April 21, 1994

Publication title: Scene, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Kymberli Hagelberg

Look Who’s Smiling Now

It’s early, and Sarah McLachlan hasn’t had much sleep. Her voice is a barely audible rasp in constant danger of being overpowered by the background noise on her end. The last few words of every answer disappear through the wires like mist. For insurance’s sake, I’m busy scribbling down comments on the back of a press release for her current tour while she speaks. (McLachlan will play the Agora this Saturday, April 23rd.) Past interviews have taught me the inherent limitations of a bargain tape recorder when you need to get down every word. Not only is there the matter of capturing complete direct quotes to consider, there’s the rule that TFDs (Tortured Folk Divas) are generally good for no more than 10 petulant minutes of discussion.

Luckily, McLachlan is the exception to lots of rules and will henceforth be known for being only occasionally tortured. In conversation she laughs easily, and quickly found what’s left of her wounded voice to talk excitedly of her third full-length release and the camera crew that kept her awake all night.

“We didn’t sleep ’til about seven this morning, when the bus stopped moving,” she adds with a laugh. “It’s just that we’ve been working very hard putting in 16-hour days in the studio. And we took this cow pasture road all the way to Toronto.”

The film contingent was on hand to shoot studio clips which will later be interspersed with footage from McLachlan’s live show. “We’ve been doing this pay-per-view thing. I wanted to get some extra stuff, so we went back up to where I did my record. Everything was live off the floor. There were seven people in the band, plus, 11 people in the camera people, plus [producer] Pierre Marchand. I was pretty interesting,” she continues, laughing again, then adds, “There’s another show tonight. I haven’t had a day off in six days.”

Despite her current good humor, McLachlan knows her early catalog of agonized peans to love and loss have added to the perception that she’s somewhat maudlin. It turns out there was even some truth in the impression. There was a time McLachlan’s muse only dropped by when the singer was in as much pain as the subjects of her songs.

“Getting out writing [when hurt] was a good thing,” she says, making a joke in retrospect. “Otherwise it takes entirely too long to write songs.

“It’s nice to be able to come from a place where I’m in a more positive frame of mind,” she says. “I can still write about sad things or dark things or whatever you want to call them, but now I don’t have to feel that way.”

The songs on McLachlan’s new release were penned with that new attitude in mind over a period of a year, seven months of which were spent secluded in rural Ontario where the 25-year-old Canadian lived alone for the first time.

Though the quality of her writing never suffered, McLachlan worked at developing her technique for happily writing sad songs with all the determination of a big league pitcher hoping to shed a slump. “You have to change your ritual,” she observes. “Now my ritual is needing to be alone for a long period of time. I can’t sit for 10 minutes and focus. Maybe a week after I do that every day, and nothing but that, I can start focusing. It takes me a long time to get to a place where I feel really comfortable, really calm and really peaceful.

“I strongly correlate all this to spring happening,” she continues. “I was living in the mountains where it was minus 35 degrees every day. There was snow up to my shoulders, but I would walk a lot. It was a two-mile hike up the mountain to the studio. That was a good, calming way to start the day. When the snow started melting, the buds started coming out on the trees, and the river in back of the house started opening up. That’s when everything opened up for me.

“Being alone was great because I did a lot of soul searching, and a lot of pulling my hair out. There was a lot of time feeling like my brain was eating itself,” she admits with a laugh. “There was nodody to talk to, but it was a really good time. I sort of feel like I became complete.”

The 12-song CD born of McLachlan’s chilly respite is the warmly received FUMBLING TOWARDS ECSTASY. At first listen, the roller coaster dynamics of her versatile voice dominate the tracks, racing from a trill to a whisper with deft nonchalance. McLachlan’s vocal personality had already begun to develop when her mother, probably wisely, declined te first overtures made by the recording industry when her daughter was singing in a punk band at age 17.

“The idea of finding my own voice was very important to me right from the beginning,” she recalls. “With the first record [TOUCH, followed by SOLACE in 1991], I was very influenced by Kate Bush. In retrospect, I think you can hear it on the record in my voice. That sort of English influence cam from a bunch of bands, Peter Gabriel, the Cocteau Twins. For those reasons, just as a natural progression, I don’t listen to Kate Bush.

“I stopped listening to pretty much everybody for a couple of years,” she continues. “I still hardly listen to any music anymore. When I’m writing a song, if I hear something familiar I change it. That became a conscious effort, and as my confidence grew, I think my own voice sort of naturally came out.”
Fighting the temptation to overdo the vocals is also a consideration, McLachlan admits. “Look at Mariah Carey,” she says. “There’s a perfect example of overdoing it. She has this incredible voice, but she just wanks all the time. It’s tiresome, and hard on the ears. If she would only be Frank Sinatra and just sing the song,” she adds with a laugh.

In the studio, McLachlan pairs once again with Daniel Lanois’ protégé Pierre Marchand, a producer she feels is perfect for her. “I pretty much came to the studio with songs written in a very simple form, whether it was on acoustic guitar or piano and voice. I had just a simple list of arrangements that I would take to him and we would record a rough. Pierre would try different drum machines, different rhythms, and different kinds of instrumentation, and go in different directions musically.

“The best thing about Pierre is that he never tires of new ideas. He’s continuously finding new doors to open and running through them. [In the studio] he won’t settle for the first thing that comes out, even if it sounds great. He’s always eager to try something else.”

Events in McLachlan’s personal life are going well, too. Though she professes to be “in the best relationship ever,” she joked that, given her FUMBLING TOWARS ECSTASY album title, she wouldn’t be surprised if people are still skeptical.

“People take a lot of things [in the songs] really literally, as coming from me,” she says. “Usually, I write in first person, but I’m not really writing about myself. I’m being a character. That character is created out of an emotional experience, but it becomes sort of fictitious.

“When you’re dealing with relationships,” she continues, “there’s only so many textbook kinds of experiences people can have, but there are tons of variations on the universal. If you’re talking about a love experience that’s gone bad, everyone identifies in some form. So even if I’m playing a character, definitely some of my old stuff still comes through.”

One song that was taken literally from the events of her life is “Possession”. The song was written from the point of view of a fan who fell so hard for the character in McLachlan’s songs that he started a very scary correspondence with the singer.

“That was strange,” she says trailing off. “Strange,” she repeats with more forcefulness, “and it happens a lot. There’s been a lot of people who write. My best friend was reading all my mail for me while I was gone. She told me she was having nightmares reading all this stuff. ‘My God,’ she said, ‘People are so fucked up.’

“And lonely. A lot of them are really lost souls,” she continues. “Obviously they don’t have a lot in their own life, which is really too bad. I’m glad my music gives them something, but when it goes over the line to where they think, Wow, we should really be together. The music says so. That’s when it’s frightening. I don’t know these people.”

McLachlan worries “a little bit” that the fan will recognize himself between her lines and glean some weird acceptance from the song. “But, also, that didn’t stop me. I wanted to write the song, and to stop and not do it for those reasons would be wrong.”

In a more indirect vein, McLachlan’s pen pal shows up in the concept version of the video for “Possession.” But don’t expect to get a look unless you can pull in Canada’s Much Music video channel by satellite. Her label re-shot a tamer live performance version for American audiences, a decision with which she’s not altogether uncomfortable.

“I’ve directed two videos, one from SOLACE and the one for ‘Possession’,” she explains. “I didn’t want it to be a love song, and I didn’t want someone chasing someone else. I wanted it to be nonliteral. I tried to get more inside where [the song] came from for me – the frustration of being put up on a pedestal by people who don’t know me. What people think I am, versus what I really am. The idea that the media creates a one- or two-dimensional character that people, if they choose to, create fantasy worlds around.”
McLachlan’s notions of how public figures are portrayed in the video were examined, “Through, um, historical references,” she says with a much accompanying embarassed laughter. “Oh it’s so lofty, it’s pompous now. I was trying to dispel that by showing a bunch of female archtypes using historical paintings, ‘Venus’, ‘Adam and Eve’, ‘Salome’s Last Dance’. I wanted to show all women possessing all these different archetypes. I also had myself suspended in the air and wrapped in gauze, as if my personality and my sexuality were bound. Throughout the video I was being unraveled by unseen forces, and I cam out in end strong and free and – Ta Da! – there I was my own self.
“Yes, it was pretty lofty,” she says still laughing, “and the label told me, ‘Don’t second guess MTV.’”