November, 1996

Publication title: Chatelaine, vol. 69, Iss. 11, pg. 50
Place: Toronto
Writer: Kim Pittaway

Tumbling Into Ecstasy

Sarah McLachlan’s songs of sorrow and longing have made her a chart buster across the continent. Now, she’s in love and at peace — and struggling to write her fourth album. Will happiness silence the muse? By Kim Pittaway

I’m, um, your biggest fan,” says the teenage girl standing in the middle of Sarah McLachlan’s backstage dressing room at Detroit’s Pine Knob outdoor amphitheatre. No one’s quite sure how she got in — she mumbled something about “a friend who works here said it was okay” — and now she stands there, desperate to make a connection with McLachlan but at the same time shy, shoulders curved inward in the posture of the suddenly – tall – and – not – sure – what – to – do – with – it – all. Salvation arrives as she remembers the yellow rose — friendship’s symbol — in her hand. “This is for you,” she says, thrusting it at her idol.

McLachlan, at 28 a veteran of the music industry, smiles back at her. In her cutoff denim overalls and beat – up Birkenstocks, McLachlan looks more like a camp counselor than a be – witchingly voiced international recording star. “Gee, thanks, that’s really nice,” she says, chatting with the girl for a minute or two until tour manager Dan Fraser politely escorts the young woman out. “I try to be gracious,” she says later. “The ones who really get me are the teenage girls. I look at them and I see myself at 15, all gawky and trying to figure it out.”

But teenage girls aren’t McLachlan’s only fans. Her appeal cuts across age and gender: at tonight’s concert, the 15,000 – strong audience will range from the 30 – something couple — he in golf shirt and walking shorts, she in maternity dress — to the guy whose tattoos clearly predate recent “body art” trendiness, to groups of girlfriends in their teens, 20s and 30s. They’ve come to hear her hits — “Good Enough,” “Possession,” “I Will Remember You” — songs that hint at pain, the emotions clear and compelling but the details vague and open to interpretation. They’re here to see Sarah, the vulnerable waif with the soulful eyes and the voice that soars from earthy to ethereal, the woman “people sort of expect to sleep on clouds and live on a diet of flowers,” says McLachlan’s longtime friend Buffy Childerhose.

But the waif image has never been entirely accurate — backstage, McLachlan is more likely to be playing Hacky Sack than floating dreamily around her dressing room. And now, what vulnerability was there has given way to newfound confidence, born of success, maturity and, as she puts it, “my honey” — her drummer, longtime friend and now live – in partner Ashwin Sood. (They’re talking babies and for now have settled on a Labrador retriever puppy named Rexy.) “I’m happier than I’ve ever been,” says McLachlan. But for someone whose musical success has come from exploring dark emotions, happiness could be bad news.

Sarah McLachlan’s songs aren’t likely to make the playlists at wedding receptions. Her music resonates with the deep thrum of uncertainty and loss, echoing into the dark scarred corners of your soul. In “Circle,” they are love’s scars, carved in jealousy: What kind of love is this that keeps me hanging on despite everything it’s doing to me? What is this love that keeps me coming back for more when it will only end in misery? Remarkably, though, it isn’t depressing so much as affirming: here’s someone who gets it, who understands, who has managed to distill those emotions so that they have the lyrical and vocal hit of witch – brewed moonshine, potent and magical.

It’s a brew that’s led to appearances on Late Night With David Letterman and The Tonight Show, and even before the Pope at a 1994 Christmas special in Rome. She’s been nominated for Grammy and Juno awards and sung on the sound tracks of movies such as Boys on the Side, The Brothers McMullen, Bed of Roses and Moll Flanders.

Along the way, she’s won rave reviews in Canadian and American media. Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, her last album, sold almost three million copies and was on the Billboard sales charts for 100 weeks. That magazine’s editor hailed it as “oddly ancient in its serene earthiness, utterly fresh in its patient inquiry.” Rolling Stone cited the album’s “quiet radiance” and “passionate dignity,” while Time magazine concluded that “far from indulging in simple emotional bloodletting, McLachlan creates exquisitely poised songs that resist anger or pathos.”

In the aftermath of the release of her first record, Touch, in 1988, and subsequent albums, Solace and Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, fans and media speculated about the source of those emotions. McLachlan wasn’t particularly enlightening: in an age of intimate disclosures, her media interviews focused mainly on her music, with minimal revelations about strict parents anduncomfortable teen years in Halifax. It just didn’t seem like enough. But those looking for deep dark secrets are bound to be disappointed, she says. And friends confirm that there don’t seem to be any. (McLachlan’s parents, whom she describes as “very private people,” declined to be interviewed.) McLachlan says her writing comes out of the inevitable pain of relationships that don’t work out, building a life separate from your family and just plain growing up: the pain of “trying to figure it out.”

At 15, gawky Sarah McLachlan was trying to figure out her first year in high school in Halifax. She wasn’t very popular. “My mom was basically my best friend, because I hardly had any friends,” she says now. “I had bad teeth, greasy hair — a general ugly duckling — and I was pitiful because I tried so hard to fit in [with the preppy girls].” It was a task made even more difficult by her parents’ strict rules for their youngest child and only daughter: no jeans, no makeup, no pierced ears and definitely no boyfriends. Then, someone introduced her to the “group of misfits and punks” who hung out at an arcade called Backstreet Imports. Says Childerhose, who met McLachlan at Backstreet, “All the things that made you weird and freaky at school made you cool and neat there.” Things like McLachlan’s skateboard and guitar (she’d first learned to play the ukulele at age 4, when she wanted to be Joan Baez). Their first conversation was a fight about who was the better band, the Clash or the Ramones. “I can’t remember which side either of us was on,” laughs Childerhose, now arts editor for the Montreal arts weekly, Hour.

The rest reads like the proverbial rock – and – roll fairy tale. At 17, McLachlan joined a band and, at her first on stage performance at Dalhousie University’s Student Union Building, was “discovered” by a musician with Vancouver – based Nettwerk Productions. The company wanted to sign her on. But her parents foresaw a different future for Sarah. Her father, Jack, a marine biologist, and mother, Dorice, who had interrupted her own studies to stay at home and raise a family, had university in mind for their daughter. While they’d always encouraged Sarah and older brothers Ian and Stewart to take classical music lessons, they viewed music as a hobby, not a career path. “The only thing they knew about rock and roll was when they opened the newspaper and saw another story about a musician OD’ing,” says McLachlan. In retrospect, she says it was the right decision — “I was too young and messed up to head out on my own” — but at the time she was furious. “I thought it was my ticket out of Halifax, and I was really angry.” Her parents wouldn’t budge. She “barely” finished high school, and enrolled at the local art college.

Two years later, Nettwerk president Terry McBride was back in town with another band. He looked her up and “plunked a five – record deal on the table,” McLachlan says. This time the decision was hers alone. She said yes and moved to Vancouver.

It was a move that made family relations, especially with her mother, rocky for a while. “It was hard for both of us. She was really angry and hurt that I finally decided not to listen to her and to do my own thing. And I had built up so much resentment too.” It was resentment she worked out in part through her music, in songs like “Elsewhere”: Mother can’t you see I’ve got to live my life the way I feel is right for me, might not be right for you but it’s right for me….

It took me a long time to see my parents as people,” she says now, as she speaks proudly of her mother’s recently acquired master’s degree in English. And, she adds wryly, “It’s curious how they stop hassling you when you stop hassling them.”

Parental relationships weren’t the only issues she worked through in the music she sometimes describes as her “therapy.” When an obsessed fan stalked her, hanging out in her Vancouver neighborhood, sending her letters and following her from concert to concert, McLachlan got a restraining order to keep him away. “I couldn’t fathom it, though, and for a while I was looking over my shoulder everywhere I went.” It wasn’t until she was able to “look into his brain” by writing a song from a stalker’s viewpoint that she was finally able to put the episode behind her. The song was “Possession,” and its popularity with fans may say something about the intensity of their devotion.

But now there doesn’t appear to be a lot left to work out. She’s on great terms with her parents: “In fact, I think I’m becoming my mother,” she laughs. And in her rock fairy tale, she appears to have avoided the stereotypical villains. Terry McBride, Nettwerk president and McLachlan’s manager, hasn’t turned out to be a record – company troll. Boyfriend Ashwin Sood isn’t the evil prince drawing McLachlan into a pit of addiction and despair. “I look back and think how incredibly lucky I am,” she says. “I ended up with a record company full of clean – living vegetarians.”

And yes, McLachlan admits that her recent good fortune may be hampering her efforts to write her next album. Originally scheduled for release last spring, it’s unlikely to appear earlier than next spring. “I don’t want to have to be miserable to write,” she says. “I would love to write a simple little song about being happy, but happiness is like a cloud. It’s beautiful, but if you stare at it too long, it evaporates.” Even her happiest song to date — “Ice Cream” — has a cautionary twist: Your love is better than ice cream, she sings, but: it’s a long way down to the place where we started from.

But McLachlan isn’t pushing herself to create artificial angst or to pen happy pop froth. “I’m giving myself the time I need to allow stuff to come out on its own,” she says. Nor is she waiting passively for the muse to appear, as she works in her “refuge” — her home – based studio, with its high ceiling and fireplace, scattered with things she’s collected on the road: an antique African wedding dress hanging on the wall, an 18th – century baroque lantern, a Turkish antique carpet. “Eventually, you say, ‘I’m just going to sit down and write.’ Sometimes what comes out is garbage. Sometimes it’s not.” In the meantime, what McLachlan is listening to may surprise her fans: Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson. “The songs are so simple and they tell these beautiful, often tragic, little stories. I’m drawn to the romanticism of that tragedy, in my own life and in other people’s lives, the stuff you go through and yet somehow survive.”

I’M your biggest fan,” says the 30 – something guy, a cameraman with the Detroit theatre’s video crew. McLachlan has just finished the sound check for this evening’s show, a five – act lineup featuring Paula Cole, Aimee Mann, Patti Smith and Lisa Loeb, organized by McLachlan and her management company. (She’s taken to calling it “Girlie – palooza” in counterpoint to the mostly male Lollapalooza tour that crisscrossed the continent last summer.) He asks for her autograph, and McLachlan flashes a genuine smile and scribbles her signature as he tells her even the sound check sounded great.

The sun is still bright and warm at 7 p.m. when Paula Cole heads onto the stage. McLachlan and others stand clustered in the wings, hooting and hollering in appreciation as Cole belts out a butt – kickingly funky version of Dolly Parton’s hit “Jolene.” The audience — still filtering in — is less enthusiastic. As the other acts follow Cole, the audience remains distracted, chattering, heading to the beer counter, going up to check out the concert merchandise.

They’re waiting for Sarah. And when the house lights go down at 9:40, the crowd, as they say, goes wild. For an hour, they cheer and clap and connect, eventually calling her back onto the stage for an encore. It’s “Possession.” Her voice rises above the crowd, as hundreds join her in the lyrics: Oh you speak to me in riddles and you speak to me in rhyme, my body aches to breathe your breath, your words keep me alive….
Fifteen thousand of her biggest fans sway as one. This crowd would grant McLachlan anything. Even happiness.