For years, Sara Bareilles has been enjoying a career that’s hard to pin down. She hit the spotlight as a singer-songwriter behind albums like “Little Voice” and “The Blessed Unrest,” but she also detoured into musical theater by writing the music and lyrics for the Broadway show “Waitress” in 2015. She’s been nominated for Grammys as a songwriter and performer, for Tonys as a composer and actress and for Emmys as an actress, host and songwriter.
In a way, the comedy series “Girls5eva,” which moved to Netflix for Season 3 after two seasons and one cancellation on Peacock, includes some of everything Bareilles does. She’s one of the stars of the series created by Meredith Scardino, joining Busy Philipps, Paula Pell and Renée Elise Goldsberry as members of a one-hit girl group trying to mount a comeback 20 years past their heyday. And in what has become something of a tradition, Bareilles has written a new song for the final episode of each of the show’s three seasons — with her Season 3 entry, “The Medium Time,” landing an Emmy nomination in the Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics category.
“The first season, it was a grand experiment,” Bareilles said of writing songs for every season finale. “And then as time went on, it fell into that pattern, which has been a beautiful grace note for each season for me.”
“The essential nature of the process is the same in the sense that there is usually something that moves me instinctually,” she said. “There’s some piece of the world or something experiential or something in the script, or something in a character that just kind of rings the first bell, so to speak. And one of the things that I love about working with Meredith and our music team is just that Meredith just is a fountainhead of all these wonderful, wonderful ideas.”
In this case, the song was inspired by a conversation that Bareilles’ character, Dawn, has with veteran actor Richard Kind, who rhapsodizes on the merits of being well-known enough that you keep working steadily but obscure enough that you never get bothered at the deli. Scardino suggested a song about “being somewhere in the middle and how beautiful that can be,” so Bareilles produced a piano-based and soul-flavored ballad whose lyrics include, “Not too high, not too low / We’re the medium time / Staying in the middle is the only way to go.”
“It was such a sweet sentiment,” Bareilles said. “I really relate to that in my own life, and I love that for our characters. To me, that line is about staying present. It’s like, we’re here right now, and let’s just stay in this moment.
“Of course things change. Your wants and wishes and hopes and ambitions are always a churning evolution. But I do love the idea that there’s a moment to just stop and take in what is beautiful and good. I think that’s a powerful practice for a person. And even though these characters are silly at times, it’s still a real truth for them to be on this wild journey and then stop and say it’s amazing just to reach for the dream with people you love.”
The cast’s camaraderie also influenced the musical approach Bareilles took when writing the song. “I remembered from a different episode when we were backstage practicing whatever we were about to sing, and being struck by how much we enjoy singing together,” she said. “So my approach for the song was, Let’s just make it solid four-part harmony, a beautiful sing-along thing.”
At first, though, the phrase the medium time gave her trouble. “Initially, it was not a very musical phrase, so I was having a hard time wrapping my brain around how to make that sing,” she said. “But the cadence of that turned into this 6/8 kind of soul, bluesy thing. And then it started to really make sense. Leaning into the swing of it started to unlock the world of the song.”
The combination of that soulful feel and an arrangement based around Bareilles’ piano also gave the song the feel of a old Aretha Franklin song, a comparison Bareilles was happy to embrace. “Hey, I’ll take that!” she said with a grin. “I’ll take that anytime.”
Of course, the Queen of Soul probably wouldn’t be singing about wanting to stay in the middle…
“She’s nowhere near the middle,” said Bareilles, laughing. “She’s solidly at the top.”
In the show, the song is performed at what is supposed to be a triumphant concert at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, though the audience consists of a few friends and family members, a pair of ushers, a grand total of two paying customers and Richard Kind. “So much about that episode and where those girls are at that time is just about this incredible journey they’ve been on,” Bareilles said. “And it’s very meta: It’s the road we’ve been on the show, which is like the little engine that could. It felt like art imitating life on some level.”
And even though “Girls5eva” is definitely a comedy, Bareilles said she doesn’t think much about adding humor to the songs she writes for the show. “The A student in me really wants to please, but people like (composer) Jeff Richmond and Meredith Scardino and Paula Pell are geniuses at writing comedy songs,” she said. “That’s not really my wheelhouse. It’s not that I’ve never written comedy songs, but my role in the music world is around heart-speak – not shying away from what is earnest and not shying away from the sweetness that’s inside these girls.”
So Bareilles finished writing the song, which was largely done in one afternoon, she sent a demo to Scardino with her usual misgivings. “I usually send it off with the caveat of, like, ‘I’m not sure this is funny enough,’” she said. “But Meredith immediately wrote me back and said, ‘I’m crying in an Adidas store. This is perfect.’” She laughed. “Meredith never worries about funny. She just wants it to be true.”
A version of this story first appeared in the Down to the Wire: Comedy issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
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