Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic

Whatever Sara Bareilles considers her day job right now, it’s not regularly releasing albums and touring. Her last studio album (2019’s “Amidst the Chaos”) and tour are both five years in the rearview mirror at this point. That might seem slow coming from someone who started out with a career like hers, but Bareilles has managed to seem like the busiest woman in pop — or in and out of it. As her recording career reaches the two-decade mark this year, nearly all of her standard album releases have come in the first half of those years, with the last 10 years of her career triumphing on Broadway as a composer (“Waitress”) and star (“Into the Woods,” and also, yes, “Waitress”), and successfully branching out into TV as a creator (“Little Voice”) and star (“Girls5Eva,” now in its third season).

If you're a fan, you might be a little jealous of the way these projects have cost her work as a pure singer-songwriter… and then you should also look at the quality of the other stuff she's been so worked up about and just say: No notes.

All of this is preface to the fact that any Sara Bareilles concert in the 2020s is a unicorn, let alone one where she performs in a symphonic format for the first time. It’s no wonder that fans flew in from across the country and overseas for her weekend show at the Hollywood Bowl on Saturday, which might have felt like a novelty even without the Thomas Wilkins-conducted Hollywood Bowl Orchestra as her sole accompaniment for nearly the entire show. Even the Bowl’s season ticket holders, however, had reason to think this was special: