On this week’s episode of All There Is With Anderson Cooper, singer/songwriter Sara Bareilles shared her unreleased track “Home” — a song sparked by an earlier conversation on the CNN podcast.
The track was written after Bareilles listened to a chat between host Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert during the podcast’s first season, when they shared their experiences with grief and loss. Their exchange resonated with Bareilles, who had been navigating losses in her own life, and she wrote “Home” as part of processing those feelings.
“I was really moved,” Bareilles tells Cooper. “I think you say it in the interview: It’s about telling your story, and about telling your story warts and all, is the thing that brings you back home. And I think of home as being a place of connection. Your soul is at peace and at rest when you’re in connection. … For me, on this earth, our work is to find ways to be bold enough to let other people see us. And telling stories is such an important part of that.”
In the clip above, premiering exclusively on Billboard, Bareilles plays a snippet of “Home” with vulnerable lyrics about losing a parent, reflecting Copper and Colbert’s conversation: “I am one day older than my father was/ Than he ever got to be/ I was 10 years old when I grew up/ ‘Cause he died at 53.”
Cooper shared his emotional reaction after getting a sneak peek of the song, saying in the podcast intro: “You’re going to hear that song on the podcast today. It hasn’t been released yet, but Sara wanted all of us in this community to hear it first. I had not heard it in advance, and I was incredibly moved by it. I’m a little embarrassed about how emotional I got.”
Bareilles is currently working on her first full album since the COVID‑19 pandemic, with the unreleased track “Home” as part of the project.
In recent years, Bareilles has also coped publicly with the death of close friend and Broadway colleague Gavin Creel, the Tony Award–winning actor and singer who died in September 2024 from a rare and aggressive form of sarcoma. Creel, who performed with Bareilles in Waitress: The Musical and other stage productions, was widely mourned in the theater community, and Bareilles honored him at the 2025 Tony Awards.
In addition to her work on Broadway, Bareilles has had a long and successful career in pop music. She first gained mainstream attention with her 2007 hit “Love Song,” which reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, and continued her chart success with Kaleidoscope Heart (2010) and Amidst the Chaos (2019), both of which reached the top 10 on the Billboard 200.
Fans can catch the full conversation and hear “Home” when the episode drops Thursday (March 19) on cnn.com/allthereis.
