Sounds Like Me

by Sara Bareilles

  That feeling is like a drug.

  It’s intoxicating to feel wanted by something you want.

  There were really good parts about the relationship. We made everybody else laugh and made each other laugh even more. I adored his family. They were kind and warm and artsy and goofy, and welcomed me with open arms. He smelled good. He was an excellent kisser. He wrote me sweet notes in class and exposed me to really amazing music and his oddball artistic brain. I saw the sides of him that he didn’t share outwardly when he was being everybody’s favorite clown. His young artist mind, exploring drawing, painting, and sculpture, was just budding and trying to gain a foothold in his life, and I could see how privileged I was to be invited into such an intimate space. Our days at school were spent finding each other between classes and during breaks, swapping gossip and laughing about nothing. We both played sports, and outside of our practices and games, we spent every other spare moment on the phone or in each other’s room, giggling and kissing and just being kids in love. And let’s be honest, there is something really magical about loving someone, especially in the beginning, when they hijack your whole being and rewrite the synapses of your brain until they are conducting all the traffic. It’s like everything is seen through the prism of that person, and it somehow makes everything sing.

  I felt so incredibly special, so chosen, and for the first year I was over the moon. So much so that I ignored the parts of the relationship that weren’t so good. We’d fight. He was moody. I was controlling. He was antagonistic, and I was a nag. Neither one of us knew how to communicate, so the seeds of discontent were planted and began to grow stronger. We began to resent each other, and the friction became more evident, but there was no way in hell I was going to acknowledge anything that would threaten the stability of what I considered to be the best thing that had ever happened to me.

  Still clinging to the certainty of our future together, wearing my relationship like a crown, I tethered all of my self-esteem to it. If he loved me, it meant I was worth loving. When things shifted and he started to feel more distant toward the end of our senior year, I didn’t know how to process that. A more mature me might have looked at our lives and realized we were heading in two completely different directions: I was off to UCLA and he was staying in Eureka. I might have figured that it would be best to leave space for other things. But instead, I grew out my horns and dug in my heels and deteriorated into what I consider to be the worst version of myself. My fear of losing him manifested as jealousy, possessive panic, and a grip so tight I would have strangled anything that required even the smallest amount of air to breathe. I was suspicious of every girl and every guy, for that matter, fiercely guarding something I felt was mine alone that everyone was trying to take away from me. We both were responsible for the ending of the relationship, but truly, whatever was sweet and true about finding each other in the beginning was long gone. I just wouldn’t let it go.

  Then he kissed someone else while I was out of town on a family trip.

  I wasn’t aware of this for about a week. When I got back from the trip, a girl in my choir class pulled me aside at school and gave me a letter telling me LR had been seen holding hands with a girl from a neighboring high school at a party. Along with the news, she also gave me an amethyst necklace. I know. I also think the necklace was a weird move.

  I was leveled.

  The shock and embarrassment of being told this intimate news by a marginal friend was really uncomfortable but I kept a brave face, thanked her for the crushing information and formal necklace, while internally the fires of hell rose up and my blood boiled. I was furious. Not only over the act itself, but because neither my boyfriend nor any of my friends had the guts to tell me. That afternoon I sped to his house in my little red Hyundai Excel, completely out of control. What happened after he answered the door is a total blur, although I know I was shaking and screaming at the top of my lungs, pushing him around and desperately trying to say something to him to make him feel as small as I did at that moment. I felt forgotten and ignored and disrespected and embarrassed and just so very, very sad. My worst fears had ultimately come true. I wanted to run screaming, backward in time, and do something differently that would have saved us from this, but all I could do was stare him down in that tiny little bedroom like a wild animal.

  He didn’t have much to say. I said the most hurtful things I could think of. We both cried, and when I ran out of mean words I went home. Over the next couple of weeks, there was no comfort for me anywhere. The truth of the matter was that things had changed and I didn’t want them to.

  There is no quick fix for the bitter pill of acceptance.

  We were only a few weeks away from graduating, and soon enough I would be moving to Los Angeles, but that didn’t soften this experience one little bit. One day not long after it had happened, I ducked out of history class because I just couldn’t stop crying. My teacher came out to check on me in the hall and gave me advice that, at the time, made no sense whatsoever. He smiled knowingly and peeled a grapefruit while I sipped for air between sobs, and choked out words telling him what had happened. He didn’t appear quite as appalled as I was hoping he would, and I was infuriated by his stupid adultness and inability to understand just how ruined I was. Now I can see he’s a fucking genius.

  He gave me a hug, handed me a section of grapefruit, and said, “Let time pass.”

  And then he said, “Eat more fruit.”

  He was right on both counts, but I wouldn’t get it for many more years.

  I dragged myself through the end of the school year and then ended up getting back together with my boyfriend just after graduation. I remember standing on the front porch at my house in the redwoods, feeling helpless as he stood before me promising that I was the only thing he’d ever really loved. It was the only thing in the world that I wanted to hear, so I agreed. He said he was so sorry and wanted me back and it was like a Christmas-morning feeling, but wrapped in sad. It was something coming true that I had desperately hoped for, but not without some new sense of knowing that this was a shell of what it had been. I knew something was gone that I couldn’t get back, but I was just too sad to imagine up my own strength to continue to walk away, and too young to know what that would actually mean.

  We were only officially back together for a few months, but the emotional tangle went on long after that, plenty long enough for me to begin to believe that I wasn’t good enough to deserve and keep someone’s love. That every relationship would end like this. My faith in trusting a partner has since returned, but it took more time than I care to admit to get over this initial blow. At the time, I thought it was him I was disappointed in, but I see now I did a lot of that damage to myself.

  We broke up again just after I left for college, and the tortured saga continued for waaaaaay too long. I would come home from UCLA on my breaks and we would pick up old routines and I’d want to believe that things would turn around: that our love was big enough to transcend the five hundred miles and light-years of maturation required to make that relationship work. But of course it wasn’t and we didn’t and my heart would rip open every single time. We’re always making everything slightly more difficult than it needs to be, aren’t we?

  Oh, us.

  That teenage love was a skeletal version of what love feels like to me today, but my visceral reactions to losing it were mature expressions of pain and loss. And I think that because of the depth and complexities of those feelings, I was compelled for the very first time to turn to my piano to truly process my emotions. Gravity was written on my dad’s old upright piano, one summer when I was on break from school, around a year after the breakup. I remember late-night composing, trying not to wake my sleeping father, crying over the piano keys.

  I could clearly see my own pattern of returning to something that was not serving me, and yet I kept choosing to repeat it over and over. I felt so powerless and so deeply disappointed in my own inability to take control. It was easier t
o blame him for my pain, because then I didn’t have to be responsible for myself. I didn’t want it to be my fault. I wanted it to be something otherworldly that was drawing me back to him, my stuckness to not be a reflection of my own weakness, but something unavoidable, almost scientific. Gravity was the first time I really remember feeling catharsis through writing. It gave a home to feeling helpless, and I saw that there is power in the act of articulating your inner world. Giving my emotions a name changed them. The chemical makeup of the problem seemed to shift once it was dissected and placed somewhere. It was not a shortcut to healing, but at least a step in the right direction. He was clearly the force that was keeping me down, but I was the one who had to let go.

  Putting that song together served as an emotional outlet where I could store my experience. I spent hours poring over the structure of it, and lots of parts of that process stay with me. I liked the evenness and repetition of the sounds of those opening chords, and I liked the simplicity of the phrasing of the verse lyric. The melody of the chorus made me feel melancholy and suited the sentiment, and the final line of the bridge was a triumphant discovery. I liked the juxtaposition of an ascending melodic line while saying the words keeping me down, and I also liked where the note sat in my register. People seem to be impressed with me hitting that note still to this day, but I’ll share a secret with you: it’s not really that high in my range. (It looks harder than it actually is, because I throw my head back.)

  I don’t think the song saved me from my heartbreak, but it did move me in a new direction, and I saw for the first time that sharing the truth of my own pain and vulnerability could also create a vehicle for connection with others. I played this song in some of my first performances and it seemed kinetic in its effect on people. I started to see how many of my fans were connecting to this sentiment of feeling overpowered by someone or something. Over the years, people have shared incredible stories of heartbreak, yes, but also of addiction, loss, death, and moving away from stagnancy in their lives. Those stories are moving and healing for me too. I am grateful to be a part of that exchange. I continue to see that the more I am willing to share the deepest and darkest parts of myself, the closer I feel to my life’s work. Maybe that’s why I don’t tire of being requested to sing Gravity. It gave a lot back to me.

  I am grateful to the boy who broke my heart for the very first time. I allowed myself to truly love something other than myself, and that is a beautiful experience, albeit painful. This song gave purpose to all that pain for me and somehow made it feel complete. Surrender is a healing sentiment to return to, and in the end, I’m glad that my heart was launched into the air by a careless kid, because I was gifted the opportunity of learning how to heal it once it hit the ground.

  Radio City Music Hall, October 9, 2013

  LOVE SONG

  * * *

  THE STORY OF LOVE SONG has morphed over the years into an incredibly oversimplified version of the truth. I think I even helped perpetuate it. It would take too long to correct every person who assumes they know the story. But this succinct version of the “truth” must have been sent out to every interviewer I’ve ever spoken to, because they all say the same thing:

  The big bad record company demanded that I write them a love song and I, being the cheeky, indignant young songstress that I am, thumbed my nose at them and gave them the anti–love song. Huzzah!

  Their story isn’t false; it’s a half-truth. I gave up trying to assert the entirety of the story because it is, like most things in life, more nuanced and complicated than a distilled one-liner that reads, “She walked into iTunes with her dukes up” (a phrase I have actually read). Don’t get me wrong—I like the idea of being some sort of modern musical Lone Ranger, but that’s not really how it happened. Love Song served as a beacon to help me find my way back to my own artistry at a time when I had lost sight of what that meant. And it was the culmination of years of experience.

  In 2003, I was newly graduated from UCLA and still living in Los Angeles, working as a waitress and playing lots of gigs on the side. I had a degree in communications, which might sound like something, but no actual things require this degree. It’s like studying the history of Jennifer Aniston’s hairstyle—a lot of fun, but not that practical. I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. At twenty-three years old, when I sat with the daunting task of trying to choose some sort of path forward, I got overwhelmed. So I just focused on having fun. I knew that I loved playing music, and I took a job in a bar with a great beer selection and flexible scheduling so I could devote myself to playing my gigs and avoiding my future. While I figured it out, I might as well drink a lot of expensive beer and nurture friendships with people who were just as deliciously aimless as I was.

  I used the money I made to pay for rehearsal spaces, a rotating cast of band members, shitty keyboards, and, judging from photos of myself at that time, a variety of head scarves. At the time, I probably had about seven or eight completed songs and many seeds of song ideas that were stylistically all over the map. As cringeworthy as it can be, I still sort of love this stage in a young artist’s development. There’s something sweet and untamed about trying to develop a craft you don’t totally understand yet. It is the musical equivalent of playing dress-up, trying things on hoping eventually you get to the bottom of the trunk and find something that fits and feels good. Sometimes you stumble into some happy accidents that stick. If you’re me, you also stumble into writing a pop-reggae tune about making out. I’ll go ahead and leave that in the vault for another time. I tried everything. Country songs. Girly punk rock. Moody down-tempos. Folky poetry songs. Jazz. Musical theater. I tried to write hybrids of all of the above. I used the word moonbeam a lot. It was certainly not a very subtle or refined time in my writing, but it was playful and pure and it brought me closer to finding myself. As I mimicked other people’s music, I uncovered facets of myself as a writer, and eventually collected a handful of songs that I had written on my own and was willing to share as I got acquainted with the singer-songwriter circuit in LA.

  Playing a show at Hotel Café

  Starting out, I played anywhere and everywhere. I opened for magicians at loungey beachside bars, and played on back porches of coffee shops that served warm beer in a can. I played fancy backyards for private parties, and crunchy weekend women’s festivals. I played stages that had stripper poles but no strippers (sad face), and kosher Chinese restaurants that served egg rolls to their patrons while I tried to think of between-song banter for people eating egg rolls. So many shows. I put together a small band that was in flux for the first year and a half or so, and we would play a few of my original songs and a handful of covers because I hadn’t yet written enough music to quite fill an entire set. If you had come to a very early show of mine, you might have been lucky enough to catch me wearing a skullcap and a hemp necklace, playing I Will Survive to the preprogrammed drumbeat on my keyboard while my buddy the djembe player beatboxed to help the “groove.” Well-intended, but maybe not one of my most musical moments. However, playing shows made me hungry to write even more music, and so I started doing more of that, growing my repertoire of songs.

  Between 2003 and 2005, I met some musicians I truly connected with, and the show and my band began to take shape, to exhibit consistency and more musicality. After my previous encounters (with, for example, the bass player who came to shows super stoned and played facing the wall instead of the audience), finding these people was like finding an oasis in a desert. That first year of shows was a crash course in putting together a band and building my business, and I had no idea what I was doing. I made plenty of mistakes, but eventually found my way toward good, kind, funny, talented human beings who are still some of my best friends in the world.

  Looking back on those early days now, I realize I had no perspective on where my music was headed, but as time passed, the picture revealed itself slowly, slowly, slowly. I went from playing in front of twelve people who were doing me
a personal favor by coming to the show, to playing for hundreds of people who had come for the music (and, potentially, the head scarves). I was amazed to see that I was actually building something within the Los Angeles music scene. The crowds and the venues were getting bigger and better, and it became clear that there was a demand from my small but dedicated fan base to have recordings of my music.

  I recorded and released my first album independently in January 2004. It was called Careful Confessions, and I recorded it with a good friend and artist, Gabriel Mann, who had produced the records Pitch-Slapped and Dysfunktional Family Album for my college a cappella group, Awaken. (A cappella groups love puns.) Gabe has the curliest hair in the world, a dry wit, great talent, and works fast. He’s a studio nine-to-fiver, my favorite kind of producer. There are a lot of musicians and producers out there who love “hanging” in the studio, and I promise they’re all cooler than me. I’m too high-strung and too cheap to enjoy lounging on a couch that costs $1,500 a day. I like to “hang” at home, or at a cozy bar, or with tiny ponies on a farm. When I’m in the studio, I want to work. Gabe and I were very compatible that way. Careful Confessions consisted of seven studio recordings and a handful of lo-fi live recordings, the best of what I had written up until that point. It took maybe a month to record and mix everything, and I began to get acquainted with a process that would become a large part of my life as an artist.