Interview: How Sara Bareilles Is Rallying to Preserve Rockwood Music Hall

Sara Bareilles is playing a second set of sold-out shows tonight to help save Rockwood Music Hall, the Manhattan music venue that helped launch her career, along with others including Lady Gaga, Mumford & Sons, and many more.

Across its three stages, Rockwood Music Hall has been a longstanding institution for up-and-coming music artists to showcase their talent. The venue has hosted over 75,000 shows throughout the past 18 years.

Bareilles, who played one of her first New York City shows at Rockwood in 2007, helped launch the #PreserveRockwood initiative last month after finding out that the independent concert venue was in danger of closing immediately. 100% of the proceeds from her concerts will be donated to the employees and artists of Rockwood.

The #PreserveRockwood benefit concert series began last month with artists like Elle King and Ingrid Michaelson joining Bareilles to help save the iconic independent New York City musical institution. Check out the lineup here.

Along with the concerts, a GoFundMe to help save Rockwood Music Hall has also been launched. Donations can be placed here.

BroadwayWorld caught up with Bareilles to reflect on her past performances at Rockwood, why she is passionate about saving the venue, how her concerts tonight are inspired by Taylor Swift, and more.

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I want to start out by asking how you originally got involved with this initiative.

Ken Rockwood, the owner and creator of the space reached out to me at the end of last year and he shared with me that they were hitting some trouble and would I be interested in kind of getting involved? I was like, "Absolutely." It was a very fast yes for me. It kind of took us a minute to figure out sort of exactly what the strategy would be. Then it was about finding the right time for a little concert series and doing some really specific fundraising.

Rockwood has been just a seminal place for me and my relationship to the music scene in New York City and literally every artist I can think of that I know has some relationship to that place, whether they play massive venues or they came up in New York. It has just an unbelievable reach. It's where I found my band members, it's where I met friends. I used to live down in the village, and I would just walk over there, even if I didn't know who was playing. It was just one of the places where the community in and around that space was just so vital to my livelihood and so I feel like I want to help pay back and pay forward for all those other artists that are still up and coming and looking for those places. There just aren't very many independent music venues that are this size and that offer a place for artists to develop and grow.

One of the things I am realizing that it's hard to get access to stages sometimes. If you can't guarantee a certain number of people or if you can't guarantee a certain number of money, you don't get to play. A lot of these little venues have been bought up by big companies. It's one of the last standing little safe havens for independent music and I just think it's so important to the health of the music community at large, especially in New York City.

We're trying to move a mountain here. It's a tall order, but I'm hopeful and optimistic and I've been totally overwhelmed with the amount of support that has poured into the GoFundMe and just people coming out, grabbing these tickets so quickly and selling out all the shows. And it's been really, really wonderful and very moving.

It's been so incredible to see the outpouring of love from everyone for this venue. I want go back to one of your first shows there in 2007. What about that specific performance has stuck with you after all of these years?

So that was the second show I had ever played in New York City. I played my very first show at Pianos, which is down the street. This was the second show, and we added the second show because the Pianos show was really full or it had sold out or something. I remember going into this and it was at Rockwood One – which is the free stage, the small stage – and I was not sure that anybody would come because I had just played a show the night before and I didn't have a big relationship to New York City, I was just coming through. Remember, this is like MySpace time. There's no streaming, people didn't have my CD or music. So I was really prepared for there not to be very many people there.

We packed out the room and so it was this really beautiful moment of validation and encouragement for me that lived in that show. Also kind of in a parallel way, that space reminded me a lot of the Hotel Cafe in Los Angeles, which is sort of the premiere music venue for singer-songwriters in LA. That's kind of where I came up. So I played Hotel Cafe incessantly. I felt like when I came to New York, I was like, "Oh, this is the sister space." I just instinctively wanted to be there. It just felt like this is where I should be and where I want to be. The vibe is great. The sound is great. Cool people play there. It was everything. So yeah, it was not a hard decision for me to want to get involved and try to help course correct.

I was actually watching a video from Elle King's show last night and I saw her discussing how the space is like such an institution for research as a musical artist. How has it helped you in that sense?

Oh my god. I have seen music I couldn't have imagined on the stage at Rockwood Music Hall. I saw a band called Paris Monster where there's a two-person band, the drummer is the singer and the bass player. So just think about that, he played the bass and the drums and sing all the songs at the same time. The sound is extraordinary. It's so full. It's so interesting. I did not even know this shit existed. I saw female mariachi band, called Flor de Toloache, that was one of the most unbelievable expressions and the most extraordinary group. They ended up in our Little Voice TV show because I was like I have to do something with these wonderful, wonderful musicians. My friend Elizabeth Ziman, Elizabeth & the Catapult, I saw her play there for the first time.

Like, never seen such a depth of songwriting and playing. There was so much variation in the kinds of music and the kinds of bands that were making music there. It could be the coolest indie rock band or just really sort of beautiful, soulful songwriter stuff. It just was f-ing cool. I couldn't believe what I was getting exposed to.

Also, people that really probably aren't destined to have a radio career sometimes, like to get to still see them in beautiful spaces because they're doing really avant-garde interesting stuff that isn't probably gonna carve out a space in the commercial sense, but is so worth seeing. It's like saying that there's no space for downtown theater because it's not Broadway. It doesn't make sense. It doesn't compute.

That's interesting because there's some things I see downtown that I don't want to see on Broadway. I would sometimes rather go to a smaller venue instead of like a big arena, too.

That's exactly right. And that was one of the things that I got reminded about when I did my first two shows for Rockwood. You get so focused as an artist on growing your sort of "business." You're striving to earn the right to play bigger and bigger stages. There is something gained in that, of course, and those are really exhilarating, too, but there is something so precious about being in a space where you can see every audience member. You can literally be in conversation with your audience the entire time. It is so intimate and it's so unique and it's energy that doesn't transfer to Madison Square Garden. It can't. It just doesn't live in that space. Something else lives in that space. These intimate venues just really have such a precious place in the livelihood of music at large. I worry that we're losing that a little bit. And don't get me wrong, I want to go to the Beyonce concert, too. I just don't think it has to be an either or. My wish is that there's room for both.

Before we wrap up, I want to talk about tonight's show because I know you posted we're getting a little bit of a "Sara's Eras Tour," inspired by Taylor Swift. What can audiences expect from tonight's show?

Tonight, for me, this is ambitious. I'm trying to play a lot of songs that I don't normally play. My hope in giving something to these audience members is that there are 10 million videos of me playing "She Used to Be Mine" solo on the piano. I'm trying to bring out some songs that I just don't play as often and I went album by album and I just chose a couple of songs from each album as best I could, you know an hour goes quickly. I chose as many songs as I could kind of fit in there. I'm trying to do songs that I just love playing because they're so fun to play or it means something to me in terms of the story of my artistry. So yeah, I'm gonna like sort of start at the beginning with "Careful Confessions" and go from there.

Amazing, some deep cuts. I love it. I know last time you also performed a little bit of new music. Can you tell me anything about that? Is tonight's audience is gonna hear anything new?

That's a little up in the air. I'm gonna sort of see how time goes. But yeah, I shared one of the new songs from the collection of songs that's growing that I can choose from for the next record. I'm really just in kind of like the first stages of what my process sort of looks like with the songwriting for a record which is just kind of amorphous and I'm just kind of writing when I get inspired. Trying to just build up what the story is for the next record. I'm trying to just build up the kind of the repertoire that I'll end up kind of distilling into the record.

This is a great piece of advice I got from Ben Folds a long time ago: When you're in this stage, you've got to kick the editor out of the room. When you're in the songwriting stage, there's no evaluation at this time. I'm just trying to open up that channel and create as much as I can. Then later, I'll sit back and go, this one's really shitty. [laughs]

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Donate to help save Rockwood Music Hall here. Go inside Sara Bareilles' previous concerts at the venue in June here:

Photo Credit: Shervin Lainez