Sara Barielles "wouldn't change" the past six years of her life - despite losing multiple friends during the period.

The Love Song singer's close friends Chad Joseph and Gavin Creel both passed away in the last half a year, while she herself has been on a "challenging fertility journey" that she "continues to be on".

However, Sara told Rolling Stone that the grief she's experienced has contributed to shaping her into the person she is today.

She said: "What I realized is that grief must be witnessed. You must share it. It doesn't heal on its own. You can't go to your corner and figure it out. The alchemy of it doesn't change unless you share it with other people.

"And the recognition that is born from taking the time to share and unpack and just see each other in your grief is the thing that actually transforms and transmutes.

"And it's crazy to say, [but] the pain of the last six years of my life, I almost wouldn't change. Of course I wish my friends were still here, but I am a different person because of losing them and loving them.

"I am more of who I think I'm meant to become because of it. So it's wild. Grief is a miracle. It's just love. It's so beautiful.

"Once I started feeling a little bit better -- not just with the help of medication, but meditation and therapy, and really doing some work with my husband, Joe -- the more I started to understand what was unfolding."

Sara added that it was at that point the "music started to come", with the majority of her the music on new album Good Grief "birthed in the last three years".

One of the songs on the new album is called Home - and was inspired by a conversation between Anderson Cooper and Stephen Colbert on Cooper's podcast about grief.

During the chat, chat show host Colbert opened up about losing his dad in a car crash aged 53, and how much it affected him when he himself became a day older than his father was when he died.

She explained: "I'm lucky to not have lost my parents yet, and I just couldn't stop thinking about that. When you outlive these people that you love, it's a wild experience. And the theme of that song feels like it's the sort of centrepiece of the record.

"We get to, and we must, go everywhere within ourselves and share it with each other in order to come back home.

"Home is about connection, it's about recognition, it's about catharsis. We just have to be brave enough to go into the dark corners to find the light."