March 28, 1995

Publication title: The War Against Silence, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Glenn McDonald

Sarah McLachlan: Freedom Sessions

To the extent that the goal of this review is to help you decide whether Freedom Sessions is a recording you would wish to possess and/or listen to frequently, I can be unusually confident and succinct. If you do not currently own and adore Sarah’s third album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, you should not buy this. If you do currently own and adore Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and only regret that you can never again hear it for the first time, you should buy this.
To the extent that I write reviews because I love writing about music, though, I have several other things to say.

First, the explanation. Freedom Sessions is a nine-song, 38-minute alternate-universe reworking of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. Most of the versions here are early demos of the songs that, in their meticulously detailed studio guises, would make up the album. There’s “Plenty” done almost entirely as a voice collage; “Mary” with just piano, acoustic guitar and a little bit of percussion; “Good Enough” with several tracks of synthetic orchestra over the voice-and-piano demo; “Hold On” with just Sarah at the piano; “Ice Cream” in its casual performance incarnation, with Sarah playing guitar, band keyboardist David Kershaw playing bass, and band drummer Ashwin Sood singing backup and providing a little brushed-drum rhythm; and “Ice” with Sarah playing a feedback-heavy electric guitar. There are also full-touring-band versions of “Elsewhere” and Tom Waits’ “Ol’ 55″ (the one song here not from FTE), and, after a bit of silence to fool the five people left in the world who haven’t learned that when a CD keeps counting even though no noise comes out it means that there’s more music hiding on it, yet another version of “Hold On”, this one a stark, clear rendition with sketchy acoustic lead guitar, shuffling drums and bass, and Sarah sounding uncharacteristically, and arrestingly, unsteady on vocals.

To dedicated Sarah McLachlan fans, the ability she shows here to reinterpret her own work will come as no particular surprise. Her singles are festooned with remixes, radio performances and live recordings; she followed her second album, Solace, with a live EP; and even Fumbling Towards Ecstasy itself had two versions of the opening track, “Possession”. Indeed, the nine non-album releases I have with Sarah’s name on them feature exactly no original Sarah McLachlan compositions. It’s pretty hard for me to imagine anybody who would consider buying extraneous McLachlan items complaining about this state of affairs, though. You almost haven’t heard a song of Sarah’s until you’ve heard it at least two ways. By themselves, each version is impressive, but hearing a song done different ways suddenly makes plain how deeply involved Sarah is with her own songs.

In fact, this involvement makes Freedom Sessions an especially appropriate release to complement the seemingly endless tour that, nearly a year-and-a-half on, found itself in Boston again last night. The first time I saw Sarah on this tour, it was exactly one year ago this issue-date. At that point Fumbling Towards Ecstasy was a few months old at home in Canada, and just newly available in the US. The crowd was passionate and the band was impressively polished, but the venue was cozy (in a dilapidatedly baroque way). Last night (I’m writing this on the 22nd, so last night was Tuesday), the band was unearthly, the venue was larger and more dilapidated (actually, it was a different venue; I doubt you could expand the Somerville Theater without it simply disintegrating completely, and there’s not a whole lot of dilapidation leeway in it, either), and the crowd was enraptured. And, for full parallelism, Freedom Sessions came out a few months ago in Canada, and goes on sale domestically the day this issue reaches the net.

Freedom Sessions acts as a tour souvenir in part literally, as the two band songs mark the first recorded appearance of the incomparable six-piece band she’s been touring with. More than that, though, the never-ending tour has meant that Sarah has lived with these songs on a day-to-day basis for nearly a year-and-a-half, not even counting the time it took to write and record them to begin with. After all that time, it seems unjust that the only recorded evidence of them should be from so early in their existences. Thus these other versions, without literally being the live ones, nevertheless show that the songs are very much live creatures, not at all frozen in their album guises.