August 26, 1999

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

Sarah McLachlan: Mirrorball

Since I have the perfect antidote to terminal underachievement handy, this week, it would almost be a shame not to need it. Sarah is a concert perfectionist just as much as she is a studio perfectionist, her approach to performing about as far as you can get from duct-taped sweaters and hearing damage without becoming Leda and the Swan done as an ice-dancing pantomime. The obvious criticism, if you feel like criticizing her, is that the live versions of her songs are so meticulous and practiced that they sound like studio versions. But either you like her studio versions, in which case there’s no problem, or else you don’t, and there’s no reason anybody should care whether you like this album any better. I don’t actually care that this is a live album, I just love hearing different versions of her songs, hearing how they evolve and adapt. Nothing makes the long journey from Touch to the present, sadly, and a pensive, wistful, half-acoustic “The Path of Thorns (Terms)”, with some breathtaking new harmonies between Sarah and backing vocalist Camille Henderson, is the only song from Solace, but the 1992 Live EP covered those two albums. This one, then, is split between Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, already partly remade on The Freedom Sessions, and Surfacing. The Fumbling singles “Possession” (which picks up a twitchy groove and some churning guitar) and “Good Enough” (languid and faintly bluesy) are joined by an aching and melodically elaborate “Hold On”, Sarah and Ash’s concert-staple guitar-and-hand-drum scat-duet version of “Ice Cream”, a brittle, shimmering rendition of “Fear”, and a long, rousing “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” that seems to have received a complete rhythm transplant since I heard it last. The understated between-albums single “I Will Remember You” hasn’t changed much yet, for some reason, although there’s some pretty guitar-and-piano interplay in the middle. She omits “Full of Grace”, I’m a little disappointed to discover, but does everything else from Surfacing other than “Witness”, “Black & White” and “Last Dance”. “Building a Mystery” is a steady and assured opening, “Adia” spare and unhurried, “I Love You” a little more organic than its original, more centered on Sarah’s curling vocal. She takes “Do What You Have to Do” as a mid-album solo, accompanying herself on piano, which should shut up anybody who still thought that she couldn’t survive without studio or band. “Sweet Surrender” has picked up speed and a touch of menace, Sarah clipping her words a little to play along. And rather than go out on crescendoing waves, as she could have, and probably I expected her to, she closes with “Angel”, again just voice and piano, an intimate benediction to carry with us each into our own nights. Sarah occupies a very different place in the world than she did when I caught half of the “Into the Fire” video for the first time, months before I’d even heard of Tori Amos, back when Alanis Morissette was still making dance fluff that entailed more hairdressing than rehearsal. Airplay saturation and her role in the Lilith Fair have conspired to take her away from me and make her into other people’s music, or to try to, anyway. And for weeks at a time, they sort of succeed, and I forget that there are awe-inspiring musical and emotional progressions to go along with the commercial one, forget that I have more than enough personal history with these songs to ignore whatever else they’ve become attached to, forget that twinge I felt, dubious and silly but involuntary and sincere, when I read that she’d married her drummer. I forget that no matter what tranquilizing shopping-experience use Sarah’s songs are put to, all I have to do is go home and put them in my own player, let them out to echo around my own walls, and they are mine again. We let strangers steal our treasures, sometimes, by gradually convincing us that they’re not so precious, until we finally just give them away. But I didn’t like Solace because it was obscure, I liked it because I thought I heard a singer and songwriter starting to unlearn her limits. I thought she might have the talent, and compassion, to one day write songs capable of wrapping themselves around nodes of the universe’s pain, and dissolving them. I think I was right. And late at night, when Sarah and I are the only ones to have fought off sleep, it seems to me that she makes new versions of old songs because the only way to dissolve pain is to absorb it into your own soul, and convert its energy to other forms. The good these songs do alters them. Any song you don’t have to periodically rewrite is dead, or you are.