At Massey Hall, Sara Bareilles walked audiences through her grief – and shepherded them through their own

At Massey Hall, Sara Bareilles walked audiences through her grief – and shepherded them through their own AISLING MURPHY PUBLISHED 2 HOURS AGO Open this photo in gallery: Sara Bareilles performed her first concert in Toronto since 2013 on Tuesday for 2,500 fans at Massey Hall. IAN ALLEN/SUPPLIED COMMENTS SHARE SAVE FOR LATER Listen to this article Learn more about audio Log in or create a free account to listen to this article. We should have known what we were in for. At Sara Bareilles’s intimate concert at Toronto’s Massey Hall on Tuesday night, free packets of Bareilles-branded tissues were available for the taking at stations around the venue. You’re going to cry, the stacked Kleenex seemed to warn. Best take one of us before you do. On the whole, Bareilles is not known for being sad. Her piano-heavy back catalogue deals jointly in affable doo-wop pop and musical theatre; her fashion choices, Tuesday night’s Charlie Chaplin-adjacent bowler hat included, tend toward twee. But in August, Bareilles released Good Grief, an album that explores the specific pain of loss in all its shades. The record’s themes are as tough as you’d expect – feelings about death and dying intertwine with longing for a pre-Donald Trump United States – but the bluesy humour for which Bareilles became famous in the late 2000s sparkles across the album. (Could any other artist pull off a smiley, jazz-tinged croon about a nervous breakdown? I’d wager not.) Sara Bareilles grieves both a friend and the U.S. on her new album On Tuesday, her first concert in Toronto since 2013, Bareilles sang through most of Good Grief and a few longstanding hits, welcoming us to join her on the road to inner peace. Loss, she explained, is best managed in community with others, an idea investigated at length on her latest album: “Tell me your story, I’ll tell you mine,” she implores on Home, the record’s opening track and the first song on its accompanying tour’s setlist. Enter tissues. It’s not that Tuesday’s tour stop was uniformly tearful. In fact, for much of its two-hour-plus runtime, the gig felt surprisingly airy, a dual showcase of Bareilles’s satiny voice and sharp wit. A jaunty Whitney Houston cover – you can guess of what song – saw Massey Hall transform into a 2,500-person dance party, creating a brightly-lit partition between Bareilles’s new record and the assortment of past chart-toppers at the end of her set. Playful jokes from the audience, too, were answered rather than…