October, 1994
Publication title: Words & Music, vol. 1, Iss. 9, pg. 12
Place: Don Mills
Writer: Unknown
Golden
In the past year Halifax – born, Vancouver – based Sarah McLachlan has been swept up by a wave of success as potentially frightening as it is welcome. Her third album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, is double – platinum in Canada and has sold more than half a million copies in the U.S., earning her a gold record and a regular seat on late night talk TV where she’s favorite of both Letterman and Leno. Not that the attention has turned her common sense East Coast head. If anything, her close encounters with fame have made her increasingly cautious.
Of Letterman, who is rumored to have a crush on her, the 26 – year – old McLachlan says, “He frightens me — he just doesn’t seem very happy. I guess when you get that famous you tend to be fairly guarded.”
McLachlan strives to remain a private and centred person — she isolated herself in the woods for two months to write Fumbling Towards Ecstasy — and is just beginning to come to terms with how huge the American market is.
It’s been really great going down there and playing to audiences,” she confirms, “but it means even more fame. There are a lot more people down there. It’s daunting.”
Because of McLachlan’s wide – eyed sensual beauty, her clear voice and spiritual subject matter, many fans tend to hear her music as a backdrop or soundtrack to their own personal growth, seeing Sarah as a kind of key to the universe.
Being their key is what terrifies me,” she says, “because I’m as messed up as everybody else, no doubt about it. I’m just going through life trying to figure stuff out like anybody else. In my mind, I’m really lucky because I have this medium — I write songs — to help myself out a lot. It’s a great release for me.”
Ecstasy in particular, recorded over six months with long – time producer Pierre Marchand, was a deliberate attempt by McLachlan to address her fears and obstacles. As such, it is an extremely personal work, from the song “Plenty” about lost love (“You hurt me more than I even could have imagined/You made my world stand still”) to “Hold On,” a heart – rending plea to AIDS sufferers to have hope, inspired by the documentary A Promise Kept.
Most of McLachlan’s music has an ethereal, soaring quality grounded by piano and acoustic guitar. The lyrics remain simple, almost blunt (“Hold on, hold on, this is going to hurt like hell”). Then again, McLachlan’s voice could make “Row, Row Your Boat” sound profound.
In interviews McLachlan will concede reference points and inspirations but she’s reluctant to ascribe specific meanings to her work. She does say the single “Good Enough” was inspired by Jane Siberry.
It’s hard to start talking about where a song comes from because you know it’s about a billion things. With ‘Good Enough’ I was thinking about my mother which was inspired by Jane who did this story about her mother and her aunts on her spoken word tour.”
Perhaps it’s just as well that the song — which could be about trying to negotiate peace between daughters and mothers — is wrapped in mystery. “I haven’t sat my mother down and said, ‘This is about you,'” confirms the writer. “She’d be mortified if she knew I was writing about her in a concrete way.”
While McLachlan hurtles toward certain fame, she’s also battling conflicting emotions as her private and public lives become blurred. “Sometimes I think I want to have two lives,” she says. “That way I could take my performing hat off and walk down the street and just be me again. But you can’t do that. You become public property in a sense and it’s something that I personally just have to deal with. I can’t say no, that’s my problem.”
As a truly nice person with no “star” attitude at all, McLachlan just doesn’t fit in sometimes. She is constantly trying to train herself to be guarded but she is finding it slow going.
It’s weird,” she reflects, “you have all this responsibility. This one time I was at a store and about 10 people had come up to ask for autographs. It was at a point in my life where I was feeling pretty low about myself. Everybody was telling me how awesome I was and I was like, ‘What are you saying? I suck!’ Anyway, this one girl comes up and and asks if I’m Sarah McLachlan and I said no. Her face fell. She just looked at me like, ‘You bitch! You’re so cruel.’ I ruined her day and I just felt so shitty.”
McLachlan remembers a time — she was on the Ralph Benmergui show in 1993 — when she received the same kind of treatment from a notoriously attitude – imbued artist with whom she shared the stage that night.
I went up to to say hi,” recalls McLachlan, “and she didn’t know who I was. Which is a terrible thing because it shouldn’t have mattered. She was quite rude to me actually. But afterwards she came up and said, ‘That was great. I didn’t recognize you before the show.'”
Like many Canadian artists, McLachlan mourns the passing of the Benmergui show: “I was sad when it was over. It was one of the only shows that showcased Canadian music.” She’s also less than enthralled by the unimaginative state of Canadian radio. “Bless Canadian content and the CBC,” she says, “because they’ve been incredibly supportive of me. I didn’t get much radio play until this album. I guess the new American formats like triple A and modern rock are just more open ended.”
McLachlan also blames the radio industry as a whole for many of the prevailing attitudes toward women artists. “Radio — and I can say this with authority — is pretty misogynist,” states the singer. “I went through quite a period of self – loathing for being nice to these people who, in other situations, I’d probably tell to f’Symbol not transcribed’*** off. But I have to reconcile myself to that.”
McLachlan has tried to fight sexism with the tools available to her, like her videos. The promo clip for “Possession” (recently nominated for three MTV video awards) is replete with witches, Salomes and other female archetypes.
It’s a reaction to the totally sexist videos most men produce and it was also a reaction to the song itself,” she says. “Without being too literal, I was trying to find a different angle, like different archetypes through historical references of famous paintings. It’s the way people look at a picture and develop a whole belief on who you are and what you are and it’s so false. In this I’m saying ‘Hey! We’re much more than that two dimensional picture.’ All women possess all the archetypes, we’re not just one or the other.”
Avoiding the concrete, willfully obtuse and cautious about fame, McLachlan is well – equipped to deal with the celebrity pedestal while remaining genuine.
I just don’t understand how people recognize me,” she scoffs. “I’ll have hair in my face, I’ll have a hat on and people will still recognize me!”