November, 1989

Publication title: B-Side, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Sandra A. Garcia

Personal Touch

The marroitt Marquis is quite an overwhelming place, even without the New Music Seminar. But plant about 9000 lunatics into this achingly modern effigy of glass and mortar and watch people get desperate. Desperate to find someone who isn’t out for a business connection, isn’t out for a deal or isn’t just just an asshole. You even find yourself wanting to get away from that face in the mirror at times. Luckily, certain people do provide wells of relief, and one such person at this year’s seminar was Sarah McLachlan. Proving unaffected, friendly, and delightful to interview she managed to provide a pocket of sanity as she aired views on her crafts and her place in this whole crazy business.

Sarah’s dramatic vocals is far at odds with her actualy presence…from hearing that stately, at times chilling range you might be led to believe she’s from some ivory towered city where all is ethereally stately and humor isn’t permitted. Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, and trained in classical voice/ piano/ guitar, she moved to Vancouver just a year and a half ago to work on her debut album Touch. “I was a singer for a band called October Game…we played three gigs in three years,” she laughs. “But we opened for Moev and Mark Jowerr, who is now head of A&R for Nettwerk, heard me and asked me to be Moev’s new singer, as they weren’t satisfied with their current one. But it didn’t work out as my parents said you’re not going to Vancouver…it’s sex, drugs and rock and roll!” she remembers with another light laugh, brushing her hair back. “But we kept in touch, sending demo tapes, then in 1987 Terry McBride of Nettwerk came to Halifax ’cause Skinny Puppy was playing the club I was working at, and out of the blue he offered me a five record contract. I thought about it for about three months, then called my parents and we got a lawyer, I signed the contracts and moved to Vancouver and started to write. It took me about nine months to write the album,” she describes.

Of course, this contract left out a few details…like her old band members. “They were pretty gosh darned mad cause Nettwerk only wanted me!” she exclaims with a grin. “They only wanted my voice, not the whole band cause they didn’t think the band was strong enough. And I had never written a song before, and I said you wan to give me this contract but I don’t know if I’m capable of writing songs! And they said oh, we have faith in you!,” she admits. “I was happy with what I was doing, I’d probably be graduating art college now…but it’s amazing, what has happened to me in the year and a half, what I’ve learned.”

Her art training that she began in Halifax is serving her in good stead even with this change or careers. She describes how she decided to do the album cover for the Arista release of Touch after her first doubtful encounter with the world of image. “The first time around, with the Nettwerk release, I had an idea but I let somebody else do it and it didn’t get done right. So the second time around, I begged Nettwerk, please, let me do it myself, let me try…if it doesn’t work then get someone in.” A pleased smile takes over at the memory. “But it turned out pretty good and re-instilled a faith in myself that I could do things like that. And it made them have faith in me. Now I do the T-shirt designs, I get into every aspect. I have such a focus now that I never had before and it’s a great feeling. Before it was half assed…’Oh yeah, I have a record contract, well, that’s pretty neat’,” she laughs with gentle self mockery. “I didn’t realize what I had! And now I do and want to jump on it and embrace every aspect. It’s my life, and my career that people are dealing with, and there are so many people who are more than willing to take it out of my hands and do it all for me! But it’s my music! It’s so big a part of me that I can’t bear to have anyone take it away from me!” she declares emphatically.

Once Sarah gets going, you can just sit back and admire her determination. She continues, “That’s why it’s so frustrating. Nettwerk is a great company and so is Arista but it’s a business! And when you’re dealing with a business you have to compromise and I hate to compromise!” she semi-growls with anger. “But I hate to! It’s really hard to do that…take videos for instance. I have all these ideas but if they don’t like them then they won’t back them and we can’t do them unless I end up spending 10,000 dollars of my own! They won’t put up the money ’cause they don’t think it’s commercial enough…but I’m not a commercial artist, and I don’t think I ever will be. I mean, if my music gets immensely popular I guess that will make it commercial. It’s a really fine line…it’s strange,” she muses.

Of course, once people find out that you’re signed to Arista they’ll think you’re commercial because a major label took interest in you. Sarah gives an exasperated sigh, “and there goes my credibility with college stations ’cause suddenly I’m on a major. It’s pure bullshit! They liked the music before, why can’t they like it now? ‘Cause it’s on a major label? All that means that I get distributed internationally. That’s great!

“It’s like suddenly college stations won’t play you…come on, you’ll still play R.E.M. and they’re huge! You’ll play the Cure! It’s weird…the whole system is weird and a lot of stuff goes on and I really don’t want to get involved in the business of it but I hate to to a certain degree.”
Especially if you want to have that firm control you’re interested in. Sarah agrees, “Oh I do! Because yes, I want the control, and actually it’s quite fascination all the things that go on that I want to learn…but also I want sometimes no to know about!”

But know your enemy…to learn everything about something is the best protection against it. You’re already wiser that many musicians who have been working in the field for years.

Sarah gracefully demurs, “I have to learn about it and then put it away, to have that knowledge it you need it but no to go crazy with it. It’s so easy to get caught up in the hype! And all of a sudden it’s like ‘where’s the music? What is important, the MUSIC! But no, it’s the money, the business,” as she scornfully answers herself in her mock conversation. “It’s horrible! But you get in, do the best you can, then get out!”

Sarah is suffering from the trend of major labels picking up on more alternative acts and then not being sure what to do with them. They take out ads, arrange appetizing little profiles in glossy fashion mags then never arrange for a real banquet of information. “You’re the first interview up here,” she frets, admitting, “I don’t think that Arista knows quite where my market is. They don’t know where to put me. I’d like to think that I fit everywhere to a certain degree. To me my music has no bounds, because I know people from young to old enjoy it.

“MTV won’t play my video, they claim it’s to artsy for them. VH1 had it on but they took it off ’cause it was too artsy-fartsy for them…what ever the hell they mean by that,” she dismisses with annoyance. “It’s not rock and roll enough for them.”

Of course I can’t help but bring up Sinead O’Connor as a comparison, musing how those channels embraced her sound. Sarah points out, “I think her music is more accessible then mine, but her voice is way out there! She has that amazing voice but her music is more simple. And I don’t know, maybe mine’s to ethereal but then they’ll play Enya or the Cocteau Twins!”

And if you want the last word in ethereal then go no further than those Cocteaus! That’s a tragedy those channels won’t help because as much as we all deride them they have proven immensely helpful for exposure purposes. Sarah agrees, declaring, “That’s what helped me in Canada, my first canadian video. It only cost 7000 bucks and I wasn’t too happy with it cause it wasn’t my idea but all the DJ’s loved it and it was only scheduled for light rotation but the DJ’s kept playing it and that’s why it got so big.”

Sarah is open and ever playful, even when presented with criticism. I couldn’t help but notice that some of Touch’s songs where over the top in terms of her amazing voice…does she ever have to check herself on how far she should go with her voice versus the complex music? Sarah gives a natured grin, breezily declaring, “Oh yeah, I’m a wanker with my voice and my music! It’s busy, there’s so much going on and that is a big problem, to simplify things, ’cause it’s easier to make things vague with lots happening. It’s a lot harder to make it simple and have it work. I do have to watch that…especially writing all the parts myself. I am really trying to make parts work together and interwine.”

Touch is Sarah’s debut, but she still wanted to get involved in all aspects of the creativity, including the sound board! “I wrote all the stuff but had no idea about the technology, I had no idea how to use those things! So I had Daryl Neudorf who did all the pre-production… he did all the technology stuff for me. Working the tracks and pushing all the buttons… but now I’m gonna get a M1 workstation so I am going to have to learn to use these things! I’m getting a little better, as I was involved with the studio work, learning how to use the board. But I want to do as much as I can myself,” as she smiles, emphasizing, “I want to do everything myself!”

After this statement Sarah does admit, “sometimes I feel like I am spreading myself too thing. But it only frustrates me though. I am very particular… I am a perfectionist. I want to come up with something unique and something that I feel hasn’t been done before to a certain degree. You can only go so far with that. But I work out parts and work on them and then all of a sudden they’ll turn into something that’s already been done so I’ll have to throw them out. There’s a constant reworking of parts and intermingling of parts to make things unique, then adding the melody line and the lyrics to work in…It’s a long process to get where I want to be.”

But even though Sarah works out both her music and lyrics herself, outside input is very important to her creative process. “I loose my objectivity so fast and end up hating everything!” she declares with dramatic frustration. “But Daryl was a Godsend, he’d go ‘what’s that, that’s good‘… I’d be ‘oh, that’s nothing’…but he’d say ‘go on, go on’, and that turned into ‘Vox’! I just had these little chords but he thought it was neat and I’m going ‘Oh, it’s horrible! Everything is horrible!”
Sarah’s working methods explain the highly textural, intricate sound her music has. She attacks her pieces like a visual artist in sonics, layering, brushing, building and lettting it dry to come back and polish over a period of time. “Each song is a seperate entity… I’ll go off and work on another song, then I’ll come back to it cause hopefully I’ve gained a new perspective and learned more. But it can take four months to complete a song!

“But it’s the way I work…I didn’t know how else to do it! I just did the natural things I knew how to do. From working on something different you gain a different perspective on the others so you can go back and hopefully add something new and interesting,”

For all that Sarah’s methods and attitudes bespeak of an innate musical sense far beyond her 21 years, she still can make light of her newly occuring fame. “People recognize me in Montreal and Toronto due to my video when I walk down the street,” she laughs, adopting a hushed stage whisper, “‘Oh look, that’s Sarah! It’s Sarah McLachlan’,” she giggles, rolling her wide eyes. “It still freaks me out! I did a show the other night and I was in the bathroom, and I overheard people going ‘Oh yeah, I can’t wait for the show, she’s so great, I love her music.’ It was really great hearing people not saying it to you but honestly to each other. And then I walked through the crowd and people were going ‘Look, I think that’s her’”, she laughs anew. “It’s like wow, what a wild feeling! Cause I’ve done that myself for so many years. I went to see Sinead O’Connor in Vancouver and I was like ‘oh wow, that’s her!’ when she peeked out from side stage! I am still stagestruck!”

With all her talent, drive, dedication and good-natured personality, it won’t be long before everyone knows who Sarah is! As we end the formal interview and blind her with the flash for photos she asks to see the inside of our hotel room, we having conducted the interview in an alcove, the maids cleaning up our roon late because certain people slept in…ahem! Sarah wants to see the tremendous view of Times Square, the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty I described. Once in she beelines for our bag of potato chips, claiming lack of food, snacking as we comiserate with her about her boyfriend troubles and laugh over her stories about wild after-show antics in Washington. I couldn’t get over it…hearing that exquisite, slightly unearthly voice on record I expected a young prima donna, and instead I discovered…warm, wonderful, funny Sarah. And now here’s hoping that the rest of the listening audience discovers Sarah!