November 09, 2008

Publication title: ReadingEagle.com, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Unknown

Sarah McLachlan Looks Back In Grief

“I never expected to be a famous rock star,” Sarah McLachlan says, “despite what my yearbook says.”
Yes, it really did say that. A friend wrote that she was “destined to become a famous rock star” for the Queen Elizabeth High School yearbook in her native Halifax, Nova Scotia. “Oh, yeah,” McLachlan says. “But, you know, I never expected success. I wanted to be happy. I wanted to do something that made me feel good. Playing music made me feel good, and I’m really lucky that a lot of other people seem to feel good when I play my music, too.

“That’s sort of carried me along all these years.” That’s an understatement, of course. Since her debut album, “Touch” (1988), McLachlan has sold more than 40 million records worldwide and won three Grammy Awards. She also guided the successful Lilith Fair package tour for three summers and founded the Sarah McLachlan Music Outreach Program to bring music education to inner-city youths.

With the 20th anniversary of that first album at hand, McLachlan has been taking stock of those accomplishments with a year of retrospection. She has released three archival projects: a 15-year deluxe anniversary edition of her third album, “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” (1993), a “Rarities, B-Sides and Other Stuff” compilation and, most recently, “Closer: The Best of Sarah McLachlan,” a hits-oriented album that comes in single-disc and double-disc editions. On a darker note, another era of her life is coming to a close: She and husband Ashwin Sood, the longtime drummer in her band and father of McLachlan’s two daughters, have separated after 11 years of marriage, inspiring the two new songs on “Closer,” “U Want Me 2” and “Don’t Give Up on Us.”

“It’s pretty gross,” the 40-year-old singer/songwriter says. “I wasn’t planning on saying anything, but it’s going to come out at some point. I haven’t said anything about it, because I’ve been terrified to, but I figure … There’s no good time to say it, so I just said it.” McLachlan says that she has spent her life as “a serial monogamist,” and prior to now has “been single probably six months of my adult life.”

That, she recalls with a laugh, was the period during which she made “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy,” which McLachlan considers her favorite album.

“The most joyful, simplest record I ever made,” she says. “It was fun and easy and light. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

Despite present circumstances, this year’s assortment of releases has given McLachlan a chance to bask in some of her accomplishments and what she calls “the luxury of great success.”

“It doesn’t feel like 20 years,” she says. “If I sit back and think about that, it’s quite shocking. I don’t feel like 40. I feel like 22 … OK, 26… . “It’s been a pretty incredible ride,” she concludes. “If I start to think about all the different experiences and all the different tours, then, yeah, it feels like 20 years. But it really has flown by.”

Her high-school friend’s prescience notwithstanding, McLachlan considered herself a musical hobbyist during her days in Halifax. But “Grind,” a song recorded by her high-school band the October Game, appeared on a local independent label’s compilation and attracted the attention of a larger company. Nettwerk Records was interested in McLachlan, rather than in the band, and offered her a five-album deal. “So I packed up my art-college career and thought, ‘Well, this is fun. I’m going to move to Vancouver and see what happens,’ ” recalls McLachlan, who in the liner notes for “Closer” thanks Nettwerk founder Terry McBride, now her personal manager, for not sending her back to Halifax during the first year.

“They were spending a lot of money on me, and I was taking a long time to finish my record,” she explains. “They gave me a golden opportunity: ‘We don’t know what you’re capable of, but you go ahead and try to write some songs and we’ll see where it goes. They really went out on a limb for me. That’s something that doesn’t just happen anymore.”

McLachlan gradually started making inroads with early singles such as “The Path of Thorns (Terms)” (1991), “Into the Fire” (1991) and “Drawn to the Rhythm” (1992), but it was “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” that broke her big, going triple-platinum in the United States, going five-times-platinum in Canada and selling more than 5 million copies worldwide. “Surfacing” (1995) did even better and contained McLachlan’s favorite of her songs, the Top 5 hit “Angel,” which was inspired by the 1996 drug-overdose death of Smashing Pumpkins keyboardist Jonathan Melvoin. “I felt like I just got it on that song,” McLachlan says. “It came from something completely outside of myself, and it came so quickly and easily. And it seemed to have really struck a chord with a lot of other people as well.”

McLachlan has continued to enjoy support from fans and from her record company, even as motherhood – India Ann Sushil is 6 and Taja Summer is 15 months – has slowed her pace of productivity. It was McBride, in fact, who recommended putting together “Closer” rather than pushing for a new album, which would have been her first since “Afterglow” (2003).

“I was recognizing that it was five years in between my last record and anything that was going to happen this year or next year, and I realized that I only had two songs written,” says McLachlan, who co-wrote both songs with her longtime producer, Pierre Marchand. “Terry said, ‘Well, what we could do is put out a greatest hits,’ and it sort of made perfect sense. It’s 20 years since I started, and I really wanted to get these two songs out.

“It just fell together and felt like the right way to do it.” McLachlan says that she’s “just chugging away” toward her next full-scale studio album. “Life moves at a different pace now that I have two kids,” she says. “I love being a mom, so that really takes up a lot of my energy and time.”

But she adds that she’s starting to get back into the record-making process, without focusing too much on the expectations that will inevitably greet that long-awaited project.

“I don’t go into it with the anticipation that any of it’s going to be a huge hit,” the singer/songwriter says. “I do the best I can, I feel good about it, and I let it go.

“I’ve pretty much lived my life that way,” McLachlan says. “Whatever I do is because it should feel good and feel right. That, to me, is success.”