February 23, 2010

Publication title: The Province, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: John P.

Another sweet miracle from Sarah McLachlan

The ethereal lady changes her tune on the Olympics, with typical aplomb

So here it is, Day 12 of your 2010 Olympic experience and you’re having informed conversations about Nordic combined speed cross curling all the time now.

But already the opening ceremony is a bit of a fuzzy memory. You remember the hydraulics screw-up, of course, thank you for that. But how about the orcas, the big statue things, the marching athletes with video cams, teen Nikki Yanofsky riffing on “O Canada?” I was waiting for a little scat thing in there, a bit of “… our home and native land, a-scooba-da-bap-bee -do.”

And you have to remember the singing stars, BCers like Bryan, Nellie and that k.d. lang whom the painfully persnickety might point out is not technically from here even though launching her career from ’80s Vancouver kinda says she is. In our hearts.

Then there was Sarah McLachlan, the ethereal Sarah McLachlan, our resident ocean nymph and ecstasy-towards-fumbler Sarah McLachlan. She who has such a West Coast yoga mat namaste thing going on that her name can be rearranged to spell Cash Can Harm All.

As 32.6 million pairs of eyes from all over the planet bored deep into her like boots in Mount Cypress snow, McLachlan sat at a massive, white grand piano wearing a black dress and some enormous spangly thing around her neck as she applied that famous mezzo-soprano vocal tool of hers to “Ordinary Miracle.”

It was a lovely choice. The song, you may recall, is McLachlan’s contribution to the soundtrack of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web film from 2006 and was co-written by Glen Ballard — producer of Alanis Morissette’s Jagged Little Pill — and the Eurythmics’ David Stewart. A fine lyric about the magic of the everyday and the need to hold on to our dreams, it’s the perfect antidote to the musical bombast events such as the Olympics tend to engender.

Like at least half of we locals, McLachlan was initially a little restrained about all this Oly thing, a tad cynical, but was overwhelmed by the backstage atmosphere of joy throughout the five days of rehearsals, not to mention the response from the 60,000-strong audience. And as the Lilith Fair producer, set to relaunch this summer, she kept a flinty eye in the direction of the logistics and mechanics of the show. We talked the day after the ceremony.

“Yeah, and let me tell you, I was deeply impressed,” says McLachlan. “It is the creme de la creme. In getting to be backstage and getting to see the hundreds and thousands of little nuts and bolts and cogs that go into making this run smoothly, it was pretty impressive. And the artistry was fantastic. The intimacy and the humanity of it, I think that really shone through. Now, did I take a critical eye and go hey? Could they do that for me? Yeah!”

In 1997, Sarah McLachlan was a fully realized, 29-year-old international recording artist with a five-album deep catalogue beginning with Touch, recorded when she was barely in her 20s and newly lured to the West Coast from hometown Halifax by Nettwerk Records. Her biggest success to date had been Fumbling Toward Ecstasy but the newly released Surfacing would go on to move a quarter of her current 40-plus million total units in sales.

Despite her success and that of many other female musicians she found the music business as a whole, and radio programmers in particular, hopelessly mired in old, anti-female paradigms that still held that guys sell records and concert tickets, not women. The story goes she somehow acquired the logs of one progressive Seattle radio station and found that only once over a week did they play two women back-to-back. So she started Lilith Fair.

At first they said it couldn’t be done, that a woman-centric touring show was doomed to failure. Estrofest, they called it. But, with the help of Nettwerk’s Terry McBride and Dan Fraser and New York agent Marty Diamond, she pulled together an amazing and eclectic roster that included the likes of Jewel, Mary Chapin Carpenter, Fiona Apple, Emmylou Harris and tons more and, everywhere they went, those shows were hugely popular. Every summer through the end of the ’90s, she put on a fresh Lilith Fair and every summer she packed them in wherever the road took them until finally it was time to lay it to rest.

And now, a decade later, she’s waking it up again and, come June, movin’ ’em out.

“The names are still rolling in,” says McLachlan. “We’re still working on getting a couple of mainstage slots organized but it’s really coming together. There’s a whole new wealth of artists out there that weren’t there 10 years ago. We went to some artists and as soon as people got wind . . . Suzanne Vega, for instance, said oh, I hear you’re doing it again. I said yeah, get your agent to phone my agent, let’s get moving on this. So now she’s in. Mary J. Blige is a great new gal we didn’t have last time but a lot of gals from last time are coming back, Sheryl’s back, Emmylou’s back.”

A major project in what is already a very busy life. These days McLachlan is trying to write her next album and it shouldn’t be forgotten she’s also the single mother to her two kids, an eight and two year old. But in the midst of it she has the best escape possible in her singing, the physical act of opening her mouth and vocalizing. Better than Xanax, some say.

In her newly released book, The Happiness Project, author Emily White rhapsodizes over the benefits of singing, how tearing into a favourite tune is a great way to start the day and stabilize the mind, whatever the neighbours say. Elsewhere there are any number of studies linking singing and physiological and neurological improvements, just a lot of happy synapses sparking away. “The only thing better than singing,” as Ella Fitzgerald once put it, “is more singing.”

“I agree with that, wholeheartedly,” says McLachlan. “I think it releases serotonin for me. When I sing, I get kinda high — that’s the only way to describe it. It just puts me at a really peaceful place. It’s like when you drone or chant, there’s something about the toning, it’s releasing something really magical. I don’t know, I don’t talk about it much, I just do it. It’s the same as laughing, like having an orgasm, it just releases all this energy. It’s very healing.”

This week’s free download is McLachlan’s “One Dream,” co-written with long time collaborator and producer, Pierre Marchand. It will be available for one week and be replaced next Tuesday by “U Want Me 2”. But for now think Olympics and “One Dream.”

“NBC asked me to write a song, a theme song, basically, for the Olympics for them,” she says. “It was probably eight or nine months ago. I had this musical idea that seemed a little lighthearted for me, for my own records. I didn’t know quite what to do with it, I put it on the shelf. When this proposal came in, I thought that would be a fun challenge right now, to try and write something that is essentially a commercial. But try and do it in a way that has integrity and real thoughtfulness and feeling to it as well.

“It was supposed to be, originally, for all of the Olympics, their official song, that every time they talked about the Olympics it got played, 30 seconds or 60 seconds, whatever. But it ended up some of the producers at NBC thought it was a little too soft for snowboarding or downhill or whatever. So it ended up being just for figure skating. I disagree with them but I really didn’t have a say.”