October 21, 1997

Publication title: The Globe and Mail, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Simona Chiose

McLachlan fans crying for more

Tears flow when the emotive singer performs, and that’s just how the audience likes it.

An anthropologist trapped inside the Hummingbird Centre for the Arts on Monday evening might have found herself developing new angles on the old theory of mass hysteria. Every once in a while, and audience member would so discreetly dry off a stray, falling tear. Then someone else would do the same. Pretty soon, everyone’s hands would flutter around their faces for a moment, the whole hall silent and reverent. This was not a religious service, however. It was the first of three sold-out appearances by the country’s premiere poetess of emotion, Sarah McLachlan, fresh from this summer’s all-female Lilith tour, and now on tour to promote her new album, Surfacing.

McLachlan’s concerts are famed for inducing weepiness. “Don’t you know?” a friend said to me after the show. “You buy a McLachlan album when you get together with someone because it’s moving and pretty. Then when you break up, you play the album and cry to it.” And fans – th majority were women of all ages – came prepared for the experience. “If she plays Into the Fire, I’ll cry,” someone said before the show, echoing others for whom the song may have been different, but the expectation the same.

With this much build-up, resistance becomes a matter of honour. And when the catalyst for all this finally appeared on stage, it seemed easy. The woman who walked in front of the microphone to wild cheers looked nothing like the adjectives – ethereal, spiritual, beatific – that have been used to describe her. Wearing a sleeveless top, slim black pants and platform shoes, McLachlan could have been just another cool, tough female rocker. The only sign that something different was up was a painted canvas backdrop with maps of the world and anthropomorphic, New Age-y male figures.

Then she started to sing, and it quickly became apparent that emotional resistance was futile. Ponderous and painful as skeptics may find her songs, McLachlan’s voice transforms raw experience and emotioninto self-understanding and grace. She hasbeen compared to Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell, but she is something altogether different, slowly building a spell over the course of two hours. We expect our musical stars to give up flesh and blood on stage. McLachlan doesn’t: She doesn’t move that much, the only exception her swirling hand motions, and she doesn’t sing from the gut, as they say. Instead, she gives soul. On her albums, the effect of this is sometimes muted by clean, almost slick, production. In concert, the range of her pipes and the almost imperceptible way she will occasionally add a full blast of emotion to one word by shifting only one note – as she did on Good Enough or Hold On, I Love You from the current album – pack the kind of intense wallop that only Sinead O’Connor used to deliver.

Without Bush’s barely restrained psychotic edge or Mitchell’s conciliatory folkiness, McLachlan’s voice sweeps and swoops, insisting on response. At the same time, as the songs she played from the new album proved, McLachlan is moving away from the lush arrangements of her lyrical earlier works into subtler, and yet more rocking, territory. She will never be an angry singer, but she can be aggressive and sexual, and her band clearly relishes the new sound. It is the perfect backup combo for McLachlan, delivering the necessary hard base from which her melodies can soar. Even the more traditionally ballad-like structure of the current single, Sweet Surrender, sounds vaguely British and trip-hoppy. McLachlan saved the song, with its message of willing commitment, to almost the end of the show. It was an uplifting note, and one that probably allowed everyone to appear cool, calm and composed when the lights came up.