“Love Song” by Sara Bareilles is an angry love anthem, but it was written as an act of rebellion.
Speaking with Rolling Stone on Tuesday, June 30, the singer and actress spoke about writing the song and her concerns with fame. “Love Song” was released in June 2007 as the lead single from Little Voice. The song spent more than 40 weeks on the chart and earned Bareilles two Grammy nominations.
“It took me so long, and I don’t regret the fear that I carried, because I think it made me cling to my own vulnerability,” the 46-year-old songwriter explained. “Telling the truth makes me feel safe. This no interest in artifice and telling the truth was something I clung to as a young artist, so I’m just going to tell you the truth.”
And she had these feelings in mind when she sat down to write “Long Song,” although she admitted she thought she was going to get in “trouble” because the meaning behind the track was so “obvious.”
“I was saying, ‘I’m not going to write you a love song,’ and they didn’t know. They didn’t know! And I was like, ‘What is this life?’ It’s wild,” she laughed.
In a 2021 Glamour interview, Bareilles went into more detail about the meaning behind the song and how it came about. “The song wasn’t a specific response to my record company. Nobody sat me down and said, ‘I need this kind of song from you.’ There was more of a subtle, nuanced… withholding.”
Bareilles was getting ready to make her first record when the record label withheld the “green light,” despite the singer having a “boatload” of songs.
She continued: “I was encouraged to keep writing and to meet with co-writers. The co-writer thing was a total disaster, devastating on every level. I felt invisible and unimportant and manipulated and all the things,” she continued. “But I knew — because I’m a smart person — that they didn’t have a song they felt they could go to radio with. So I shifted to the idea of a love song.”
Bareilles also references Maroon 5 in the lyrics because they were a band she had toured with and knew well. “Those boys were so wonderful to us,” she shared. “They felt like big brothers. They took me and my band on the road. They took us under their wing. They shared everything they had. It was really awesome.”
She concluded that the real message of the song is nothing to do with love, romance and relationships. “It was a response to feeling invisible and knowing that I wasn’t going to be manipulated. I was so stubborn, especially at that age. I was so protective of myself—I wasn’t going to do what they asked me to do. I wasn’t going to wear the sparkly dress, I wasn’t going to wear the high heels. In some ways, I probably wasn’t having as much fun as I could have had. I was so concerned with losing myself, somehow, in the process.”
This story was originally published by Parade on Jul 3, 2026, where it first appeared in the Entertainment section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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