‘Girls5eva’ Team Breaks Down Sara Bareilles’ Emotional Season 3 Song ‘The Medium Time’

variety.com:

Hunter Ingram The team behind “Girls5eva” has gotten used to being texted song demos out of the blue. Series creator Meredith Scardino regularly sends music supervisor (and fellow executive producer) Jeff Rich- mond and his team voice memos singing her lyrics to the show’s latest absurd songs, such as “Home Alone Doorknob” or “Sweet’N Low Daddy.” By season’s end, Sara Bareilles also gets in on the fun.

It is a tradition that the Grammy winner, who stars as Dawn, writes a song to emotionally punctuate each finale. In Season 1, as Dawn began to harness her own songwriting dreams, Bareilles penned an ode to imperfection with “Four Stars,” and for Season 2, she was behind the empowering anthem “Bend Not Break.” Deploying Bareilles’ soulful style is always strategic for the series, which moved to Netflix for Season 3 after two seasons on Peacock. “You want to wrap the emotion of the whole season up in a bow at the end, and I think that is where we always lean on Sara and her heartfelt, honest songwriting gifts to pierce that for us,” Richmond tells Variety.

Bareilles’ homemade recordings are a bit more elaborate when she sends them to the team, including co-stars Renée Elise Golds- berry, Paula Pell and Busy Philipps. “I’ll sing all the parts and do all the vocals, and then I’ll text it to the girls, which is always a really sweet moment,” Bareilles says.

For her Season 3 song “The Medium Time,” Scardino pitched Bareilles a tune that ponders the group’s relationship with fame, asking if there is satisfaction in shooting for the big time and landing somewhere in the middle. “She came back with this gorgeous song, and I was in the Adidas store buying shoes for my son when I got it,” Scardino says. “I opened the file and held.