Originally posted by Spinner

Sara Bareilles is slowly making progress on her follow-up to 'Little Voice,' the album that made the singer-songwriter a household name. So household, in fact, the First Lady invited Bareilles to perform alongside Yo-Yo Ma and Trisha Yearwood at the G20 Summit and Weezer cherry-picked her for a guest appearance on a 'Raditude' track at AOL's very own studios.

Guest gigs aside, Bareilles has been studio-hopping and shopping producers for her next effort. "I'm just doing tracks with a bunch of different people to feel where I'm at," she tells Spinner. "It's still at the point where I'm not quite finished writing the record yet." One of her studio stops included a two-day stint in New York with Roots drummer Ahmir "?uestlove" Thompson and producer Adam Blackstone. "We started with a couple of songs, just to feel each other out and see if we can make music together."

Although Bareilles often pegs herself in the "pop-soul" category, her taste in music is shifting. "I like the idea of trying to make something that is quirky and a bit more rock," she says, noting she's a fan of the Kings of Leon's 'Only by the Night.'

"I'm not gonna come out with that record, but to have flavors of that would be fun for me. It's the types of synthesizers you put on, the types of guitars, how you mic the drums when you record them. It's all technical changes that help shape a song," she says of being sonically inspired by the Followills. "I'm not going sound like Kings of Leon, because I'm not."

To help steer her down rock's yellow brick road, Bareilles also clocked in studio time with producer Neal Avron, whose rock pedigree includes Fall Out Boy and Linkin Park.

"I take a lot of time in the lyrics and I think that's why I'm still figuring out what I'm still saying with this next record. There are songs that I started 10 years ago that still aren't finished," she admits, "And there are songs that I've written in a couple of hours. I'm pretty autobiographical in my writing. I'm definitely processing what's going on around me and regurgitating my life through music."