Sarah McLachlan\u2019s singing voice is one of the wonders of the pop music world. <\/p>\n
It has alternately belted out and whispered hit songs (\u201cAdia,\u201d \u201cBuilding a Mystery\u201d) as well as the most devastating Disney song of all time (Randy Newman\u2019s \u201cWhen She Loved Me\u201d from \u201cToy Story 2\u201d) and is a pristine musical instrument. It can elegantly vault octaves, scoop notes without a croaky glottal fry and crack words into multi-note, velvety yodels. It can be breathy and ethereal or a searing flamethrower \u2014 and she transforms into an angelic chorus of one when she tracks layers of her own harmonies.<\/p>\n
So it was downright terrifying when McLachlan almost lost<\/i> this voice last November, when a viral infection silenced it while she was preparing for the Canadian leg of her \u201cFumbling Towards Ecstasy\u201d anniversary tour. She had already finished recording the vocals for her new album, \u201cBetter Broken\u201d \u2014 out Friday \u2014 and she was uncharacteristically proud of the results.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was this whole last winter of, like, \u2018OK, I love this record so much, and I might not be able to sing it,\u2019\u201d says McLachlan, 57. \u201cI might never be able to sing like that again.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBetter Broken\u201d is McLachlan\u2019s first record of new songs in 11 years. She\u2019s spent the past decade, not in exile, but just living a normal life in West Vancouver, raising her two daughters; India is 23, Taja is 18. \u201cI was a very busy parent,\u201d she says. \u201cMy little one is a big dancer, so I was full-on dance mom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sitting casually in an office space in Century City, the veteran songstress had just dropped her youngest at college 24 hours earlier. (\u201cI\u2019m still OK,\u201d she insists. \u201cWhen I have to fly home, I\u2019m gonna be a mess \u2014 but right now I\u2019m good.\u201d)<\/p>\n
The two girls are \u201cwildly different, they\u2019re night and day,\u201d McLachlan says. Both sing with her on a fiery feminist anthem, \u201cOne in a Long Line,\u201d on the new record. \u201cThey\u2019re both beautiful and strong and fierce in their own ways, and I\u2019m still amazed that they came out as well as they did. I tried so hard to be the opposite of my mother. And it turns out I was a lot like her in so many ways, in the end.\u201d<\/p>\n
She has also been busy as a maternal figure (and until recently, principal fundraiser) for the Sarah McLachlan School of Music, a free after-school program with three locations in Canada. She launched the foundation that begat her school in 2002 with some of the funds she earned from Lilith Fair \u2014 the all-female music festival, also her brainchild \u2014 as a way to keep the spirit of that phenomenon going.<\/p>\n
McLachlan had already donated much of the profits of Lilith Fair to women\u2019s charities, and \u201cI wanted that energy to be transferred to something,\u201d she says, \u201cand to be able to create that same kind of safe space where everybody has a voice, everybody is seen, heard and valued, and they all have agency in what they\u2019re doing and how they\u2019re creating.\u201d<\/p>\n
A new Hulu documentary, \u201cLilith Fair: Building a Mystery,\u201d will premiere Sept. 21. McLachlan was interviewed alongside Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Natalie Merchant and many others who were involved or inspired by the late \u201990s movement \u2014 which was somewhat rebuked in the early 2000s by a wave of plasticky, image-based corporate pop, but which more or less prophesied our current musical moment dominated by soul-baring women singer-songwriters.<\/p>\n
McLachlan is an admitted Swiftie (\u201cFolklore\u201d and \u201cEvermore\u201d are her favorites), and it\u2019s impossible not to see her own influence on the likes of Swift, Brandi Carlile, Olivia Rodrigo and Billie Eilish. When I interviewed Eilish about her song \u201cWhat Was I Made For\u201d in 2023, I suggested that her gossamer vocals reminded me of McLachlan\u2019s.<\/p>\n
\u201cI love, love, love<\/i> Sarah McLachlan,\u201d Eilish said, beaming. \u201cI always have.\u201d<\/p>\n
So, plenty of talented acolytes filled the void McLachlan left during her lengthy hiatus, and \u201cit was really an easy shift for me to step out of the limelight,\u201d she admits. \u201cI\u2019ve never liked being famous.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sarah McLaughlin.<\/p>\n
(Allen J. Schaben \/ Los Angeles Times)<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure><\/div>\n
Growing up in Nova Scotia, the third child (all adopted) of an unhappy marriage, McLachlan found her voice and her confidence in music. Her mother was a voice of discouragement and defeatism, and McLachlan feels she was \u201craised by wolves\u201d: \u201cI left the house at 9 a.m. and didn\u2019t come home until I absolutely had to, and I was on my own. I had to pick myself up and figure out how to soothe myself \u2014 and thank god for music, because that was the thing that got me through. Music was my mother, really.\u201d<\/p>\n
Throughout her childhood, she formally studied piano and guitar and had years of classical voice training. But \u201chonestly, I just faked it,\u201d she says of the voice lessons. \u201cI could pretend to sing opera. I can mimic anything.\u201d She didn\u2019t much care for classical vocal music, but her golden voice won her a record contract at 19, which took her out to Vancouver. During those early album sessions, where she was also learning how to write songs, she kept blowing out her voice \u201cbecause I didn\u2019t really know how to control it.\u201d<\/p>\n
She contacted a local singing coach, who told McLachlan to run around the block as fast as she could. \u201cI came back panting, and she goes, \u2018Lie on the floor. Now breathe for me. Do you recognize that feeling? That\u2019s your diaphragm actually working. Now sing me something with that feeling in mind.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Initially, McLachlan styled her singing after Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, which most reviews of her debut album (1988\u2019s \u201cTouch\u201d) pointed out. With her sophomore album, \u201cSolace,\u201d she \u201cpurposely made a concerted effort to move away from that,\u201d McLachlan says, \u201cbecause I wanted to know what I<\/i> sounded like.\u201d<\/p>\n
She gives credit to her longtime Canadian producer, Pierre Marchand, \u201cwho was instrumental in creating that foundation for me. Because at the beginning of the second record, he\u2019s like, \u2018I know you can do all that flowery stuff. I want to hear what you<\/i> sound like. I want you to sing low.\u2019 So he forced me to sing way lower than I normally do, and that\u2019s kind of where my natural register came up.\u201d<\/p>\n
With Marchand, McLachlan climbed the charts of \u201990s pop; \u201cAida\u201d and \u201cAngel\u201d were top 10 mainstays, and the albums \u201cSurfacing\u201d (1997) and \u201cAfterglow\u201d (2003) both went platinum.<\/p>\n
\u201cAfterglow\u201d \u2014 which featured such addictive bops as \u201cWorld on Fire\u201d and \u201cTrain Wreck\u201d \u2014 was made right as she started her journey as a mother. \u201cI tried to get as much of it done while I was pregnant,\u201d she says, \u201cknowing that life was going to completely change.\u201d Nine months after giving birth and \u201cstarting to feel human again,\u201d she returned to a studio in Los Feliz to finish it, while renting Dan Aykroyd\u2019s house in the Hollywood Hills \u2014 \u201cand punctuated by, you know, I have to go home and breastfeed<\/i>.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cBetter Broken\u201d is a bookend to that moment, coming out right as her children are emptying the nest. It, too, was made in Los Angeles \u2014 but this time without Marchand.<\/p>\n
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