November 07, 2014

Publication title: Toronto Sun, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Toronto
Writer: Jane Stevenson

Multi-faceted Sarah McLachlan shines at Massey Hall

Sarah McLachlan has two sides on stage.

When she’s performing, she’s the earnest, fresh-faced if still sexy sounding singer with an astonishingly good voice if predictably “sad, depressing love songs,” as McLachlan herself called them.

But when she’s speaking, as the 46-year-old Halifax-born, Vancouver-based artist often did during two separate Q&A segments of the first of two shows at Massey Hall on Thursday night, she’s salty and plainspoken, and often more appealing.

Or at least more real.

When a second group of six people – referred to as “social-media contest winners,” were brought up on stage to sit on a couch and join McLachlan and her four-piece band, one of them asked: “Where do you find your inner peace?”

“Oh, Jesus,” she exhaled before joking: “In a big bottle of wine in a couple of hours.”

It seems even McLachlan has grown tired of her hipppie-dippy, peace-loving image promoted on the world stage with the success of her all-women festival Lilith Fair and her biggest album to date, Surfacing, in the late ‘90s.

When the only man was welcomed into her “living room,” as McLachlan called it, he was much bolder asking for a kiss “so hard, it takes your breath away,” just like she sings in her hit song, Possession, adding “if it’s okay with my wife.”

Hey, at least he asked permission.

“Am I your get-out-of-jail-free card?” McLachlan joked, who kissed him lightly and his wife too.

Two other revelations, she only got her driver’s licence when she was 32 – “I was on a tour bus since I was 19,” – and she can play the drums as she showed the audience briefly.

On the music front, McLachlan and her band – with special mention to lead guitarist Joel Shearer who brought some much needed edge to the proceedings – offered up plenty of new material from her 2014 album, Shine On, with such standouts as Broken Heart, Brink of Destruction – which she dedicated to her “sweetie” (former NHL-er Geoff Courtnall from Victoria) and Love Beside Me – but they were no match for her older songs.

The crowd roared its approval for such familiar tunes as Building a Mystery, Adia, Answer, Fallen, World On Fire, Loving You is Easy, and Sweet Surrender.

But it was the material offering something more than a pretty voice and McLachlan strumming an acoustic guitar or seated at her piano that made the biggest impression like the vocally dynamic Stupid in the first set – followed by a 25-minute intermission – and Hold On, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, Fear and Possession, with gorgeous harmonies provided by backup singer Melissa McLelland in the second set.

And when McLachlan was joined by McLelland and her husband Luke Doucet – the Hamilton couple make up the folk-rock duo Whitehorse – for the first encore song, Angel, it was pure harmony heaven.