Sara Bareilles feels like she’s on the campaign trail with all the miles she’s traveling. “Yeah,” she said while in Chicago recently. “Except way less political.”
“This is what you aim for — the busy schedule,” the 28-year-old said. “I’m just happy to ride the wave while it’s happening.”
That wave will swell very soon.
When this edition of VH1’s You Oughta Know tour comes to a close, Bareilles will venture out on her first headlining club gigs in April. She comes back to Chicago on April 17 to play the House of Blues.
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She’s excited about the road trip.
“This is the first time touring on a bus! No more van and trailer. … We can actually sleep,” said Bareilles, who’s been compared to Fiona Apple and Norah Jones.
She’s jazzed, too, when recalling the past year. Her discovery moment became all the buzz, as is what happened next.
Many in attendance for Bareilles’ opening set at a San Francisco Aqualung concert in May were so taken with her, they shut up and listened. An audience member, who was there to see Aqualung, the British pianist who rocks a little harder than the quieter Bareilles, shot a video of her performing the haunting “Gravity,” uploaded it to YouTube and it spread like melted butter around the Net.
That was two months before her “Little Voice” dropped (a special two-disc version of the CD is in stores Tuesday), but Bareilles had already seeped into the nooks and crannies of pop consciousness with her YouTube fame. “Little Voice” became the most-downloaded album on iTunes.
Then she appeared on a Rhapsody music service commercial playing her hit single, the lovely “Love Song.”
Pretty good for a largely untrained artist who took a few piano lessons as a 2nd grader in Eureka, Calif. Her musical calling came later during a semester abroad while studying communications at UCLA.
“I had a bit of a nervous breakdown in Italy,” she said. Depressed, she found a piano shop, went in, sat down and played Joni Mitchell’s “Blue,” and that was it. “I had an epiphany that music was for me. It made me happy.”
That’s not so much a skeleton in her non-political closet. It’s just a songwriter being honest.