April, 2005
Publication title: Scene, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Alan Sculley
Bathing in the afterglow
Fearing that she had lost her creative touch, Sarah McLachlan considered quitting music for good.
When Sarah McLachlan arrived in Toronto last August for two concerts that were going to be filmed and recorded for her recently released DVD/CD, “Afterglow Live”, she came with a mix of confidence and uncertainty.
The confidence came from the performances she and her band had given during the first six weeks of the tour. “It was quite relaxed,” McLachlan said in an interview just prior to the launch of her current spring tour. “We had the show together. The songs sounded really good.” The trepidation came from a situation beyond her control. “For a week beforehand something happened to my ears. I had some sort of weird sinus thing, and I lost pitch,” she said. “I couldn’t hear pitch. I went the whole first night (in Toronto) thinking that I was singing completely out of tune. I was up there crying in my mind (and thinking) I’m sucking and wasting $750,000, going ‘Christ!’ But you know, it’s always much more dramatic in the moment than it actually was. It turned out I sang pretty well.”
The proof is there for all to hear on “Afterglow Live,” although McLachlan noted that the majority of footage ended up coming from the second concert in Toronto, after her ear problem had improved. The DVD features the full 23-song set she played on last summer’s tour, while the CD is edited back to include 15 of the live tracks. Both versions find McLachlan and her band in fine form, as they strike a winning balance between capturing the precision of the studio versions of the songs and generating a little extra live energy. As the title suggests, the live set leans heavily on material from McLachlan’s latest studio CD, “Afterglow,” which arrived in fall 2003, a full six years after her previous CD, “Surfacing.” The gap between records wasn’t a surprise for McLachlan fans. She had told fans she was going on hiatus following her 1999 outing as headliner of her all-female festival tour, Lilith Fair, although she didn’t expect to be away from music for as long as the break ended up lasting. She returned to her native Canada to settle into life with husband, drummer Ashwin Sood. In spring 2002, McLachlan gave birth to a daughter, India. Only then did she begin to seriously turn her attention toward finishing a CD she had started about a year earlier. But McLachlan struggled. She said that after growing intensely frustrated over the new music, she walked away from the project, fearing that she had lost her creative touch. She considered quitting music for good. This dire feeling, though, wasn’t an alien experience. “That happens every time,” McLachlan said, noting that she seems to endure a temporary crisis of confidence every time she makes a CD. As it turned out, when McLachlan revisited the recordings for “Afterglow” after a couple of months, she realized the songs actually were good. She simply had lost perspective on the project. She returned to work on the CD, which was about three-quarters recorded and in fairly short order finished the project. It’s easy enough to understand how McLachlan lost her way during the “fterglow” project. She had begun work on the album in 2001, but then two major events occurred. In December 2001, her mother died after battling cancer. Four months later, India was born, and for the next five months, McLachlan had to tend to her newborn daughter, who had colic. Those major life events, McLachlan said, made her uncertainty over the “Afterglow” project feel that much more acute and severe. “(It) makes sense because I had the biggest distractions in my life that I had to deal with at the same time,” McLachlan said. “The bigger the distractions, the harder it is to focus and finish the songs.” The fact that the gap between “Surfacing” and the still uncompleted “Afterglow” was continuing to lengthen also didn’t help McLachlan’s state of mind. “There was a lot of self-inflicted pressure,” she said. “I was feeling the pressure in the sense that I knew the longer I was out of the game, the more work it would take to get back into it. My biggest trepidation is that I had a child now. I am simply not willing to work as hard as I used to work to have a successful record. I also knew I was bringing a record back after six years of not having a record and into the world of downloading. So I knew I would have to work twice as hard as I used to work to have the same kind of success that I had last time. And that’s just if I’m super-super lucky.”
Musically, “Afterglow” offers few surprises to the faithful. Working once again with her longtime producer Pierre Marchand, McLachlan once again creates a song cycle of ethereal, even delicate, pop songs filled with lush and airy instrumentation that accentuates McLachlan’s fluttery yet potent vocals.
It’s a trademark sound the native of Nova Scotia (who now calls Vancouver, B.C., home) has been refining ever since she arrived on the music scene in at age 20 with the 1988 debut CD, “Touch.” But it wasn’t until her third CD, 1993’s “Fumbling Toward Ecstasy,” that McLachlan broke through commercially. That album featured such singles as “Possession” and “Good Enough,” and set the stage for even bigger success with “Surfacing.”
“Afterglow” delivers the same kind of strikingly melodic and dramatic balladry that has been McLachlan’s signature, with songs such as “Fallen,” “Stupid” (both of which were hit singles) and “Dirty Little Secret” being among the CD’s strongest moments.
Music fans have obviously liked what they’ve heard. “Afterglow” has surpassed 2 million in sales, spending nearly all its entire first three months of release in the Top 15 of Billboard magazine’s album chart.
The current run of dates will complete the touring cycle behind the “Afterglow” CD. Knowing that “Afterglow Live” features a full show, McLachlan said she has tweaked her live set. “We’ve made an attempt to put on a bit of a different show,” she said. “There’s not much reinventing the wheel because I have the songs I like to play. . . . We’ve reworked ‘Hold On.’ We do a totally different version now. I’ve tried to add four or five different songs that weren’t in the set first time around, replacing a few that I sort of thought weren’t maybe the strongest.”
McLachlan said she has enjoyed headlining large venues after several Lilith Fair tours in which she played a short set. Her current show runs about two hours. She remains proud of Lilith Fair and says she believes it helped to earn women more respect and prove their wideranging appeal with audiences. It certainly was a fun and rewarding undertaking, she said.
“I’d like to think that everybody involved in Lilith took something away from it, took a good feeling away from it or a sense of being part of something important and fun,” McLachlan said. “I think the audiences had a really great show. And we raised a lot of money for charity. It was a fantastic thing all around.”
