Sara Bareilles goes cameo crazy

Piano pop princess Sara Barielles is back with a new song called Uncharted. Once I'd got over the fact it wasn't a tribute to Nathan Drake (geek joke!), it turned out to be a zippy little kitchen sink anthem in the style of The Benjamin Folds Five.

And guess what? Ben Folds turns up in the video, lip-syncing to the track as though he'd written it all along (he didn't). You will also get to see Pharrell Williams, Josh Groban, Tegan And Sara, Ryan Tedder and many, many more people with human faces mouthing the words that Sara Bareilles wrote and sang into a microphone.

Yes, it's exactly the same idea as Nickelback's Rockstar video, but the song is infinitely less hateful.

Sara Bareilles - Uncharted

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Single Ladies - now with added jazz hands

Sara Bareilles, of "not going to write you a love song" fame, has a new record out. In celebration of this fact, she's covered Beyoncé's Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It) in exchange for a bit of promotion on Billboard's website. And, subsequently, this one.

Sara Bareilles - Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)


Billboard call her interpretation "a slow, jazzy track, complete with creeping bassline and vocal harmonies".

The phrase they're trying to avoid here, readers, is "lounge singer".

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Not going to write you a love song (again)

Sara Bareilles' Love Song was a pretty major radio hit. Back in summer 2008, it was played 1,000,000 times every hour on radio stations in the Oxfordshire area alone (FACT*). What's more, it sold in excess of 3m copies in the US (FACT**).

Now she's back with a brand new MOR pop ditty called King Of Anything. Not one to ditch a winning formula, Bareilles has penned a petulant kiss-off to someone who tried to give her unsolicited advice.

"Who cares if you disagree? You are not me. Who died and made you king of anything?" she pouts.

Last time round, the venom was directed towards her record label. On this song, the target is a bit more mysterious - but the song's just as catchy, in a "I wish Ben Folds was still this good" kind of way.

Sara Bareilles - King Of Anything


Sara's next single is going to be called "You can't tell me what to do, you're not my real dad.***"

* Not a fact
** Fact
*** Oh, work it out for yourself

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Credible Christmas songs pt II

If you like your singer-songwriters female and fragile, then you're in for a treat: Here are Ingrid Michaelson and Sara Bareilles performing their new duet Winter Song on US TV:

Ingrid Michaelson and Sara Bareilles - Winter Song


Poor Ingrid, she can't even afford a full-size guitar...

The song is from a compilation CD from hipster LA music venue Hotel Cafe, which also features Fiona Apple doing Frosty The Snowman (awesome) and Katy Perry slurring her way through White Christmas (excruciating).

Infuriatingly, it's not available in the UK. In fact, the copyright restrictions are so severe you can't even watch the cute Youtube animation that accompanies Winter Song if you're outside the US... Although you can see a really poor quality version of it on the People website.

I thought this was the season of sharing and goodwill to all men?

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Gig review: Sara Bareilles

Riding high on the euphoria of a top 10 hit, Sara Bareilles was like an excited teenager at the Bush Hall in West London last night. She bounded onto the stage, eyes wide with puppyish enthusiasm, and started chatting away to the crowd about London, the temperature, the fact that she had come "dressed as Dorothy from Wizard of Oz".

Sartorial disasters aside, her set started out energetically with US single Bottle It Up. Sara's "thing" is to hide stinging, bitter lyrics inside radio-friendly melodies and this one is about the music industry putting pressure on new artists to ape the chart-bothering antics of established acts.

It's not something her record company needed to worry about, mind you, as Sara already sounds exactly like a whole host of other big-name FM radio songsters: Sheryl Crow, Fiona Apple and (especially) Maroon 5 come immediately to mind.

Like them, several of her songs meander dangerously close to the territory marked "innoffensive but unmemorable" (catchy name for a territory, huh?). Similarly, when her songs shine they do so with a sparkle that mesmerises the tiny audience into reverent silence. Love Song, the hit, is one of them - but special mention should be made of Vegas and Come Round Soon, too.

However, the gig really comes to life when the singer abandons her piano for a low-down bluesy rendition of the Beatles Oh Darling accompanied solely by her guitarist Javier Dunn... Here's a similarly powerful version from a gig in Dallas a couple of months back:

Sara Bareilles - Oh Darling


On this evidence, Sara desperately needs to shun the polished, session-musician sheen of her current album in favour of this raw and gutsy sound.

It would be the making of her.

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