April, 1989

Publication title: Music Express, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Kerry Doole

Sarah McLachlan: A Midas Touch

Her moodily atmospheric music and soaring, ethereal voice has you picturing Sarah McLachlan as a sensitive, serious young singer/songwriter. When you meet this fresh-faced lass of Scottish descent and discover she’s the daughter of an English professor who specalizes in romantic literature, you then typecast her as having been, in an earlier life, a lovestruck maiden wandering the Highlands in search of her crown prince.

It’s quite a shock, then, to hear her come across like John Landis.

“The helicopter pilot we hired for the video of (first single) Vox was a wimp. He wouldn’t get close enough to the water; he couldn’t cut it. But next time we’ll have lots of fast helicopter shots panning across great expanses. Helicopters can create great imagery!”
Don’t be surprised if Sarah starts taking chopper-flying lessons. She’s a novice in the music biz, but the 21-year-old Nova Scotian has already learnt “it is up to me to get things done the way I want.” She designs her own album jackets and promo T-shirts, and plays keyboards, classical and 12-string guitar on her debut solo album, Touch

Touch was released in Canada last year on progressive indie label Nettwerk and impressed Arista Records enough for them to license the record and sign Sarah to a multi-album deal. They did request the addition of an extra song and some remixing of others, but that suited her just fine.
“Originally, my main thing was to keep it simple so I could recreate the LP live. Now it’s, ‘Oh yes, all these toys. Add this!’ ” laughs the charmingly carefree chanteuse.
Amazingly, Touch is Sarah’s first foray into songwriting. Previously, she’d been the vocalist in Halifax techno-pop band The October Game, and prior to that she’d studied piano, guitar and opera singing.

“Opera training gave me lots of control I otherwise would have lacked. There are glottal stop things where you sing really low then open up and go really high. It’s all in the control of your throat muscles.”

Her vocal virtuosity is such that McLachlan confesses to often “seeing my voice as just another instrument,” the resulting sounds evoking comparisons to the likes of Kate Bush and Liz Frazer of the Cocteau Twins.

She is benefitting from the recent resurgence of interest in musical women, but Sarah McLachlan dismisses music industry attitudes to this trend as “real condescending and annoying. People say it’s a fad, they’re going to go away. It is disgusting the way they talk as if women have just begun in pop.
“Because some really good female artists have come out with high quality product, now record companies are going, ‘Wow, females. We better sign up everybody.’ ”