December, 2003
Publication title: Elm Street, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Brett Grainger
Sarah McLachlan
After a break from the spotlight, the singer-songwriter is back with Afterglow, her first studio CD in six years. She spoke with Brett Grainger about dealing with loss, the pressures of the music business and her new life as a rock’n’roll mama.
Elm Street: You’ve said that the tile Afterglow is about “what’s underneath, the murky, shadowy uncertainy where everything looks different.” What did you mean by that?
Sarah McLachlan: Well, when the sun goes doen, there’s a beautiful sunset, but it’s also very dangerous. It’s a time of transition. It’s a very bad time to drive because your eyes have to change focus. It’s foreshadowing what’s coming – the darkness.
ES: The album comes at a point of transition in your own life.
SM: In the past two years, there’s been a lot of death and a lot of birth. I’ve lost my mother, I had a child, my husband lost his father. Seven of my girlfriends have had children. So there’s sadness, but incredible joy as well. And It’s been amazing to have this time to digest it all. It’s been really hard, but I’m so happy in my life. And I’m so happy with this record, too – because for the longest time I wasn’t. I thought all the songs were crap and I was putting all this pressure on myself to get it finished for all the wrong reasons: just to get it out there. That’s not the way to make music. So I had to walk away for a while, and it was probably the best thing I ever did.
ES: How did you let go of that pressure?
SM: I tend to have to hit rock bottom first. I get really pissed off at myself when I do that, and it took me a while to dig myself out. I realized that I was just completely paralyzed and I was not going to be able to make any kind of music that way. I had to let it go, and I finally did. I was like, “You know what? It’s all going to be fine.” And it was, and it always is.
ES: Has being a mother affected your songwriting? You used to isolate yourself at a cabin in the woods for months at a time to write.
SM: One reason it took so long to finish this record is that I didn’t have that luxury any more. I’d have and hour or two during the day when I would have to go and “be creative”. I love bein a mother. It’a the most amazing thing in the world. But it didn’t do much for my creativity.
ES: How are you going to handle touring?
SM: I’m trying not to think about it too much. It’a going to be a challenge, because I have never spent even an evening away from India. But we’ve worked out a schedule so I can get up in the morning with her and put her to bed. Also, I’ve travelled extesively with her already, and she loves new places. She doesn’t get overstimulated too easily. It seems like she was born for it
ES: After so much change, does coming back into music feel jarring?
SM: It’s certainly a big challenge for me. I know what it takes to work a record. But I want to see if I can do it. There are lots of women who have jobs and kids and do just fine. I’m not reinventing the wheel here.
ES: You’ve been working with you producer, Pierre Marchand, for a long time. How had that relationship grown over the years?
SM: He’s my musical partner and mentor. Sometimes, working on a song, I can get stuck so quickly, and he’ll slog away and come up with the most beautiful idea that takes it in a while new direction. He’s got such a wealth of creativity. He had a child with his gal two months before I did, so neither of us was getting any sleep. But the wonderful thing is that we totally empathized with each other. It seems with every record, whatever weird emotional stuff we’re going through, we’re on parallel planes.
ES: You said that you’re happy. But you’ve also said you have trouble writing music when you’re too happy. Is happiness the enemy of great art?
SM: It’s kind of true – for me, anyway. It’s all very entwined – the lightness and the dark. Even when you’re happy, you can still remember the times when you weren’t. Maybe it’s better to look at the unpleasant situations with a more objective view, and I think you can only do that once you’ve found a bit of peace.
