June, 2004

Publication title: YOU, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Maureen Paton

Sarah basks in the Afterglow

Sarah McLachlan strides into the room in a pink vest, combat trousers and studded cowboy boots, a straight-talking breath of fresh air that has just blown into London from Vancouver. “I’m a boot-wearing hippie chick at heart – you won’t find many Manolos in my closet”, she announces in her sexy drawl. “Do you mind me if I just phone my baby back home before we talk?” she asks. “I always phone her when she wakes up, and it’s eight o’clock in the morning over there now.”

Sarah McLachlan, 36, may have sold 25 million records in America and have been annointed the new Joni Mitchell, but this three-time Grammy award-winner’s main priority is her child. Two-year-old India Ann Sushil was born during one of the most emotional times of Sarah’s life – just after her mother Dorice died. It comes as no surprise that Sarah’s latest alum, Afterglow, is dedicated both to Dorice and India.

The striking-looking singer-songwriter from Nova Scotia, Canada, who singe so compellingly of love and loss, had always been on of those ‘best-kept secrets’, until she founded the women-only touring festival Lilith Fair in 1997. It ran for three years and drew massive crowds to such names as Jewel, the Dixie Chicks, Emmylou Harris, Sinéad O’Connor and Sheryl Crow, conclusively proving the power of female music and turning Sarah, an outspoken critic of sexist marketing in the record industry, into the new face of modern feminism. So widespread is her appeal that even those White House trysters Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton discovered a mutual interest in the music of Sarah McLachlan.

Yet it all nearly ended over a year ago when she found herself suffering from severe postnatal depression following the birth of India. Under the circumstances it was only too understandable, for she had watched Dorice succumb to lung cancer five months before India was born. “And my mother never smoked in her life,” she adds, still mystified as to how Dorice contracted the disease.

Sarah’s pregnancy was a difficult one, dominated by morning sickness and India was a colicky baby who cried all the time for the first few months of her life. It was only Sarah’s stubborn self-belief and the loving support of her husband Ashinw (Ash) Sood, India’s father, that pulled her through. Later she wrote ‘Push’, on of the songs on Afterglow, for Ash. “I had a midlife crisis at 35; I thought of giving up the business,” she says. “Ash was amazingly supportive, but then he has always been the most caring, understanding guy. I married my best friend, which was the best way to do it because there’s no putting forward the perfect face. He’s seen my at my weakest.”

Ash had joined her band as the drummer in 1990, but it wasn’t until a man from another band made a pass at Sarah in front of Ash at a nightclub that they realised their true feelings for eath other. “Ash didn’t like it, so he grabbed me and kissed me, and that was that.” They married in 1997. And it’s a perfect arrangement, she says, to be able to work with your husband. “In this business, you don’t get an opportunity to get to know anyone other than the people you work with,” she says. “You are either in the studio or on the road.”

Her first relationship in the business was with her manager, when she was only 21. “I was very young and very stupid and it was short-lived,” is all she will say of it. A year later she fell in love with her producer Pierre Marchand. And he’s still her producer, because Sarah seems to have developed the knack of staying friends with her exes. “I was 22 and Pierre was this beautiful French-Canadian man who lived in a house in the woods,” she says. “Ifelt he was my musicl sould mate – I still do. Now he has two children and a wonderful girlfriend, and he and I have a great friendship.”

After Pierre came a relationship with her keyboard player Dave Kershaw. Their friendship and their professional partnership survived what she describes as ‘a huge, nast break-up eight years ago. I never stopped loving Dave; he’s a wonderful guy. I can’t stand the thought of there being someone out there in the world that I have unfinished business with.”

Yet there is some other unfinished business in Sarah’s emotional life. She and her two brothers were adopted from different families by Dorice and her marine-biologist husband Jack Lamont McLachlan, who gave them a very happy home. Sarah cherishes the memory of Dorice as “an amazingly strong woman”, and still feels to protective towards Jack that she tells me how glad she is that her father had now found happiness with a new woman. “He was quite worried that I was going to get upset, but I don’t want him to be lonely,” she say.

Sarah grew up listening to Dorice’s Joan Baez albums, but soon began wondering about the origins of her own musical talent. When, at the age of 19, she found her birth mother Judy, Sarah discovered her musical and aristic heritage in her Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Spanish and native Canadian-Indian ancestry. “Judy is an artist and my birth father was a guitar player in a rock’n’roll band,” she says. “It was fascinating to see Judy’s art. I draw, too, and our work is so alike.”

Becoming a mother herself has made Sarah appreciate even more how difficult things were for her own birth mother. “Judy had to give me up for adoption because she was only 19 and would have had to drop out of art college to look after me, so she would have resented me. But I’m really thankful,” insists Sarah. “I got a great life and a lot of amazing opportunities.” Yet she also admits that she doesn’t see Judy now.

“We don’t have much of a relationship; it’s complicated. And I have never quite decided wether or not I want to find my birth father,” she says. “I feel a mixture of emotions about it. My birth mother had no other children, but I think that I do have half-siblings from my birth father. The whole subject is fraught with a lot of emotion and strangeness,” she concludes.

It took years, she admits, before she could bring herself to tell Dorice that she had made contact with Judy. “It was tough. Dorice worried that the three of us would find our birth parents and want them more than her, so she always loved with a bit of insecurity. But we all had a very stable, good upbringing, so it was never an issue for us. At leat I now know, genetically, where the music and the art come from,” she says.

Although Dorice and Jack had given Sarah piano and guitar lessons from an early age, they made her wait two years after being discovered at 17 before signing a recording contract.
My parents were incredibly strict. My mother was scared for me,” says Sarah. “She thought joining the music industry was the quickest route fo an overdose.”

Although success has made Sarah wealthy, she still has the same values she grew up with and lives as simply as possible. “I go to the beach when I’m not working, I do my own laundry; I’m horribly domestic,” she grings. “I’m probably going to be a strict parent, but I just hope that I have enough faith in myself as a mother to give India all the right tools – just like Dorice did for me”