Sarah McLachlan thinks her first trip to Los Angeles is a warning.
Signed to Clive Davis' Arista Records when she was 20, the Canadian singer-songwriter from Halifax ventured south in 1989 to film a pair of music videos as part of Arista's plans for an American edition of her debut album, ” “Touch”. The LP had presented McLachlan as an ethereal art-pop dreamer in thrall to Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel. However, Davis and his partners had different ideas about how to present the singer to an American audience.
“I remember a fitting with this stylist, who showed up in all these Jean Paul Gaultier suits with huge shoulder pads,” McLachlan recalls. “Before, she just wore whatever, so she was like, 'Umm…' But I tried them all on because she was a good Canadian girl and I did what I was told.” She laughs. “I went down without even thinking about the shape of my body or the way my face looked, and after six days in Los Angeles, I had this feeling of 'Maybe you could lose 10 pounds' and 'We'll have to do it.' something with this hair', this underlying current that I wasn't okay the way I was.
“I thought, if I stay here, I'm screwed.”
McLachlan did not stay, but returned to Canada, where she continued to hone her style until she became a star on her own terms: a sensitive but muscular balladeer known for her impeccable voice and the probing, philosophical tone of hit songs like “Adia.” , “Possession”, “Angel” and “Building a Mystery”.
“The game you're expected to play is in this world; I just knew I'd like to have as little to do with it as possible,” McLachlan, 56, says with a smile during a recent trip to Los Angeles to play. the late-night show “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” ahead of a tour marking the 30th anniversary of his third album, “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.” Released in October 1993, just as grunge was about to give way to other sounds on the radio and MTV, the LP was McLachlan's pop hit, selling 3 million copies in the US and establishing massive success. from “Surfacing” from 1997, eight times platinum. ,” which spawned a pair of top 5 singles on Billboard's Hot 100 and won a Grammy Award for Female Pop Vocal Performance.
Hanging out in the late-morning sun at the Hollywood Bowl, where he'll perform “Fumbling” in full (along with a host of hits) on Friday night, McLachlan remembers the 1993 album as a feat of cloistered introspection: She and her longtime producer, Pierre Marchand, made the record largely alone in a remote studio in Quebec's Laurentian Mountains.
“I think that's when I discovered that I'm actually an introvert,” she says of the year-long recording process. “I need to go away and be alone.”
However, the current tour provides an opportunity to assess the long reach of McLachlan's music, which laid crucial groundwork for deeply felt artists like Brandi Carlile and Florence + the Machine and did much to incorporate the now ubiquitous language and rituals of self care. the field of pop songwriting. Consider a tune like “Good Enough,” a meditation on empathy with a gently rolling beat, or the anthemic “Elsewhere,” in which McLachlan longs for “a space where he can breathe.”
“It would be difficult to overstate Sarah McLachlan's influence on my work and my spirit,” says Allison Russell, the Montreal-born singer-songwriter who is serving as one of McLachlan's opening acts on the tour.
Russell, whose first public performance was singing McLachlan's “Mary” at a high school talent show, believes that McLachlan's music “amplifies and connects with the greater community of seekers, singers and lovers of equality and the reduction of damage”. (In 2016, Darryl McDaniels of Run-DMC wrote in his memoir that listening to “Angel” brought him back from the brink of suicide while he was experiencing depression in the late '90s.)
Leslie Feist, another Canadian artist who will appear with McLachlan at the Hollywood Bowl, says that, for all the soothing textures in McLachlan's work, “There's nothing soft about her; there is a strength at the center of his delivery of these messages and stories. “It’s like a firm hug from a friend.”
In the era of Ozzfest and Warped Tour, McLachlan leveraged that strength to create Lilith Fair, the female-led traveling music festival that many remembered last year, decades after its 1997 debut, when Carlile brought together an all-star lineup. team (including McLachlan) to accompany Joni Mitchell in concert at the Gorge Amphitheater in Washington state.
Russell, who also performed that night, says: “Lilith Fair taught me about the power and necessity of circle work. She could not be the artist, activist or mother I am today if Sarah had not shown me the way.”
McLachlan is working on his first album of original songs since 2014.
(Dania Maxwell / Los Angeles Times)
McLachlan discovered music as an uncomfortable child in an unhappy home; As a teenager he joined a ragtag group of musicians and moved to Vancouver, where he still lives with the youngest of his two daughters from a previous marriage.
The warm reception of her second album, 1991's “Solace,” persuaded those previously dubious record executives to allow her and Marchand to take their time with “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.”
“I toured and toured and toured and built a really solid fan base, and it's not like they were spending a lot of money on me,” he says. “So 'Fumbling' really felt like freedom to me. I was single for the first time in my adult life” (she and Marchand had dated before but had broken up) “and she lived alone in this little house in the woods. I don't even remember having a hard deadline, although I'm sure we did. But to fully immerse myself in music, I mean, having kids and everything now, I can't even imagine it anymore.”
“It was definitely a deep dive,” says Marchand, who believes that the length of the “Fumbling” sessions allowed them to tune out what was going on around them (this was the era of Smashing Pumpkins and Stone Temple Pilots) and create a unique sound. own richly detailed. “If we had done it in a month, you might have felt some of the influences of that time. But after a year, you're really just plagiarizing yourself.”
The album begins on perhaps its darkest note with “Possession,” which McLachlan wrote from the perspective of an obsessed fan, a point of view she adopted with such chilling acuity that an Ottawa man later sued the singer, saying that she had used words. of letters she had sent him without giving him credit. (The man died before the case went to court.) But “Fumbling” also hosts one of McLachlan's lighter melodies on “Ice Cream,” a flirtatious innuendo that compares a lover to that frozen dessert.
McLachlan says “Ice Cream” almost didn't appear on the album. “At that age, I was still very concerned about how I was perceived (I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist) and that song seemed very simplistic to me,” he says. What changed her mind was hiring jazz drummer Guy Nadon, who “kind of took it to a different place. He gave her a little massage.”
The song has become a fan favorite: Just a couple of nights before flying to Los Angeles, McLachlan accompanied his daughter to a Justin Timberlake concert in Vancouver, where the boy sitting next to him happily informed him that she had lost her virginity to “Ice Cream.” .”
“I thought, 'Wow, okay, I just met you, but thanks.'”
Despite all the freedom he and McLachlan enjoyed in the studio, Marchand remembers that “people at the record company were like, 'We don't know what radio stations to put this on.'” In fact, “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” turned out to be a hit on the so-called hot AC format that later closed the gap between Top 40 and adult contemporary; “Angel,” from “Surfacing,” would eventually top Billboard’s adult pop playlist.
When asked if he can see elements of his legacy in modern music, he grimaces. “That sounds really fucking selfish,” she says. “I love the idea of becoming one of the aunts. But I don't spend much time thinking about it.”
At the moment, she's more worried about what comes next. With his daughter moving away soon to go to college, McLachlan has been working on a new album, his first set of original songs since 2014, in Los Angeles with producer Tony Berg, known for his work with Phoebe Bridgers and Beck.
“Lyrically, I'm still trying to figure out what I'm trying to say,” he says, although he notes that he has written songs about his relationship with his daughter and his experience in family systems counseling. (“I asked her if it was okay for her to talk about this and she said, 'Oh God, it's okay,'” she says.)
One conundrum in returning to writing songs, he says, is the apparent disconnect between his mood these days and what emerges when he sits down at the piano.
“We're in the studio making the saddest music ever and we're laughing out loud the whole time,” he says. “I'm happier than I've ever been in my entire life, which is something I struggle with as an artist. Am I representing myself?” She shrugs her shoulders.
“We'll see if I do it right.”
