McLachlan, Sarah

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Sarah McLachlan

Singer, songwriter, guitarist

Sarah McLachlan knows where the best music comes from: "Sonically," she told Cover magazine's KK Kozik, "moving water is perhaps my all-time favorite sound." Water has both aural and thematic relevance for McLachlan. "Being around any kind of water is one of the most important things in my life," she commented. "I find it soothing and it's a very female thing, too." Indeed, McLachlan herself has a fluid quality; her voice is noted for its liquidity and her lyrics and production values for their tempest and storm.

McLachlan comes by her turbulent personality honestly. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, McLachlan led a relatively sequestered life while growing up. David Thigpen of Time reported that McLachlan was "a shy, awkward child who never fell in with the crowd." He described her as a teenager who "would kill time on long, frozen winter nights writing songs." Billboard's Timothy White provided a more complex portrayal of McLachlan's youthful existence. Her mother, Dorice, sacrificed her educational pursuits in order to support her husband, Jack, an American marine biologist, and then acquainted her little girl "with the isolation that regret places in the path of personal fulfillment." But according to White, the results were worth celebrating. "McLachlan was able to fuse her mother's depth of pathos and her father's detached analysis into a calm grasp of our culture's callous objectification of women," he concluded.

From the start of her career at age 19, McLachlan was compared to other female songwriters such as Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush, Sinead O'Connor, and Tori Amos, comparisons one might ascribe to what Elysa Gardner of Rolling Stone called a voice of "astonishing strength and clarity [that] may drift at any given time from a siren-like middle range to a ghostly soprano." Her songs tended toward lyrics which explored the relationships between women and men.

During her childhood McLachlan sought out the serenading voices and sentiments of folk-rock singers Joan Baez, Cat Stevens, and Simon and Garfunkel. She had 12 years of training on guitar, six on piano, and five years of voice lessons, all of which contributed to what White referred to as "the wit, literate grace, and unfussy intricacy of her material." As a teenager McLachlan worked at restaurant counters and as a dishwasher in Halifax.

A New Maturity

Critics generally agree that with McLachlan's third album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1994), she revealed new maturity as a singer, songwriter, and woman. Her first album, Touch (1988), suggested a waif-like quality to Gardner, while her second album, Solace (1991), revealed a sturdier woman, one less "ethereal."

McLachlan said of Solace, "There's a lot more of myself in my writing [there]—more the way I think, more the way I talk." Fumbling Towards Ecstasy revealed a woman with broader sensibility, and her self-awareness and melancholy have merged with a political consciousness.

McLachlan has referred to the relevance of her increased self-respect and gender appreciation. She told Billboard, "It took me six years to learn how not to edit myself, to remain open in my music so that I touched greater levels of darkness as well as some positive areas of escape."

While the bulk of critical response to McLachlan's music was admiring, some criticism contained a disparaging tone. Dave Jennings of Melody Maker was dismayed by the excess of "vulnerability" he found in Solace. He felt that while it was couched in nature imagery, it did not add up to "New Age consciousness, but really … just old-school singer-songwriter preciousness." Similarly, Spin's Joy Press found the lyrics of Fumbling "mature with a capital M, to the point of sophomoric pseudo-profundity." Sardonically, she concluded that McLachlan "obviously places herself in the category of the self-defined, strong, female songwriter," and that ultimately Fumbling provided only "an easy-listening portrait of a woman—a perfectly graceful, confident, and smart woman—but it's not the portrait of an artist."

Other critics, however, found in that album both an artist and a portrait of that artist. Thigpen attempted to remove the debate from the gender-biased charge of confessionalism: "Far from indulging in simple emotional bloodletting," he wrote, "McLachlan creates exquisitely poised songs that resist anger or pathos."

A trip to Southeast Asia in 1993, in which she represented her Canadian peer group, afforded McLachlan both disillusionment and wisdom. She admitted that she sang less about self-pity as a result of that mission, one that focused on AIDS, prostitution, and poverty, and one where she encountered thousands of men, women and children who were real victims of disease and poverty.

Though McLachlan did not address the Southeast Asian journey directly in her songs, its impact could be felt. Critics implied that her experiences there enriched her lyrics and music, even while she remained devoted to songs about interpersonal relationships. Thigpen identified McLachlan's audience as "the desperately troubled," to whom she offered the suggestion "that the answers to life's emotional earthquakes can come through perseverance and compassion." Terry McBride, the president of Nettwerk Records, remarked, "There's more soul in her singing on this album. [This] record finally makes you believe that she means what she says."

For the Record …

Born on January 28, 1968, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada; daughter of Jack (a marine biologist) and Dorice McLachlan; married Ashwin Sood (a drummer), 1997; children: India (daughter).

Trained in classical guitar, piano, and voice; discovered by Nettwerk Records while performing with a New Wave band in Halifax; signed contract with Nettwerk at age 19, released debut album, Touch, 1988; contributed "Hold On" to No Alternative compilation, 1993; featured on American Public Radio's "E-Town," 1994; released Surfacing, 1997; released live album Mirrorball, 1999; released Afterglow, 2003; Afterglow Live, 2004; Mirrorball: The Complete Concert, 2004, and Wintersong, 2006.

Awards: Grammy Awards, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, for "Building a Mystery," and Best Pop Instrumental Performance, for "Last Dance," 1998; Elizabeth Cady Stanton Visionary Award from New York Gov. George E. Pataki, 1998; Juno Awards, Album of the Year, for Surfacing, and Female Vocalist of the Year, Single of the Year, and Songwriter of the Year, all for "Building a Mystery," 1998; Society of Composers, Authors, and Music Publishers of Canada (SOCAN), award for Most Performed Pop Songs, for "Adia" and "Sweet Surrender," 1998; Billboard Award, Adult Contemporary Track, for "Angel," 1999; Grammy Award, Best Female Pop Vocal Performance, for "I Will Remember You," 1999; Grammy Award, Best Song Written for a Motion Picture, for "When She Loved Me," from Toy Story 2, 2000; Juno Award for International Achievement, 2000; Juno Awards, Songwriter of the Year and Pop Album of the Year, 2004.

Addresses: Record company—Arista Records, 6 West 57th St., New York, NY 10019. Website—Sarah McLachlan Official Website: http://www.sarahmclachlan.com.

Though still inspired to look outward, McLachlan explained that her strengths as a singer and songwriter were nurtured in solitude. With Rainer Maria Rilke's self-searching philosophies at the core, in 1994 McLachlan was focused on how to reach her artistic potential. With expressed gratitude toward her producer and sometime-collaborator, Pierre Marchand, and all the talking and thinking he required of her, she still remarked, "I find that to open up myself as much as I have to get at what I need, I need to be by myself." McLachlan conjured images of herself walking the moors of Nova Scotia, out in the country where "everything just seemed so huge and so much bigger than I'd ever known it to be before."

Fumbling lingered on the music charts for well over one year and attained multiplatinum sales. The album's hit single, "Possession," reached number 14. Likewise "Good Enough" reached number 16. McLachlan released an alternate version of Fumbling, called The Freedom Sessions, in 1995.

Lilita Fair Music Festival

In 1997 she released Surfacing, which made its debut at number two. The album scored two hit singles, two Grammys, four Juno (Canadian) Awards, and earned multiplatinum sales certification. McLachlan used the momentum from the success of Surfacing to inaugurate the first Lilith Fair music festival that toured in the summer of 1997 to honor the advances of women in music. Lilith Fair met with success, and earned a reprise in 1998 and again in 1999. Also in 1999, McLachlan released a live album, Mirrorball, which made its debut at number three, igniting the largest sales surge of her career. The album was recorded during McLachlan's tour in support of Surfacing in 1998.

In February of 1997 McLachlan announced that she had eloped with drummer Ashwin Sood in Negril, Jamaica. The couple set up residence in Canada in the Dunbar District of Vancouver, British Columbia. McLachlan won a Grammy Award for her 2000 song "When She Loved Me" from Toy Story 2, and she was also featured among the all-star lineup of "Music Without Borders," which aired on Canadian television and radio stations on September 29, 2001, to benefit the victims of the September 11 terrorist attack on the United States.

McLachlan's ensuing release, Remixed, made its debut at the top of the Billboard Top Electronic Albums chart in 2001. That same year, after giving birth to a daughter, India, McLachlan turned to the peaceful retreat of a cabin in the woods. There, while caring for her new baby, she completed an all-new album. The recording, Afterglow, won Juno Awards for Songwriter of the Year and for Pop Album of the Year. One year later she released a live version of the album, recorded on tour following the release of the original disc.

In 2003, in collaboration with director Sophie Muller, McLachlan created a video from Afterglow's "World on Fire." The video compared the expense of making a music video with the cost of badly needed medical and food supplies for many poor nations, juxtaposing footage of the film crew with footage of third world hardship. To underline the video's message, Muller and her film crew donated funds from their work—$150,000—to 11 charities. "When Sophia Muller and I made ‘World on Fire,’" McLachlan told Media That Matters Film Festival, "our hope was to show how easy it can be to use your wealth to help make immeasurable improvements in peoples lives."

McLachlan embarked on a lengthy tour in 2004-05 through Canada, Britain, and the United States, her first since 1999. "At the center," Steven Mirkin wrote of one performance in Variety, "is McLachlan's dusty, discursive voice, which in the high end of her range can achieve the dewy vulnerability of Joni Mitchell." In 2004 McLachlan released Afterglow Live, a CD collection drawn from her 2004 tour and featuring songs from Surfacing and Afterglow. As a bonus to fans, the collection included a DVD with backstage footage and the politically-tinged video for "World on Fire." "It's a great set of music with some new tweaks to such favorites as ‘Possession’ and ‘Ice Cream,’ wrote Victor Smith in Star Pulse.

In 2006 McLachlan surprised fans by releasing two albums, Mirrorball: The Complete Concert and Wintersong. Mirrorball: The Complete Concert returned to previous material that had produced Mirrorball and issued the complete contents of the last date on her 1998 tour. "It's a strong set," wrote Marisa Brown of All Music Guide, "presenting the best of what chick-rock was in the late '90s." In the fall, McLachlan followed with her first-ever holiday album, Wintersong. "Recorded at home in a relaxed Canadian setting," wrote PR Newswire, "Wintersong combines traditional and standard Christmas tunes with several contemporary classics that are close to Sarah's heart."