I'm not sure if anyone does the upbeat song about the downside of love any better right now than Sara Bareilles. Exhibit A: Little Black Dress, off her new album The Blessed Unrest.

Putting aside the fact that the song sounds like a modern-day Supremes hit, it follows along in the footsteps of Love Song and King of Anything as happy sad songs.

Little Black Dress may not even be a single off the new album - right now the only one getting radio play that I know of is Brave.

But it's my favorite off another solid album by Bareilles.

I bought Bareilles' first album because I liked Love Song. I think I've written before that I like piano-heavy music, and that's what first piqued my interest about Bareilles. A friend gave me Kaleidoscope Heart, her last album, and that's when I became a legit fan. I love that album. (Actually, besides The Supremes, the song I thought of first when I heard Little Black Dress was Gonna Get Over You, one of my favorites from Kaleidoscope Heart, because it has a throwback feel to it as well.)

I'm not sure a week into it that I love The Blessed Unrest as much as I loved Kaleidoscope Heart, but I still like it a lot. Brave is a good song. Two of the next three songs on the album feature New York City, and you can never go wrong with me with songs paying tribute to NYC. There's a (surprise!) breakup song called Manhattan and there's a song called Chasing The Sun in which Bareilles sings about "a cemetery in the center of Queens." I think I'd still like it if it was a cemetery in the middle of the Bronx, but obviously I have my soft spots.

Towards the end of the album is a song called 1000 Times. It's about someone who's afraid to tell someone their true feelings. I kind of like the juxtaposition of that song on an album where the big hit is Brave - which is about encouraging people to "say what they want to say."

I remember hearing Brave on the radio a couple of months or so ago and knew that a new Sara Bareilles album was coming. I thought, though, that it would be in the fall. It was a really pleasant surprise when I saw the weekend before it came out that it was a mid-July release.

Of all the new music I've written about this year I think there's only two bands that I've decided I really want to see live. The first is The Lumineers.

The other is Sara Bareilles.