt very just kismet and miraculous,” Bareilles says. “The reason I’m involved is because I happen to have been in Colorado when Andrea was performing there, those final shows, and ran into Glennon (Doyle) and Abby (Wambach) there, and we shared our love for Andrea’s work, while we were all in very tender places personally.
“I got introduced to Andrea’s work on Instagram — you know, the blessing and the curse that Instagram is. It was all of those videos that they would share, and I was just so moved by their generosity and courage to share something so intimate, and with so much lightness. I think that’s one of Andrea’s superpowers is this ability to hold the dark matter with so much light, and real love — like, a devotional love of life. There’s a lot of really incredible wisdom in their perspective. And I know it was a hard one for them as well — you know, they were on a dark journey for a long time — so when I think about the context of these times that we’re in, it feels like a real beacon of hope to have somebody be able to garner good things from hard places.
“Watching someone like Andrea be on the mortal precipice and hold it with such grace… They’re a beautiful teacher. That’s just how I view them. And so like with anything with your meditation teachers, or if you’re a person of faith, your deacons or your priests or whomever, the shamans of our world that help us translate our pain into grace, really, that’s how I hold them in my mind.”
In the actual crafting of the song, “structurally, it actually was pretty intuitive,” she says. “I mean, I think Andrea as a poet is pretty musical. And so I was looking for things where there was an internal rhyme or whatever, and then of course I added some interstitial things to kind of help stitch the song together a little bit. But it was pretty intuitive. It was not a heavy lift to kind of change form.”
When the film premiered at Sundance, and the song was unveiled for the first time, “It was really tender. I don’t know if we maybe had sent it before. But the first time they heard it live, I was singing it at the welcome gala at Sundance. And they weren’t feeling great, and the travel had been hard, but they came. I won’t forget that feeling of getting to perform the song for them. It feels a little bit like a magic trick to watch somebody make something you made into something else. I’ve had that experience watching someone choreograph a dance to a song of mine of just being like, ‘Oh, I didn’t know that was in there,’ you know? So it’s a really beautiful feeling to share that transformation, and they were just very loving and excited about the collaboration.
“Andrea knew that this film was gonna hold a lot of heavy material, but it’s so funny. You watch this film and Andrea is hysterical, hysterically funny, as is Meg. So you’re laughing a lot, and it’s just a joyful, life-affirming film that happens to be about cancer. It’s just the both of it all, that it’s something that can be joyful and devastating at the same time, that I just think is so human and so real. And Andrea didn’t want to leave people with some kind of broken-hearted, achy song. They wanted a love song for Meg, and so that’s what we wrote.”
One of Bareilles’ favorite lines in the song — one that came from Gibson — is “Grief is a shortcut to the truth.” “I love that. It’s so real. … I’ve been going through a lot of loss these last few years. You know, I had a couple of friends pass away, and it was my first experience as an adult with just sort of devastating grief. I have a new record coming out early next year, and the whole record pretty much is about grief. It’s all I’ve been feeling since the pandemic, pretty much. But it’s so truthful; it’s so tenderizing. It cracks you open in this way that I think is really important and helpful, ultimately, if you can sort of endure what’s hard about it.”
Best of Variety
Oscar Predictions: ‘Hamnet’ Gains Momentum as Fall Festivals Confirm It’s an Undeniable Audience Favorite
What’s Coming to Netflix in November 2025
The Best Couples Costumes to Wear This Halloween: From 'Severance' to Oasis
Sign up for Variety's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Source: “AOL Entertainment”
