The Blessed Unrest

There are pretty small handful of albums that feel important to my life, and I encountered most of them when I was a teenager in the late 1990s or early 2000s.

Sara Bareilles’s The Blessed Unrest is an exception. The album dropped in 2013, when I was probably too old to be nursing a celebrity crush on a pop star, but what can I say? I was in the thick of my twelve-year stint blogging about a cappella and Bareilles had charmed me in her single season as a judge on The Sing-Off. Moreover, I really liked her music, having discovered her to be more than just another singer-song writer my early-twenties girlfriend obsessed over--the identity I had assigned to and thus dismissed Bareilles for the first time I saw her live, opening for Counting Crows--but rather someone whose deep cuts like “Bright Lights and Cityscapes” and “Goodbye Song” I felt on a surprisingly deep level.

I really liked Bareilles. Enough to pre-order The Blessed Unrest and feel it quickly enter my life’s story—a sort of soundtrack, a sort of companion.

I adored “Manhattan” from the start--the kind of heartbreak epic that harkened back to my early instincts to call “Raining in Baltimore” my favorite Counting Crows song or “Evaporated”my favorite by Ben Folds. It’s a beautiful song with an old-fashioned sensibility to it.

And there’s “I Choose You,” which functions something like a mirror image to “Manhattan”--maybe the before to its sibling song’s after, out of sequence on the album, or maybe an after of recovery as one of the more uplifting songs on The Blessed Unrest. It’s a song that came the more impactful for me after I got together with Heather, later that year. For though I first learned of Bareilles from a girlfriend I’d split from messily after four years, in a breakup that I didn’t deliver very well, and though I became enamored with Bareilles during my next multi-year relationship, and though the album dropped while I was licking my wounds from a boyish crush on a friend that hadn’t gone anywhere for her disinterest, my relationship with Heather helped me feel a song that is a celebration of love in a way that I don’t think I fully would have at any other time in my life. In follow up to a discussion about the choice, and the need to not only have chosen, but to continually choose one another, we decided that this was our song and that if we ever got married, an acoustic version of this song that we particularly liked would play for our first dance. Three years later, it was (discussed at greater length here).

And there’s the song that everyone knows from The Blessed Unrest—“Brave.” It’s quite arguably the single most popular song Bareilles has ever recorded, an infinitely catchy pop jam, engineered for radio play with an uplifting message. I dismissed this song in about equal parts because it was so omnipresent and accessible, casting too wide of a net, and also because it didn’t feel like a tonal fit relative to the cooler, more pensive aesthetic of most of the rest of the album. But it’s a really good song—I can concede that all these years later, and though I don’t expect it will ever be my favorite, it probably is now one of my top five favorite tracks from the album. I will, in particular, always remember it from a night nearly a year removed from when the single first dropped. I sat in my car after checking my mailbox, midway through the process of hearing back from the MFA programs. There in my hands was a business-sized envelope from the University of Iowa. I can’t overstate how much I had romanticized the idea of going to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, if only because it was the consensus top program, and I so badly craved the validation of that acceptance letter. I was already listening to The Blessed Unrest in the car and, in a moment of undeniably over-programming my life, but also seeking a little extra courage, I skipped back to “Brave,” took a deep breath, and ripped open the envelope.

I didn’t get in.

The moment could have ruined “Brave” for me, but instead the song became something of an anthem for carrying on, because I had gotten into other programs, and would still get into Oregon State—another top tier choice from the schools I had applied to—a month after that.

But one track after “Brave” is “Chasing the Sun.” From my first listen, I loved it, and though I’d listen to the full album and previously mentioned individual tracks a lot, this was the one I obsessed over from day one. It’s uplifting, but also textured, a lyrically complex song largely set in a New York City cemetery that I nonetheless connect to my shit hole one bedroom apartment in Baltimore and commutes to and from an office job I was pretty disillusioned with by that point.

And I connect it to California.

It’s a song of recovery with a refrain of, all we can do is try and live like we’re still alive and fill up your lungs and just run; an observation that history—particularly surrounded by people who are gone and their memories dare us to move. This all takes me back to the last of my annual end of summer drives down the California coast after an annual intensive work residency in Santa Cruz.

2013 saw the last of four such journeys, as I anticipated going to grad school the following fall and that I may have left the job by that point, or else at least be in money-saving mode in the transition to the leaner times of being a full-time student again for the first time in nine years. That trip, I sky-dived and I went to a wrestling show. That trip, I texted compulsively with Heather, who I’d just started to get to know, and whom I’d have my first, twenty-four hour date with in San Diego at the end of this journey.

I listened to “Chasing the Sun” a lot along the five hundred miles of driving that week.

I know it may be overstating it to call it the most exciting time of my life.

But I know wouldn’t be overstating it by much.

So it was that The Blessed Unrest entered the fabric of my life, interwoven as favorite teenage music and childhood movies and great books and the voices of great teachers.

This album was everything to me.