November/December, 2004
Publication title: VIVA, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Kenny Florent
Perfect Harmony
Singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan on how she and her husband, drummer Ashwin Sood, are raising daughter India in a rock’n’roll world. Mixing yoga and meditation with herbal remedies, Canada’s soulful superstar finds harmony in her life and work.
Sarah McLachlan is all about India these days. India her daughter, that is. The two-year-old has brought both joy and a big change of style to the lives of the singer-songwriter and her husband, Ashwin Sood, who is also the drummer in her band. Conversations with McLachlan start and end with her little girl. The family has just completed a tour together, in support of Afterglow, her fifth album, and her first in nearly seven years. India is incredibly stuck to a routine, McLachlan says, something that mom herself encouraged. She’s really prospered under it. It’s like clockwork. At one in the afternoon, she’s like, Mummy it’s time to go nite-nite, and she has a nap. Then at seven thirty, she goes off to bed.
India now sets the pace, and her mom couldn’t be happier about her new priorities. The life or a rock star may seem glamorous – and McLachlan now has all the perks that come with financial success – but it can really wear a body down. She hit a dizzying peak of success at 29 when her previous album, Surfacing, smashed records selling 12 million copies, establishing McLachlan as a major voice in the adult alternative music format. That led to an exciting three years as a headliner and motivating force on the Lilith Fair concert tours, which attracted top-name acts to stadiums around the world. Lilith Fair also allowed McLachlan to tap into a deeper well by raising founds for charities – community arts, literacy and women’s issues, primarily – that are now close to her heart. By the time her rollicking caravan stopped, the tours had raised a phenomenal $7 million in support of these causes. Add in the eight Junos and three Grammys she’s racked up, and you have a pretty spectacular resume for the 36-year-old sensation from the Maritimes (though she is now inextricably linked to her adopted hometown of Vancouver).
Never one to milk the cow to the point of exhaustion McLachlan stopped before the fairs became a chore. “It was a great experience”, she says now, looking back from the last leg of her Afterglow tour. “But I am a great believer in leaving people wanting more and ending on a high note”, she says, adding, “And we want to have lives, too! It was just a huge undertaking.”
So now, family life comes first, and these parents, like parents everywhere, work around their daughter’s needs. “We eat really well”, says McLachlan of the organic meals that her personal chef, Jaime Laurita, prepares for them on the road. (Laurita, who specializes in vegetarian dishes, released a cookbook in 1999 called Plenty: A Collection of Sarah McLachlan’s Favourite Recipes.) Laurita “prepares only organic foods”, says the singer.
Now that she’s in her 30s, the singer finds she has to work much harder to stay healthy, what with the hectic twin demands of a toddler and a touring schedule. “I try to get as much sleep as I can”, she says. “I rarely drink. Now, if you have two glasses of wine, you feel like crap in the morning. I just can’t afford that.”
McLachlan admits to feeling growing-up pains. “In my 20s, I was definitely a little wild and I’d drink a whole lot more.” She didn’t even take up exercise until she hit 28, when she discovered surfing and snowboarding, “Yeah, fun, reckless things”, she laughs. The other key personal staffer on the tour team is her yoga instructor. “I do it for an hour a day”, she says of the Vinyasa flow series she prefers. Again, regularity keeps the musician’s punishing schedule from overwhelming her. “I won’t do it if she’ not here”, she says of her personal instructor, whom she calls “a lovely, lovely person.” Without her, McLachlan admits, she’s “completely undisciplined”: Her yogi doubles as a masseuse, soothing McLachlan with Thai yogic massage. “When I am feeling like I need my mummy, she does that for me instead of kicking my ass”. And just before the curtain rises each night, the two go through a meditation exercise together. “I have to. It really helps me get through the day.”
She is grateful for the resources her financial success has afforded her. It is a lot of work being the focus of everyone’s attention, and the singer has learned to ask for the help she needs. “Personally, these are just sort of the creature comforts that I need to get through and deal with the frenetic pace of being on the road.”
To top up her regimen, she takes acidophilus supplements and vitamins, “You name it, anything that’s gonna help!” she says cheerfully. She is also “a little addicted” to Booster Juice.
She reaps the benefits of her dedication to a positive lifestyle. “I like it when my body serves me well”, she says. Live and let live is a strict personal code for the singer, who respects the value of free speech. The only thing that will get her up in arms is smoking. “I’m hard-assed about smoking. I can’t stand it. I can’t stand smelling it. And I don’t want anyone to die young.”
Staying healthy is an imperative for the singer. “I can’t afford to get sick”, she says. After all, she has a whole circus traveling with her, and a cold can knock her voice – and thus the whole works – out of commission.
Sometimes even big doses of sleep, three square meals and vitamins can’t prevent a sore throat from setting in. As her tour draws to a close, the pace has caught up and she’s feeling the strain in her vocal chords. “I thread steroids for a week”, to help her throat, she says, “and that didn’t do any good, which I really hate. I’m on a whole bunch of homeopathic remedies, which may help”, she says, laughing again.
The urge to live well, she says, has been a “slow shift”. Her fame has made her personal traumas very public, most notably the death of her mother, which occurred just five months before her daughter was born. In these past seven years, McLachlan’s life has changed dramatically.
She had already written most of the material that appears on Afterglow, but her new love (daughter India) and losses (her mom) over the past two years adds rich dimensions to her new works. A singer who can convey great pain and empathy with her voice, McLachlan is still amazed when her work touches, and helps, others.
The material draws from life, she says. “It started out with other people’s experiences. I had a girlfriend who was going through a real heartbreak at the time and I was on the phone with her, counseling her, talking her through it and trying to build up her self-esteem”, she says. “I sort of found myself seeing these were things I would tell myself and it sort of brought up for me how I dealt with things in the past and how I am continuing to deal with things.”
As she learns from her own mistakes, so others tell her they learn from her. “I’m really amazed when someone I don’t even know tells me my music has helped them.”
These days McLachlan doesn’t have the option of sequestering herself (in the past she has disappeared on her own for up to eight months while she was writing). This time around, “I was just going to live at home and deal with the day-to-day distractions that came with that and take my time making the record.”
At the end of the tour, she headed back home to Vancouver for a solid month of downtime with her family. But the urge to do good called her out of retirement a the end of September, when she made a brief and sunny appearance at the Vancouver Kiehl’s store, apparently all patched up from her battle with a tour cold.
Whenever a celebrity expresses a fondness for a product there is an automatic reaction from a public relations department. In a recent interview, McLachlan made an offhand comment about her penchant for Kiehl’s lip gloss. Next thing you know, McLachlan is being honoured by Kiehl’s at the opening of their Vancouver store, and accepting a nice, fat cheque on behalf of her charity, the Sarah McLachlan Music Outreach Program, which provides instruments to inner city youth whose classes have been hit by budget cuts.
Such is the power and responsibility of celebrity. It seems Sarah McLachlan has managed to keep her community spirit up while she balances the grueling – and exhilarating – realities of promoting an album and raising a family.
