Sounds Like Me by Sara Bareilles

After The Fifth Season, I was in the mood for something a bit more light-hearted to read. I’ve been a fan of Sara Bareilles’ music since my then fiance-now husband suggested one of her songs for our first dance, and I was intrigued to learn she’d written a book.

Sounds Like Me isn’t a typical celebrity memoir full of love affairs and feuds, but it’s written with humility and humour, and provides insight into the experiences that shaped Sara as a musician and person from her parents’ divorce and being bullied about her weight at school, finding her love of music and theatre to her first love and inevitable heartbreak, a year studying in Italy, recording and touring, right up to writing the Broadway musical Waitress.

It’s a short book comprising of eight essays based around eight of her songs, though one aspect that did disappoint me was that most of the songs she picked as the basis of the chapters in this book were from her earlier recordings with no songs from Kaleidoscope Heart and only one from The Blessed Unrest, although she does include one from Waitress.

I started reading this thinking it would be a little stopgap between other reads, but I enjoyed it much more than I expected to. Sounds Like Me is a quick and entertaining read, filling in the background of one of my favourite musicians that made me want to listen to her songs with fresh insight, though it did leave me wanting to know more.

My reading often dips in the summer when longer, lighter evenings encourage me to spend more time outside being active, but back under partial lockdown for a couple of weeks and on the cusp of autumn, I’m looking forward to cosy evenings catching up on my TBR shelf. Take care, and have a lovely week. X