Sara Bareilles is a singer-songwriter known for her powerful vocals and piano-based pop-soul sound. But before she was composing for Broadway and selling out arenas, she was just a small-town girl from Eureka, California, with an expressive voice. She's one of those rare artists who managed to transition from the highly competitive singer-songwriter circuit to serious theatrical acclaim.
Piano was Bareilles' first love; she was already hammering out beautiful melodies by age 6. She spent her youth singing in local choirs before moving south to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she majored in communications and honed her vocals in campus a cappella groups.
Though Bareilles ultimately built a spectacular career, she wasn't a pre-ordained Disney star. She once auditioned for the Mickey Mouse Club and didn't make the cut.
Bareilles had what you might call a very diverse resumé before she could afford to focus on music full-time. She once worked at a petting zoo, did time as a janitor (we assume that job didn't involve playing the piano), was a data entry clerk, a waitress and tried her hand at pizza making.
Her first brush with a big crowd came when she was just 14 years old, singing the National Anthem at Dodger Stadium on Opening Day. The opportunity came through her eighth-grade math teacher, Mr. Funkhouser, whose brother handled some of the musical bookings for the Dodgers. It was a high-pressure situation, but she handled it, though she did cry in the bathroom beforehand, largely thanks to a questionable fashion choice involving a crushed velvet vest and MC Hammer pants. When someone later told her, "Hey, good job, but this is California. We're casual here," she was speechless.
Before her major label debut, Bareilles was a grind-it-out musician, self-releasing independent demo CDs and hawking them at her gigs around LA. She signed with Epic Records in 2005, but the real turning point was pure lightning in a bottle.
The song that changed her fortunes was "
Love Song." In June 2007 it was featured as iTunes' Single of the Week. The exposure turned her from a cult favorite into a national sensation almost overnight and drove her debut album,
Little Voice, straight to the top of the iTunes chart.
Sara has one of those complicated surnames that causes announcers to break out in cold sweats. She joked on Reddit that she'd heard it butchered in countless ways, but never considered swapping it out for something simpler. Her reasoning was perfect: "I figured if people can figure out Aguilera, they can figure out Bareilles." (For the record, it's pronounced "buh-RELL-iss.")
When it comes to crafting a tune, Bareilles said she usually starts with the melody at the piano. She also likes switching to the guitar because she doesn't play it as well: "Sometimes you find little surprises when you don't know what you're doing."
Bareilles leveraged her songwriting into a massive career shift by writing the music and lyrics for the 2015 Broadway musical Waitress. The work earned her a Tony nomination for Best Score. Her theatrical successes didn't stop there; she picked up critical acclaim and more Tony nominations for her work on SpongeBob SquarePants and Into the Woods.
The theater brought her more than just awards: it led her to actor Joe Tippett, whom she met in 2015 while working on Waitress. They began dating in 2016 and quietly tied the knot on October 5, 2025.
Bareilles earned an Emmy nomination for her performance as Mary Magdalene in NBC's Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert in 2018.
Bareilles has a terrible sense of direction. "Nobody ever lets me lead on tour," she said. "They're smart for doing that."
