Whatever counts as Sara Bareilles ’ day job right now, it’s not regualrly releasing albums and touring. Her last studio album (2019’s “Amidst the Chaos”) and tour are both five years in the rear-view mirror at this point. That might seem laggardly for anyone else who started out with a career like hers, Bareilles has managed to seem like the busiest woman in — or flitting in and out of — pop.
As her recording career reaches the two-decade mark this year, almost all of her standard album releases came in the first half of those years, with the last 10 years finding her triumphing on Broadway as a composer (“Waitress”) and star (“Into the Woods,” and also, yes, “Waitress”), and successfully moving into TV as a creator (“Little Voice”) and star (“Girls5Eva,” now in its third season). If you’re a fan, you can be a little bit jealous of how these projects have taken time away from her output as a pure singer-songwriter..
. and then you’d also have to look at the quality of the other stuff she’s prolifically been up to and simply say: No notes. All this is preface to pointing out that any Sara Bareilles concert in the 2020s is a unicorn, let alone one that has her performing in a symphonic format for the first time.
So it’s no wonder that there were some fans flying in from around the country or overseas for her weekend show at the Hollywood Bowl Saturday, which might have felt like a novelty even without the Thomas Wilkins-conducted Hollywo.