May/June, 1989

Publication title: Music Scene, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Dave MacIntosh

The Positive Touch

To put it mildly, Canadian singer/songwriters are a uniformly odd species. Let’s take two unlikely compatriots such as Leonard Cohen and Bruce Cockburn, and determine what we know about them. Well, they’ve each written a handful of songs that most of us will remember until almost forever, and aside from that, all we really know is that they’re strange. Distant, mysterious, brilliant.
So let’s add a new twist – let’s switch gender to the, ah, gentler sex. What do Joni Mitchell, Jane Siberry and Buffy Saint Marie have in common? Great voices, great songs, and great big helpings of mystique that, in no uncertain terms, protect them from the prying ears of their audience. The music is the whole story.

Sarah McLachlan is no different. This article will only tell you a fraction of what it is possible to know about her music, her muse, and her motivation. Sometimes, that’s just the way nature intended things. It’s not she’s particularly shy, or reticent, because the 21-year-old Halifax native has personality to spare. But every once in a while an album comes along that defies description, that thwarts random analysis, that just is, period. Yes, McLachlan’s debut Touch is one of those records.
It’s something of a miracle that McLachlan is even making pop records to begin with. Her involvement in music up until the point when Touch was recorded had been entirely restricted to practicing and composing classical guitar and piano music, as befits a person with years of instruction from the Nova Scotia Royal Conservatory. This “sheltered life” she’d been leading broke wide open when the Nettwerk organization spotted her debut performance in the band October Game, and the star-making machinery started humming. She resisted Nettwerk’s solo offer at first, knowing how badly her parents would react to the ramifications of their classical-musician daughter sharing a label – or anything, for that matter – with the likes of Skinny Puppy, but cool heads prevailed, and before you know it she was in a Vancouver hotel room with an eight-album Canadian record deal, a U.S. distribution deal (through Arista), and one simple, clear-cut task: Songwriting. This is where it starts to get serious.
You see, she’d never actually written any songs before, so as they say in the music business, she tossed out a few tunes.

“The songwriting process is hard, a real challenge. It’s all down to discipline. Sticking with an idea is very hard for me, because I don’t really like anything I do! People will say, ‘What’s that? That sounds interesting.’ ‘Oh, it’s just nothing.’ ‘No, play it again!’ – and something emerges from it all. But sometimes it’s a horrible chore. If I’m here by myself I’ll work for hours and hours, and it gets so frustrating because it never feels like I accomplished anything. But the last few songs I wrote with the band, and I find it’s getting a lot easier.”

The “band” includes After All’s keyboardist Darren Phillips and former 54:40 drummer Darryl Neudorf, and McLachlan also benefits on Touch, from the masterful, if slightly impersonal production of Vancouver whiz Greg Reely. Needless to say, for such an impressively “modern” sounding record, the production values, indeed, the overall tone, is nothing but meticulous.
“There’s a lot of very interesting things that can be done in the studio, but there’s a lot to be said for simplicity as well. Tracy Chapman’s album is a beautiful example of how redundant technology can be, but then the sound of Daniel Lanois gets on Peter Gabriel and Robbie Robertson’s albums is sheer technological wizardry.

“I was scared of recording technology for a long time, but being involved in the recording process showed me a lot about what you can do. It can get overwhelming and overdone, you just have to be careful with the stuff.”

Another thing McLachlan has to be careful with involves the grey area of an artist’s business and legal responsibilities. It goes without saying that many novice singers and musicians have found themselves floundering in their own contract’s fine prints.
“There are just so many different aspects involved in this, that if I didn’t keep an eye on everything, I’d just go nuts, because people in the business are forever springing new things on you. I keep track of everything that’s going on.”

The Canadian music media has, in it’s own indefatigable way, been kind to Ms. McLachlan. The response to Touch’s release at the end of 1988 portrayed the multi-faceted debutante as the musical salvation to most known earthly woes, and she received a big “thumbs-up” from the people who count in radio and rack-jobbing. We could have a veritable overnight-sensation on our hands, and none too soon.
You could argue that her years of training on various instruments and theoretical disciplines should qualify her for whatever merits points are to be accrued by “struggling” musicians in the pop music field.

“Strict training is certainly a good foundation for doing almost anything musical. Pop music is easy. But to some extent my training was a hindrance. In writing for the first time, I wanted to have songs with too many chord changes, because classical music is so highly structured, and it was difficult to simplify things. The songs on my album are radically different from their original versions because we took so much out.”

McLachlan’s voice is both pure and sensual, ethereal and vivid. Her operatic tones are dominant in the mix, weaved into the multiple layers of sound. Make no mistake, McLachlan’s tapped into a thoroughly “’90s” sound, with similarly “’90s” values: the whiff of adventure, the allusion to personal fulfillment… the hazy, lazy world of dreams; devils and angels, pain and truth and a cast of fantastical characters with whom we all must share the subway ride.

McLachlan writes almost entirely with imagery as her main tool. Imagery is her stock in trade. These songs are more compelling than her novice status would suggest – more of her efforts hit than miss. But still, it’s a fragile musical equilibrium she attains, a seasonal flavour. She’s been honest enough to confess to another publication that these songs are, basically, “words that sound nice together.” Well, they do.

“I try to work with imagery because… I don’t really know what to talk about! I can’t really cope with tangible stories. I just try to zero-in on how a song makes me feel, musically and then I try to write what I felt. It’s all very connected. The lyrics come last in my songs – they’re the images invoked in the music. Because writing is so new to me, some of my songs arrived through blind word-association – ‘Steaming’ was just word-association. Other ones, like ‘Vox’ are quite personal, and took some more effort and time. It it doesn’t work, I just throw it out and do it again.”

There’s got to be a lot more than a “right place/right time” stratagem involved in the rise of Sarah McLachlan. After all, the one thing that seems to strike her most verbal advocates is the outright “newness” of her sound, a clear, but complex bundle of ideas and sounds from the most unexpected source. It’s part of a phenomenon where the listener identifies primarily with the suggestion of the music, with the textural significance to the tunes.

Yet it’s not so new that it avoids a heavy debt to the progressive elements of a particularly rich vein of European ’70s rock music. McLachlan is the first to point out her own interest in the Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel style of pop tapestries.

With the U.S. deal seemingly providing a firm toe-hold on the market, this newcomer has only one final thing to prove before we give her the go-ahead to become a major star, and that’s translating herself to a concert crowd.

“I get completely varied crowds, and it’s just wonderful to play live. But sometimes I’m not quite sure what to do, and there’s embarassing pauses between songs. But I’m learning!
“I just have to go out on tour. The album’s been out a while, and if we don’t go out soon it’s gonna be lost. Also, everytime I get half-way tight with my band, I’m dragged away to do promotion and videos. That’s scary because it takes me away from the most important thing – writing new songs. But hey, I’m gonna do my damnedest.”