August 19, 1991

Publication title: Vancouver Sun, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: John Mackie

Music To The Touch

Sarah McLachlan never expected to be a star, and so the critical acclaim and commercial success that followed the release of her debut album, Touch, was a pleasant surprise.

But when it came time to record the followup, she felt pressure like never before. Never a prolific tunesmith (she’d never written a song before Touch), the songs for her second album came slow and hard.

“I usually have to work myself up to a state of almost neurosis and madness before anything good comes out,” admits McLachlan, who is normally fairly easy-going.

“When I’ve almost cracked – or usually I do crack – I break down and I bawl and I scream – it’s like the sun comes out. I stop crying, and a great chorus comes out or something.”

This process carried over into the recording sessions for what would become her second album, Solace. Her perfectionist streak was reinforced by the intense work ethic of producer Pierre Marchand (”he’ll work for 14 hours with no break until he gets a guitar line right”), and what was supposed to be a one- or two-month session turned into nine months of soul baring – and emotionally exhausting – work. But it was worth it. Solace is the full-flowering of McLachlan’s talents as a singer and composer, the realization of the promise she displayed on Touch. She uses the full range of her classically trained voice to soar, dip and swoop through music that shifts effortlessly from noveau folk pop to darker dance-floor rhythms.

Lyrically, she’s coming of age, looking out of herself and into the problems of the Big Bad World. It’s music with a warm, spiritual quality, music that touches the listener far more deeply than your standard pop tune.

The album title reflects the feeling McLachlan had making the album. “Solace means comfort, and in writing these songs, I got a huge comfort,” says the 23-year-old Halifax native.

“When I listen to music, it’s to be comforted … it’s almost like having someone’s arms around you. Listening to a beautiful song is like hugging somebody.”

“These songs gave me comfort and I hope that they can give comfort to other people.”
Some songs are intimate and personal like Into the Fire (”it’s back to the womb, back to simplicity, yearning for what we can’t have, what we’ve lost, trying to find that spark that’ll keep us happy and complete.”).

But in songs like Black (where she takes the role of a “corporate pig”) and Shelter, her social conscience comes to the fore.

“I’ve been figuring out my own life,” laughs McLachlan, who will appear Wednesday at the PNE’s Coca Cola free stage.

“I stepped out of my own pathetic existence for a while and looked at other people’s lives. Generally, I write because I’m pissed off or messed up about something, but I didn’t have anything to write about … (because) I was really happy in my own life. So I looked out of myself and into the world, and that’s really when I started discovering there were all these horrible things going on.

“(I made) the gross realization that this whole world revolves around greed in a really big way. That terrible, terribly offended me, and to see it happening continuously just pissed me off.”

Oddly enough, her Nettwerk label mates Skinny Puppy had an effect on her new outlook, exposing her to videos about animal abuse that opened her eyes.

“Shelter (is) sort of about animal torture. It’s about creatures who are forced out of their natural environment, forced into a situation that they have no control of, basically due to somebody else’s vanity and greed.

“On Shelter, I’m singing from the animal’s point of view, but it’s left open – it can be animals, it could be homeless people, it could be the outcasts of society that nobody wants to deal with, nobody wants to look at. It’s something that a lot of people want to pretend doesn’t exist, animal torture or whatever, and it does.

“It seems to me that a lot of it is incredibly unneccessary. It took me watching one newsreel of (stuff) getting put into rabbits’ eyes and I was just bawling. It was horrible, I couldn’t watch it.”
McLachlan has had to grow up in a hurry. Her rise to prominence has almost been a fairytale come true. Although she had plenty of training in classical music at Halifax’s Nova Scotia Royal Conservatory of Music (including 12 years of classical guitar, eight of piano and five of voice), she was still relatively green to the pop scene when she was discovered by Nettwerk’s Mark Jowett. (Her new band, October Game, only played three gigs in three years, but one of them was opening for Jowett’s former band, MOEV.)

Jowett wanted her to sing for MOEV, but her parents demurred at the prospect of letting their teenage daughter move to the West Coast. Eventually they relented, and she moved to Vancouver to make it as a solo artist.

Then Touch succeeded beyond McLachlan’s wildest dreams. It became an underground hit in Canada on Nettwerk, which prompted Arista Records to sign McLachlan for the U.S. After Arista re-released the album, it went on to rack up sales of about 200,000 worldwide, including 50,000 in Canada and 90,000 in the States. McLachlan’s Ben’s Song was even picked as the music for a Nissan car commercial in Japan.

But trouble loomed. Arista is known as the home of pop starlets such as Whitney Houston and Taylor Dayne, artists who seem to tailor their music for maximum airplay and maximum sales. Arista wanted pop hits – singles – and McLachlan just wanted to make music, which made for a stormy relationship between artist and record company during the making of Solace.

“Somehow on the first record, I didn’t know what I had. I just did it,” relates McLachlan. “This one I cared so much about, it was so personal, it ran so deep for me. When people came to me and said, ‘We don’t like this because it doesn’t sound like a single,’ I just wanted to kick them in the head. ‘Like, man – but do you like the song?’ ‘Well yeah, we like it, but we need singles.’ I just couldn’t handle that at all.”

“That’s another horrible realization, that this is a business, these things are units, a commodity and product to these people. Not Nettwerk, but the major label (Arista). I just couldn’t take it. It horrified me, the thought that these people wanted me to create music – which to me is a sacred, beautiful thing – and put a hip-hop beat on it so it can get played on the radio. I just couldn’t take that.

But McLachlan and producer Marchand stuck to their guns, slowly but surely building the album up in sessions in Montreal and Vancouver.

When money ran low, recording shifted to Daniel Lanois’ house in New Orleans, where everything could be done on the cheap. They recorded in the living room, and the relaxed atmosphere and general magic of New Orleans helped put the final touch to the album.

“New Orleans is really wild and decadent and debauched and perverse and dangerous, but there’s something incredibly enticing and romantic about it too,” says McLachlan. “It’s dirty, but the architecture is incredibly beautiful. The people are nice and kind.”

“It’s an incredibly inspirational place musically. There’s just something in the air. I don’t know, it just hangs everywhere. It’s wild. There’s music in every bar – there’s a bar on every single corner, all the doors and windows open, and there’s a band playing in every one, and they’re all great.

“There’s music continuously. The scene that you see, like three o’clock in the morning, there’s a single lamplight, and there’s somebody playing sax in the distance. Well, that happens down there. I walked down the street, and there was this guy, and he wasn’t like (screeching noise) ‘buuhhlippp blippp,’ he was like playing this beautiful solitary sax. It happens, and it was the most beautiful scene.”