July 17, 2014
Publication title: The Boston Globe, vol. -, Iss. -, pg. –
Place: Unknown
Writer: Maura Johnston
Sarah McLachlan puts her living room onstage
Sarah McLachlan fans who attend her concert at Blue Hills Bank Pavilion on Saturday might be startled to see the evening’s stage setup, where the Vancouver-based singer is inviting attendees to her Shine On Tour to peek inside her living room — or at least an onstage re-creation of it.
“I’ve been trying to figure out ways to break the fourth wall and bring the audience in,” the singer says via phone from Lake Tahoe. “I brought my living room with me, and it’s onstage. We ran a social media contest and asked people how they shine — talking about struggles, how to rise above and how to work through adversity. It’s about creating positive social change. We invite [winners] to come up onstage and hang out in the living room for a couple of songs. It’s worked out great — I’ve looked over and people are like, ‘Oh my God!’ because they’re looking out at 5,000 people. It’s been really fun.”
McLachlan has amassed quite a fan base over the course of her career, which spans eight studio albums — the most recent, “Shine On” (Verve), came out in May — as well as the traveling ladies-only tour Lilith Fair and staples of alt-leaning pop like the Grammy-winning “Building a Mystery” and the bereft “Adia.” Not to mention the tear-jerker “Angel,” which provides the soundtrack for McLachlan’s heartbreaking ads for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. “It became hard to choose what songs to do and not to do,” McLachlan says of narrowing down her catalog to a 2½-hour set. “You want to do all the songs people recognize, and I also want to play the new record. We just spattered the new record in amongst the old stuff.”
“Shine On” opens with the statement of purpose “In Your Shoes,” a call to arms for women who walk out of step with the crowd: “Time for you to walk out, walk in your own shoes/Lay down your footprints wherever you choose,” McLachlan sings forcefully in its chorus. The song was inspired in part by the Pakistani activist and author Malala Yousafzai, who in 2012 was shot at point-blank range in an attempt to cut short her advocacy for educating women. She was 15 at the time.
“She’s my newest hero,” McLachlan says of Yousafzai. “I think women, and young girls in particular, need great female role models. Her story is so profoundly important — there she was, speaking out about what should be a basic human right, girls being educated, amidst real danger. They tried to kill her, and she didn’t die. She rose up. She survived, she endured, she continues to speak out, and she’s become an international hero.”
Other tracks on “Shine On” deal directly with
recent happenings in McLachlan’s life. Her adoptive father, Jack, who died in December 2010, is paid tribute through three songs in the album’s middle: the piano ballad “Broken Heart”; the elegiac “Surrender and Certainty,” which reaches its emotional peak when McLachlan mournfully sings in chorus with muted brass; and the gentle, reverent “Song for My Father,” which showcases McLachlan’s airy soprano over brushed drums and a rolling acoustic guitar. On these songs, and tracks like the desire-consumed “Flesh and Blood,” the lyrics are direct and at times searing, especially when compared to McLachlan’s earlier, more abstract work. She chalks up the shift to “the very specific subject matter I was dealing with — I didn’t need to cloak it.
“Quite often in the older songs, there’s a lot of creative license, and more than one person’s story is in there — there’s my story, and there are other stories as well,” she says. “The new songs are just about one thing, and it’s quite obvious. I’m really pleased that I felt like I had something strong enough and important enough to say that I didn’t have to find a whole bunch of fodder to fill it with.”
McLachlan has two daughters, 12 and 7, who come along on tour with her during the stints when they’re in her custody. (“My daughters packed a month ago,” she notes dryly when asked about how they had prepared for the unconventional summer vacation.) The act of balancing tour and family life might be tricky, but for McLachlan, going from telling personal stories in her remade living room to reading her daughters books on the tour bus serves as a way to ground herself.
“They’re polar opposites,” she says of her onstage and offstage lives, “but the great thing is that it’s fairly seamless. I get off stage and get onto the bus and put my jammies on and read my girls bedtime stories — it’s one extreme to the next. ‘I don’t care that you were just onstage with 5,000 people screaming at you! I want my bedtime stories read!’ It’s the great leveler.”
