When things get a bit predictable in our lives, it’s only natural to want to change things up. Try a new hairstyle, take up a new sport, plan a vacation to an unfamiliar place.

Sara Bareilles wrote a musical.

This was part of a big shift in the singer-songwriter’s life that began in 2012 when she moved to New York from Los Angeles. She’d broken through in 2007 with the single “Love Song” from her first major-label album, Little Voice, which eventually went platinum. She’d toured internationally and brought out two other albums and an EP.

To some that might sound like a pretty sweet spot. But as Bareilles describes it, “I was just feeling really burnt out. I was bored and not uncomfortable, but maybe the problem is that I was a little too comfortable. I had a sweet little cottage in Venice, and a comfortable career, comfortable friends, and my lifestyle was ... there was a lot of same in my lifestyle. I was sort of facing down the next record cycle and realizing, ‘Is this just what I’m going to do forever?’ … I started to have a little bit of a panic attack about that, and I was like, ‘I need to do something totally different.’ ”

And so she up and moved to New York City, and put out some feelers about getting into theatre. She had a meeting with Diane Paulus, artistic director of the American Repertory Theatre and director of several successful Broadway musicals. Bareilles thought they’d be talking about opportunities for her to perform in one of Paulus’s shows, but to her surprise Paulus suggested that she write the music and lyrics for an adaptation of the 2007 film Waitress.

“I’d never even considered being a composer,” says Bareilles, but she nonetheless “said yes, kind of as an exploration.”

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That was really gutsy, I suggest. With a laugh, Bareilles counters that it was “naiveté … I did not know what I was saying yes to, but it was the happiest accident of my life.”

Waitress opened on Broadway in 2016 and earned four Tony nominations including one for Best Original Score. It is particularly noted for its female-led creative team that includes book writer Jessie Nelson and choreographer Lorin Latarro along with Paulus and Bareilles (the late Adrienne Shelly wrote and directed the film). The musical is still playing on Broadway and opened earlier this year in London’s West End. The upcoming Toronto run of the show’s touring production has brought Bareilles to the city to conduct interviews, and in person she’s as self-effacingly genuine and thoughtfully spoken as her music would lead you to hope.

As does the film, Waitress the musical tells the story of Jenna, a waitress in an unhappy marriage who finds personal and imaginative release through baking, and ends up having an affair with her gynecologist after she discovers she’s unexpectedly pregnant. When I suggest it’s a show about pie, waitressing, motherhood, and the desire to change one’s life, Bareilles agrees, but says she’d change the order of those themes. “The reason to say yes to this was about getting to talk about wanting to change, like giving someone agency to evolve in their life.

“To do it on a stage was really interesting to me. I love that we meet Jenna at a really messy time in her life, and I find that to be so relatable. That idea that someone who is extraordinary feels so invisible at the same time, and all the things we have to do to get to that place where we allow ourselves to be seen.”

Most critics agreed that Bareilles’s songwriting style transposes beautifully to the musical format (the Hollywood Reporter’s David Rooney called it a “thoroughly charming musical theatre debut”), so it’s not surprising to learn that Bareilles’s first experience of music was listening to cast albums in her home town of Eureka, California. She rattles off the names: “Evita, Les Mis, Jesus Christ Superstar, Little Shop of Horrors, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Tommy. The Secret Garden, I loved. Chess, I loved. Oklahoma! and The Sound of Music, I loved … When I think about it now in retrospect, when I really examine my own storytelling as a songwriter, that’s where I got so much of it from.”

The first song she wrote for Waitress is Jenna’s big second-act lament “She Used to be Mine,” which contains a surprising reversal — the character’s singing about how she’s lost control of her life. The inspiration for this, Bareilles says, came from a song from Chess, the 1986 tuner with music by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus and lyrics by Tim Rice. That song, “Someone Else’s Story,” Bareilles explains, has “a shift at the end where the woman sings ‘The trouble is the girl is me.’… There’s a part of that informed ‘She Used to Be Mine,’ about the idea of talking about someone else, but you’re really speaking about yourself. That was radical to me at age 12 or whenever when I heard it.”

She wrote “She Used to be Mine” in her first New York City apartment before she’d been able to furnish it fully. “I had a piano and some cardboard boxes … I was just beginning this journey and I was having that experience of, ‘I don’t recognize myself here.’ I had left everything that felt familiar, and I saw that in Jenna’s story … that time where you’re reconciling who you thought you would become and who you actually are, and sometimes that’s a disappointing revelation. Sometimes it’s amazing, but I think everyone can relate to that.”

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The risk of the New York move paid off for Bareilles. Since Waitress, she has (amongst other things) written a memoir, released an album of Waitress covers, played Mary Magdalene in the live TV performance of Jesus Christ Superstar, co-hosted the Tony Awards, brought out a new album, and is now working on a TV project. It sounds like a well-thought-through program of diversifying one’s output across entertainment platforms, but Bareilles says that this career path is “more of an articulated passion than an agenda … I’m actually just a curious person who’s interested in getting to learn how another part of the world works because I think it’s so vast and infinite that I want to keep growing and expanding.”

She traces this productive and adventurous period in her life back to taking on Waitress. “Saying yes to the thing that scared me and felt beyond my safe zone (was what) opened up the most doors and endless possibilities, even just in terms of personal growth. I’m so transformed by my experience of working on this show. I will forever be grateful, and I will show up for this show forever because it’s been a dear friend to me.”

Waitress plays at the Ed Mirvish Theatre from July 9-August 18. Tickets at Mirvish.com, 416-872-1212 and 1-800-461-3333.