July 13, 2014
Publication title: Elle, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Unknown
Sarah McLachlan Is Done Writing Breakup Songs
Soulful Canadian songstress Sarah McLachlan, back with a shiny new album of strong, evocative tunes, will be barnstorming across the U.S. this summer.
“I was writing breakup songs,” Sarah McLachlan says by way of explaining why she’s been pretty quiet for four years. “I’m like, I don’t want to keep writing the same songs. I’m done with that. I want to do something different.” That something different is her new record, Shine On (Verve).
When last we heard from McLachlan, a three-time Grammy winner who has sold more than 40 million copies of her seven previous albums—including Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993) and Surfacing (1997)—she was navigating a notably blue period, surveying on 2010’s well-received Laws of Illusion the midlife wreckage of her marriage and her dreams of a peaceful, harmonious life. As Shine On makes clear, she’s moved on.
McLachlan’s new songs bristle with declarations of strength, resilience, and fortitude, ranging from her signature piano balladry, meticulously arranged into a seamless ebb and flow of volume, pace, and emotiveness (“Broken Heart,” “Brink of Destruction”), to fairly racy rockers—two of them (“Flesh and Blood” and “Love Beside Me”) recorded with Bob Rock, Metallica’s renowned producer. “He gave me an electric guitar and said, ‘Play this.’ I haven’t played electric in so long, and I was like, ‘Oh, this feels good,’ ” McLachlan says with a grateful giggle. “I remember how this feels. I love this.” She’s looking forward to stepping out from behind the piano and strapping on a guitar at center stage this summer.
Shine On doesn’t beat around the bush in addressing the changes that have been visited upon McLachlan’s life over the past four years: There are straightforward odes to her sustaining bond with her daughters—India, 12, and Taja, 7—(“Beautiful Girl,” “Little B”) and welling tributes to her father, who passed away in 2010 (“Song for My Father,” “Surrender and Certainty”). Anything else? “Oh, and I, let’s see—I fell in love again,” McLachlan lets drop, as if it were a mere afterthought. But songs like “Turn the Lights Down Low” and “The Sound that Love Makes” (rawrrrr!) and the cuts made with Rock amply attest to the fact that McLachlan has found love, and happiness, with former professional hockey player Geoff Courtnall. (So Canadian!)
The most affecting track on Shine On, though, may be the one that kicks it off, “In Your Shoes”—an antibullying song that McLachlan struggled to write, first thinking of her daughters, then finding inspiration in Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani schoolgirl who became a crusader for women’s educational rights after the Taliban attempted to kill her. But there’s also a personal element: McLachlan herself was mercilessly bullied for years in junior high school. Was her success a form of sweet revenge? She says she met some of the mean girls a few years after: “One of them already had three kids and was looking like she was about to get divorced…. Another one—her father was an abusive alcoholic. As an adult, you find a context in which you can place these situations and go, Okay, that’s why she was like that. There’s forgiveness in that—and, you know, I prefer that.” How utterly, perfectly Sarah.
