November, 2003

Publication title: MacLean’s, vol. 116, Iss. 46, pg. 136
Place: Toronto
Writer: Unknown

Girl Talk

SARAH MCLACHLAN is squashed into the back seat of a white Cadillac Escalade, en route to a promotional appearance in Toronto for her new CD, Afterglow. The megastar’s male makeup artist offers her a handful of Altoids. “Ever get your Es mixed up with your mints and take one by accident?” he jokes. The other five people in the truck chuckle, but McLachlan doesn’t get it. He whispers in her ear, “ecstasy.” “Oh,” she sighs, “I’m so square.”

Turns out McLachlan, 35, is in the dark about much more than just designer drugs. She has no new music in her CD player, since 19-month-old daughter India prefers Raffi. And she’s never watched the TV phenomenon known as Canadian Idol, even though many of the contestants took a crack at her 1997 hit Angel.
The Halifax-born singer-songwriter likes to say she lives in a bubble-starting back in 1987 when, at the age of 19, she was signed to a five-record deal with Vancouver-based Nettwerk and was whisked off to the West Coast. Since then she’s coasted through the music industry, releasing seven similar-sounding, emotionally charged albums and thriving no matter which genre is in vogue. “I’ve seen a whole lot of shifts,” she says. “When I came out with my first record, there was Tracy Chapman and Sinead O’Connor-this whole new world of female singer-songwriters was having a real surge. Then grunge happened, and the pendulum swung all the way to the other side. Then it went well for a couple of years for us singer-songwriters, then came the boy bands and girl bands and hip hop. But it’s not something I really think about. I live in my own little world.”

In that world, McLachlan also feels immune to the sexism she perceives in the music industry. “I got signed to Nettwerk and they were a bunch of young, idealistic guys who were really progressive as far as their ideas of equality in the music industry. It’s only later when I’d talk to other people I’d see what the world was really like.” Once her eyes were opened, McLachlan started Lilith Fair, the all-female tour that dominated the festival circuit from 1997 to 1999-and definitely proved women’s worth in the industry.

After the last Lilith show, exhausted from the rigours of three years of touring, McLachlan went on hiatus, resting, travelling and establishing a music education program for Vancouver children. Four years later she’s returned-and it hasn’t been easy. McLachlan has always had trouble starting the songwriting process. “It’s like admitting you need therapy,” she says, “because of all the emotional baggage it brings to the surface.” Meanwhile, at the end of 1999, McLachlan’s mother, Dorice, was diagnosed with cancer. The singer went to all the treatments and appointments, and took her mom on two cruises. Four months after Dorice died, McLachlan gave birth to India and was understandably distracted once again.

The album, now completed and released, doesn’t address any of these life changes. Instead, it delves into heartaches from eight to 10 years ago, as well as reflecting on the happiness she’s found in marriage (to Ashwin Sood, her drummer). “I used to think that I needed to bring trauma into my house to write, that I needed to break up with somebody,” she says. “Now I realize that I can be perfectly content and it’s actually a better place to write.”

While out plugging Afterglow, McLachlan struggles to articulate what the songs are about or how she wrote them. She’d rather just play. Walking into a radio station, with only minutes to spare before a live performance, she sits down at the piano with no fuss, does a split-second sound check, then knocks off her new single, Fallen, as well as Angel, achieving instant emotional depth with her well-rested voice. In between appearances she rushes back to the hotel for time with India, who travels with a nanny.

Or McLachlan shops. In Toronto, she buys two Moroccan lanterns, and convinces the shop owner to sell her five more that are on loan to CBC-decorating the set where she was interviewed the night before. She explains the excess by saying that in New York she saw the same lamps for $1,000; here they’re only $200 and change. Even bubble-dwellers know a bargain when they see one.

EVERY DAY before going to the London studio where she was recording her second album, Dido would stop by the hospital to visit her father, who was suffering from lupus. “I would leave intensive care and think, I’ve got to live my life to the fullest,” she recalls. “Not just because of my dad, but you’d see these people lying there, kids and people my age as well, and think how fragile we can be.” But the experience was also uplifting, she says, “because you see these people recovering.” Her father was among those who got better-and Dido (full name Dido Florian Cloud de Bounevialle Armstrong) made a thoughtful, sad but ultimately life-affirming album, Life for Rent.

Born in north London-her father was in publishing while her mother, a housewife, secretly wrote poetry-Dido, 31, developed a passion for music early on. “During high school,” she says, “if I was screwing up in the classroom, teachers would say, ‘Just go play the piano; physics isn’t your thing.'” At 15 she discovered boys, parties, drugs and drinking. And in her late teens and early twenties she went through a “very long clubbing phase.” But partiers grow up, and the only hold-over from Dido’s wilder days is what she calls her “deep-rooted love of electronic music. But I also listen to James Taylor, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Carole King, and I try to make those two passions collide.”

She writes songs using only a guitar or piano so that she knows they work in their simplest form. Then her producer instincts kick in and she adds a hip-hop or electronic beat. This approach confused U.S. radio stations when she introduced it on her debut CD, No Angel. But many listeners understood, including Eminem, who used her track Thank You as a sample in his stalker song, Stan. That stroke of luck certainly helped make her the star she is today, with the new CD debuting at No. 1 in Europe and No. 4 in the U.S. “I didn’t feel the need to go crazy different,” she says of Life For Rent, “because I still feel there aren’t many people doing what I do.”

Well, Sarah McLachlan has long dabbled in canned beats. And another English artist, Beth Orton, probably does it best. But none of that diminishes Dido’s contribution or the elegance of her new CD-if her life is for rent, we’d like to sublet.

WHEN IT COMES to Pink’s love life, she keeps people guessing. She’s been in a two-year relationship with motocrosser Carey Hart. Yet the 24-year-old singer has also been known to court the ladies-just last month she was photographed making out with Kristanna Loken (the babe of Terminator 3) on the dance floor of a Monaco nightclub. Now there are tabloid reports that she’s left Hart for punk guitarist Lars Frederiksen. It’s hard to tell where her heart lies; what is certain is that she’s using it all for artistic inspiration.

On her new CD, Try This-a title suggesting she’s up for all kinds of new experiences-Pink has included an unplugged ballad for Hart entitled Love Song, as well as a half-dozen sneering, guitar-driven punk-pop numbers produced by Rancid front man and Frederiksen bandmate Tim Armstrong. Her attraction to women is showcased in a sexed-up duet, Oh My God, with Canadian-born electro-clash queen Peaches. “She’s raunchy and hot and talented,” gushes Pink, “and she’s pretty much the only girl out there these days that I consider rock ‘n’ roll.” It’s an impressively eclectic-or, as Pink describes it, “schizophrenic”-CD that also features her signature brand of danceable pop and sultry white-girl R & B. It proves she’s one of the few commercial successes who’s morphing and experimenting. She owns her sexuality, fluctuating between tomboy and dominatrix, and promotes female independence and confidence. “It scares me that so many women are still afraid of the word feminist,” she says. “I’m just trying to light the torch again.” Certainly, she’s a more worthy heir-apparent to Madonna than Britney is.

The Philadelphia area-born daughter of working-class divorced parents, Pink dropped out of high school and talks with bravado about her youthful penchant for petty crime and physical altercation. She laughs at how, after signing to the Arista label as a teenager, she started rebelling against her new family at the record company. At 16, living in Atlanta, she convinced her handlers to rent her a car-then secretly left the state, disappearing for three days. “I packed a backpack and drove to Florida. I got a ticket in South Carolina, going 88 in a 35. When I got to Florida, I rented a ghetto-ass, cockroach-filled hotel room for $35 and sat on the beach for three days by myself. It was fun as hell.”

She also insisted the label let her scrap the cheesy R & B persona of her first album, Can’t Take Me Home, and work with harder-edged influences like Linda Perry, former lead singer of ’90s alt-rock band 4 Non Blondes. The result was the megahit Missundaztood, a grittier, more emotional pop CD that reintroduced her as a skateboard-toting party girl nursing childhood wounds.

This time around, Pink didn’t have to fight to change direction-if she wanted to give punk a go, no one was going to stop her. And the rock ‘n’ roll hellion that emerges in Try This is bound to make everyone happyexcept maybe Carey Hart.

ALICIA KEYS is one of those NYC chicks who oozes wild-side cool. Born Alicia Augello Cook, she was raised in Hell’s Kitchen by a single mother. “I experienced a lot of things growing up on 42nd Street, when there was nothing but prostitutes and pimps, drugs and drug dealers,” says Keys, 22. “Yet about four blocks away, there was nothing but theatres and restaurants from many different cultures. We were constantly teeter-tottering between the light and the dark.” When she graduated from high school as valedictorian, Keys used her speech to “really dog the school”-accusing it of caring more about the budget than students. “I was frustrated, and I’m very vocal when I’m frustrated.”

On her stunning debut album, Songs in A Minor, and her upcoming The Diary of Alicia Keys (Dec. 2), she continues to be steeped in New York, socially conscious and ready to speak her mind. The new CD is also filled with emotional highs and lows, just like the journals she’s kept since she was eight. “You’ll know something about my love life, my thoughts on society, my insecurities and the things I feel confident and strong about,” promises Keys. But she also sounds like she’d be a blast to hang out with. The single You Don’t Know My Name has a ’70s groove in the vein of the Jackson 5 or Spinners, and tells of the joys of new love with Keys playing the role of a coffee-shop waitress. Streets of New York (featuring rappers Nas and Rakim) shows people who are, in Stevie Wonder’s words, livin’ just enough for the city.

Keys strives to embody the soul, funk and relevance of Wonder and Marvin Gaye. But being a singer-songwriter is just the beginning. She says her future includes composing for theatre and movies, producing and developing new artists, going back to university (she dropped out of Columbia to focus on music), acting-and the list goes on. “To tell you everything,” she says, “would take all day.”