June 01, 2014
Publication title: Music! The Sounds of Santa Barbara, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Brett Leigh Dicks
Sarah McLachlan Shines On
Sarah McLachlan needs little introduction. The Canadian singer-songwriter has forged a career born as from her die hard dedication as it was from the marriage of emotive ballads and her gorgeous mezzo-soprano vocals. Since the release of her first album, Touch, in 1988 she has gone on to sell over 40 million albums worldwide, earn three Grammy Awards, and even started her own music school. The Sarah McLachlan Music School is an outreach program in Vancouver that provides music education for inner city children and free music lessons for at-risk youth and has something that has recently enveloped both her enthusiasm and time. But last month McLachlan released her first new album in four years. Shine On comes on the back of a tumultuous period in the singer-songwriter’s life which included the loss of her father. The album is her first release on Verve Records, after leaving her home for over twenty years, Nettwerk/Artista, and debuted at the top of the Canadian charts and at Number 4 on the US Billboard charts. A working mother of two, McLachlan is about to take Shine On out on the road for a series of shows across the United States and Canada which includes an appearance at the Santa Barbara Bowl on Wednesday, June 25th. But before McLachlan grabs her guitars, bundles up her children, and takes to the road for the summer, she found time to chat with Brett Leigh Dicks about both her new album and the honor of being immortalized in a pinata.
I must say that you recently surfaced very unexpectedly for me. I was watching an episode of “Portlandia” and of course there you were, both as a gardener and a pinata. What was your reaction when the show’s producers approached you and said they wanted to turn you into a pinata?
I was excited to do the show because I thought it would be really fun and also a bit of a challenge because I don’t have any aspirations to act. So I thought putting myself out of my comfort zone would be a fun and challenging thing to do. I didn’t get to witness the bashing of the pinata though, but it was very funny. It was a great experience.
On to pending experiences. You have a new album, Shine On, that has recently been released and you are heading out on the road with it. What is this period of anticipation like?
I can’t wait. Playing live is the icing on top of the cake of all the hard work of trying to make the songs and this new album as good as it could possibly be. Now we get to take them out on the road and give them to these great musicians who are going to breathe new life into them. So it’s very exciting.
It has been four years since the last album. Tell me about the genesis of the album….
The album was a bit piecemeal at first. It started writing for it about three and half years ago, but there were big pauses in between. I have two small daughters and I also have a free afterschool music program that I have been running for 13 years and three and half years ago we separated from the arts organization we had partnered with and went out on our own. That involved creating a whole new organizational structure and spending a lot of time reorganizing and it turned into another fulltime job that I didn’t expect to have. So the writing process was punctuated by a lot of big breaks because of that.
And being a parent too is a fulltime job, too. Was difficult to eke out time amidst all that to be creative? Do you find that you have to specifically set aside time to write or do songs have a will of their own and come what may?
Usually what happens is after I take the kids to school in the morning I then try to work for an hour or so. If I don’t have the kids that then gives me some time to work. But what I found is that I wasn’t terribly disciplined for quite a while and it was really only when I already had a lot of songs that I became a little more regimented.
What part of the process do you find is the easiest, starting or finishing a song?
Beginning to write a song is easy. Finishing writing a song is very difficult. It’s like I’m still that person who does their homework at 9 p.m. on a Sunday night. So I did paint myself into a bit of a corner because I fell a bit behind schedule and really had to put my nose to the grindstone at that point to get songs finished and get into the studio. A lot of it is just about me focusing. I don’t have the time. I don’t live up in the mountains like I used to where I had time so that’s why this album took so damn long.
One constant within your work has been the emotive nature of your lyrics. Do words come easy to you?
I write music all the time and sometimes there will be a lyric or a rhyme attached to a melody, but writing lyrics is incredibly difficult for me, it’s not something that comes naturally and usually accompanies a process of self discovery or self analysis. So the lyrics are usually me trying to work my way through something and trying to do it in an eloquent and poetic manner. Writing about emotional things is not reinventing the wheel. All these things we feel and talk about have been written about a thousand times already so what I try to do is come up with something that can translate something simple in something poetic.
With that in mind, Shine On is a very personal album and a lot has taken place in your life across the past few years – a relationship ended, you lost your father, the business structure surrounding your music changed. I presume some of that has been channeled into the songs …
A lot of the songs on the album were inspired at least in part if not entirely by my father’s passing three years ago and the profound effect that had on me. But there was a whole arc of things that played into that period of writing. From turning 40, separating from my husband of many years, the loss of my father, and even separating from my label. Just like I was saying before, all that definitely gives you cause for self-analysis. In the end I guess the album is about recognizing that every moment is precious.
Where did you record the album?
It was predominantly split between my studio in Vancouver and my producer’s studio in Montreal and we did a brief session in East West Studios in Los Angeles.
Presumably you went to Montreal to specifically work with Pierre Marchand …
Absolutely. Pierre is based there in Montreal. We both have busy schedules and we both have times when we are going to be free. So the week he didn’t have his kids I went out to see him and we worked our 16 hour days and then he came out to see me a couple a times as well. We have worked together a lot over the years so as disjointed as that might seem, we know each other well enough that we can pick up where we left off.
At what point in your life did you realize that writing songs, performing, and making records, was something that you are seriously good at?
The “seriously good at” part is something I still question and I think that self-doubt and more specifically self-loathing is what propels and pushes me onward to find the calm in the storm. I started writing when I was 19 when I was given a record contract. Up until that point I was just happy playing music and didn’t really feel that I had much to say. Then I got the record contract and thought, well, I guess I have to try and write some songs. So that’s what I did. I took me a while, but I thought about some of my favorite songs and then thought about what I wanted to do and what I wanted to talk about and how I wanted to make my songs sound.
Over the past few years Canada has produced this cascade of incredible musicians. What is it about the place that has inspired such a wealth of musical talent?
For one thing there’s a real emphasis on culture and the arts here and that art is encouraged. We also live in an incredibly beautiful place, it’s a glorious part of the world. And it’s a very demanding place too. It gets very, very cold and quite frankly when it gets like that there’s not a lot else to do. You drink, play hockey, and make music. I’m joking, but as a teenager in a lot of our cities and towns, you end up being inside and being creative.
So we can blame winter for all those plaintively beautiful introspective songs from the likes of Blue Rodeo and Kathleen Edwards and Emily Haines?
I think you can. It’s kind like that hibernation thing where you do tend to have a lot of time on your hands to think and be introspective.
And then summer rolls around and take it all on the road to share it with people …
Absolutely! It’s the perfect arrangement isn’t? Summer is the perfect time to go out on tour, especially since I need to arrange it around the kids and their schooling. So we’re all heading off for a summer adventure.
