For those who enjoy reading old articles about Sarah...
The article isn't in Solaced's archives, so here's the full text and the complete reference.
White, Timothy. "Sarah McLachlan: irony & 'ecstasy.' (Music to My Ears) (Column)." Billboard 8 Jan. 1994: 5.
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Abstract:
Canada-born singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan is much-praised for her fourth album 'Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.' She says that her new record's sense of searching might have been drawn from her trip in Southeast Asia where troubles and problems seem trivial. 'Fumbling Towards Ecstasy' opens with 'Possession,' a track inspired by a fan. The record includes tracks with pensive-sounding excerpts and titles.
Full Text:
"Well, I'm 25 years old," laughs Canada-born singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan, "so what the fuck would I know about life?"
Yet what's so marvelous about "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy," the much-praised McLachlan's fourth album (Arista/Nettwerk, due Feb. 15), is the fact that she can write candidly about the things she can't always follow but aches to fathom.
McLachlan figures that her new record's fluent sense of searching might have been drawn from a disquieting trip to war-, poverty-, and AIDS (via prostitution)-torn Cambodia and Thailand with the World Vision charity organization; or possibly from her recent exposure to "Letters To A Young Poet," German philosopher Rainer Maria Rilke's tracts on solitude and acceptance.
But when she admiringly mentions that her mother recently returned to school to gain a master's degree in English Literature--doing her thesis on "Clarissa," English novelist Samuel Richardson's epic work of fiction--Sarah's careful description of that book's title character tells much about the music Dorice McLachlan's emerging offspring creates: "All through her life she exerted her free will, and even though people did painful things to her, in the end she found ways to forgive them, because in her sheer determination she had kept her heart pure."
McLachlan began her career at 19, and acclaim for her debut album, "Touch" (1988), was immediate and sustained; local critics were hot to christen her as Canada's preeminent folk siren for the millennium. When American and British observers reinforced that high regard in 1992 following the studio sequel "Solace" and a live release, Sarah resolved to slow the pace of her widening reputation, lest it outdistance the seasoning of her talents.
"Fumbling Towards Ecstasy" opens with "Possession," a track inspired by a rapt fan whose misguided epistles to his heroine missed her true nature by a country mile.
"The ironic truth is that during the making of the first two albums, I was in a spiritually low place," says McLachlan--who adds that she's "not a particularly religious person. It just took me a long time to realize I should feel pride for what I do. That may show a big lack of confidence, but ultimately I was pleased I came to understand things on my own terms."
The question no mere fan could be informed enough to pose is explored in the octave-leaping monologues of other "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy" tracks like "Wait," "Plenty," "Ice," "Hold On," and especially "Elsewhere": "I believe/There is a distance I have wandered/To touch upon the years of reaching out and reaching in . . . /I believe this is heaven to no one but me."
Those presuming from such song pensive-sounding excerpts and titles that McLachlan's work resides in a pat confessional mode will be surprised by the wit, literate grace, and unfussy intricacy of her material. As produced by Daniel Lanois protege Pierre Marchand ("my friend and mentor," says McLachlan with undisguised gratitude), she establishes a consummate counterpoise of vocal fire and reportorial flow--each vibrant trill, insight, and instrumental touch too absorbing to remain in the realm of autobiography. No theme is worried, no image wasted.
"The things I saw and experienced in Southeast Asia made any troubles and problems I might have seem pretty trivial," she says. "These people have so little, yet they have a dignity and a kindness. I visited there after having been on the road in a cocoon for 14 months after 'Solace' was released, and it challenged me to be more responsive, discerning, and sensitive in my own life. For instance, 'Hold On,' on the 'Fumbling' album, came together in a matter of hours after I'd seen a documentary on the Arts & Entertainment channel, 'A Promise Kept,' about a woman whose fiance was dying from AIDS. Since the album is already out in Canada, I've heard from people who just take the song as being about the loss of any intimate friend. I like that ambiguity, where listeners just perceive words of love as entities of faith."
Born January 28, 1968, in the Halifax, Nova Scotia, suburb of Bedford, Sarah was the third child of American marine biologist Jack McLachlan and wife Dorice, a fellow Yank who shelved her own academic aspirations to support the education and professional wayfaring of her husband. An often-lonesome Dorice McLachlan picked Sarah over her spouse and older sons as her prime confidant, acquainting her little girl with the isolation that regret places in the path of personal fulfillment.
Invested by her firmly nurturing parents with a toddler-to-teenager dose of classical training ("12 years of guitar, six years of piano, five years of voice"), and self-financed by years of dishwashing and counter work in Halifax establishments like the Club Flamingo and the Second Cup and Mother Tucker's restaurant chains, McLachlan was able to fuse her mother's depth of pathos and her father's detached analysis into a calm grasp of our culture's callous objectification of women.
"But it took me six years," she says, "to learn how not to edit myself, to remain open in my music so that I touched greater levels of darkness as well as some positive areas of escape."
The fruits of this unimpeded intuition are featured on "Good Enough," "Fear," and the title track, on which McLachlan both grievously delves and bids goodbye to the emotional stasis her mother unconsciously tried to bequeath her.
"To know oneself is to find freedom," she says. "As a child, I was never passionate about classical music, even though I put so much energy into it. From the age of 4, I preferred to improvise on the stuff I was learning. And the moment I hit puberty, I got into popular music instead and wrote my first song, 'Out Of The Shadows,' in early 1987. Now, whether I'm making decisions about the things I want to sing or about the 13-member entourage that relies on me--actually, it's 24, because the Devlins will be opening for us |beginning Feb. 26 in Las Vegas~--I know I have to do it for the right reasons."
With the pure curiosity of youthful intellect, and a musical proficiency rare in the popular idiom, McLachlan is now able to probe such matters as if they were a still pool. "Living completely alone for the first time during the seven months I made the new album, I saw I could make myself happy, and that state gave me an incredible spiritual high," she says. "Since then, I'm in my first good relationship ever, and what he and I have doesn't fill some empty space. Love is meant to shine a light rather than fix a gap; that's the feeling I wanted to achieve."
McLachlan has made a record unlike any one will hear this year, oddly ancient in its serene earthiness, utterly fresh in its patient inquiry. In exploring why we break each other's spirits, she posits an empathy accessible to us all.
"It's what honest music has always given me," she says, "and what I wanted to give back."
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But given the idiots this region continues to send to Washington, D.C. I kind of doubt it. 
