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by Bill DeMain
Thoreau once said that every
writer's duty was to give "first and last, a simple and sincere
account of their own life." More than his sage words reached 26-year
old singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan. In preparing the songs for her
latest release, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (Arista), the Canadian songstress,
perhaps inspired by Thoreau's Walden experience, retreated to an isolated
cabin in the mountains for nearly seven months of meditation and
soul-searching. "It was just an amazing time for me," she
relates.
The results of her temporary
sabbatical are intensely personal, emotionally rich, dark, moody, stirring
songs like "Good Enough," "Plenty," "Possession,"
and "Circle." Listening to these songs, one can almost hear
McLachlan going through cathartic changes, making discoveries about her
self and her life. Indeed, several times during this interview, Sarah
talked about the songwriting process as a self-therapy. "It's given
me so much, as far as learning about myself," she says.
Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia,
Sarah McLachlan studied guitar and piano as a child. She remembers being
drawn to the sounds of such seminal folk/rock artists as Cat Stevens, Joan
Baez and Simon & Garfunkel. Later, as she reached her teens, it was
Peter Gabriel's music that touched her most. "The emotional response
you get from his songs, because of the honesty, that really inspired me to
find my own voice and write from that point of view," she says.
At 19, she signed a
recording contract with Nettwerk Records. The first ten songs she wrote
comprised her debut, 1988's well-received Touch. Her sophomore effort,
1991's Solace announced McLachlan's talents to the world and brought into
focus her intimate, moving vocal power and evocative songwriting gifts.
Currently on an extensive
tour supporting her new release, Sarah McLachlan recently stopped to share
her thoughts on writing, art and solitude with The Performing Songwriter.
You said that it took about
six years to learn how not to edit yourself and remain open in your music...
(laughs) Hopefully I'll get that back again someday.
What kinds of things can a songwriter do to reach that place in their
writing?
Well, for me on this new record, it was mainly secluding myself, being
away from society and being away from everything. I locked myself up in a
cabin in the mountains and stayed there for seven months. It was just an
amazing time for me to really focus on a lot of stuff that had sort of
been lurking behind the scenes in my brain, but never had the time to come
out. Or it kept being put aside, because there were so many distractions.
Also I think, I got incredibly in tune with the earth, with nature, like I
hadn't before. I couldn't write a thing for three months. My brain was
eating itself. It was terribly cold out and I couldn't do anything
creative. I was just frozen.
Everything was churning
around inside but nothing would come out. Then spring happened and
everything totally opened up. I was blossoming as well. Most of the
songs--I had written four previous to going to the cabin--were written
then, about seven of them, between April and May. The place that I got to
in myself of feeling calm and peaceful and also for the first time in my
life, feeling I'm happy now. Not 'I would be happy if . . . ' There was
always that going on with me. I finally got to a place where I was totally
happy and peaceful and living in the present tense instead of in the
future, you know and projecting things.
Did you go into that
experience with any sort of agenda?
Well, in the process of not being able to write, I kept a journal, these
sort of morning pages. I wrote three pages before I'd do anything else,
just to try and clear my head. Most of it was totally banal like mmm,
coffee smells good, I have nothing to say, I have nothing to say (laughs)
for ten times. But sure enough, about midway through the second page,
sometimes I'd really open up and all this stuff would come out. You know,
you're not really awake yet and you're just sort of spewing whatever's on
the top of your head sort of free form. And there was no editing happening
there at all, because no one was going to read this book. I could say
whatever I wanted. I didn't have to hide behind anything, and I think that
really helped me. To be really open and honest with myself, that was good.
I'm pretty good at deceiving myself or I've known myself to do that in the
past (laughs).
Did you listen to music while you were there?
I listened to a lot of Tom Waits, and Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden, which is
one of my favorites.
The opening lines of your songs are always captivating and they seem to
contain the germ of the whole song in just a few words.
I figure the first two lines usually tell the whole story of a song (laughs).
The first two lines are what comes out first when I'm writing, and they
basically tell which direction, for me lyrically, the song is going to go.
Sometimes those two lines will sit for months by themselves, until they
find a completion to the story, or a completion to the stage that I'm in
of trying to work through something, until hopefully I'm somewhere near
the other side of it, when I can be a little more objective and write it
down. It's the same with titling the songs. Most of the song titles come
from the last word in the second line (laughs).
Say you have those two lines and the music wants to continue. Will you
let it go on without words?
Unfortunately, I often try to fill it in. I'm sort of still a bit stuck to
that convention of writing a song with a four-line verse, the more
traditional phrasing of a stanza or whatever. So if there are only two
lines, there usually end being four lines. I work at making it four before
I stop (laughs). But there's also this thing, when I go in the studio,
Pierre (Marchand, her producer) is great at editing. He'll say, why don't
you just not sing that line, do you really need to say that, you kind of
already said it. He has done that, which is something that I can't really
do, because I'm not as objective about it. And I don't see things from the
same direction that he does, which is why he's so good to work with.
Do you demo songs before you go into the studio?
Well, I demo them in a very simple way, with acoustic guitar or piano.
Sometimes a drum machine. But my sort of restrictions on myself for going
into the studio are making it strong by itself in the simplest form. So if
you're hiding behind a lot of production, if you take it away, you can
still play that song and it'll still be strong on its own.
You mentioned a drum machine. Do you ever write with just a groove?
I have never have before. I'm pretty lazy as far as technology, and I
think it's something I'll probably have to get more into, because I'm sort
of exhausting the instruments that I'm using, or exhausting the
inspiration that they give me. I can go back and forth, but I don't have a
piano, so I end up doing a lot of stuff on guitar. But when I was in
Montreal I did, so a lot of this record came from piano because it was
such an exciting thing, a new sound, a new instrument. That happened with
electric guitar as well. I started writing with that, because it was a new
sound. So maybe I will get into the drum machine. I just have to learn how
to use the damn thing first (laughs). I always fight against technology. I
want to be grass roots and I want where it comes from to be organic.
Well it sounds like you have a good combination with your producer,
because he strikes me as a technically minded guy...
Oh, he's amazing that way, because he's such a techno-head. But at the
same time, he totally comes from the organic sense of letting the song
happen in whatever direction it goes in. Just following and not pushing
the song for any wrong reason, whatever feels right go with it.
A lot of your songs have an air of mystery and darkness. Is there
something you do during the writing process to conjure this mood?
(laughs) I just think it's what's in my brain. It's not that I'm really
pessimistic or anything--I'm not. But I sort of like the effect of two
sides of things--one being really pretty and one being really ugly, like
when you lift up a pretty rock and there's all these mites and worms
underneath it (laughs). I think that sort of came from this one poem I
read in grade nine. It's funny, the little things that stick with me my
whole life. Wilford Owens, he's a World War I poet and he wrote about
being in the field in the war and all the horrors that went on. But
somehow, without glamorizing or romanticizing it, he made it incredibly
beautiful. In the same breath, he'd be talking about something
horrendously grotesque. I just really loved that. That's actually where
the title of the record came from too, "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy."
It was taken from a line in one of his poems. "Quick boys, in an
ecstasy of fumbling we fit the masks just in time . . ." and I
thought that was amazing, that "in an ecstasy of fumbling." It
was so beautiful, and since grade nine I've been trying to fit that into
something (laughs). I sort of have a little library of phrases and words
in my head that I like. Like "murmur." Never been able to use it
yet, but it's a beautiful word. I like words that say so many things.
Language is such a beautiful thing and words are so amazing.
Tell me about writing "Possession." Were you writing from a
male point of view?
Yes. I tried to put myself into their shoes, into the mind of someone who
is so obsessed with another person that they could conceive murdering them.
It took me awhile to justify that one. As a woman, living with that fear
in the back of your mind every day with the possibility of being raped.
And so, it's kind of weird for me, but then I save myself in the third
verse by saying I'd never really act on it, except in my dreams. And maybe
that's putting me into a false sense of reality, but it did help. Not just
that, but writing the whole song, was kind of a cleansing thing for me,
because I had two people in particular who just became incredibly intense
with the fantasy world that they created, and demanded that that was
reality and we had to be together. And they went to great lengths to make
this happen. It became frightening, but it ticked me off that I had to
look over my shoulder every time I walked out the door. There was one
point where I was told I'd have to have a bodyguard. It was like, screw
that, I don't want to live in fear. It makes me so angry.
When you're writing a relationship song, do you keep a particular
person in mind while you're doing the lyric?
Yeah, I usually do set up a fairly clear image of who I'm talking about.
"Plenty," for example, is definitely aimed at another individual.
I tend to switch people in a lot of the songs. Sometimes I'll say "you,"
and sometimes "I" and I'm not really sure why I do that.
What was the inspiration behind "Good Enough?"
A lot of things. That song has been such an amazing experience for me
because I've learned so much from it. There's so many different stories
that I attach to it now. But it sort of came from, initially really
missing my best girlfriend. It started out as fiction, about a couple in
which the woman was pretty much alienated by just about everybody, because
her husband was really abusive and domineering, which sort of somewhat
mirrors my mother and father's relationship. And basically, I am the
friend coming in, saying hey, you deserve more than this, why don't you
come with me and I'll take care of you. The video that I'm going to do for
that song is the first sort of dramatic narrative that I've done.
Everything else has been pretty abstract, trying to find a parallel
universe to describe it differently. But we're going to have a little girl,
a man and woman, and a friend, possibly an imaginary friend. We're going
to look at the relationship between the little girl and her friends and
also between the mother and the little girl. And there's quite a bit of
alienation from the father, who's been behind the scenes the whole time
anyway.
How much input do you have as a songwriter as to how your songs are
interpreted in a video?
A lot. I'm very lucky in that the record company I'm signed to has given
me a 100% creative control, pretty much from the start. It's been amazing.
I've directed a couple of the videos, and the ones I didn't direct have
been my concept, because I simply don't know the language of film. I've
entrusted my vision to other people, and have been quite well represented.
I'm actually working with one of my best friends on this film for "Good
Enough." Her name is Kharen Hill, and she's done most of my photos in
the past six years. She's amazing. We talked a lot about what the song
meant, and we got this whole narrative thing going. It's going to look
really beautiful, and it's the first one that's going to be literal.
Love is usually something that's idealized in pop songs or expressed in
a co-dependent, I'll die without you sort of way. What do you try to do
with the concept of love in your songs?
In the past, I thought it was really a great thing, but it turned out to
be really bad, so what does that mean? I tend to try to analyze the
mistakes, or what went wrong. Why did this not work? Usually I turn to
myself and ask what's wrong with me, or where did I go wrong? Then I turn
to them and ask where did you go wrong? So I guess I'm trying to show that
hopefully--it depends on the song--it's not any one person's fault. It's
like there's two people involved. I'm focusing more on the emotion of what
people go through when love does go away, or when people break up. The
anger, the frustration of why did it go wrong. I tried so hard, or maybe I
tried too hard (laughs). It depends. On this record, on "Plenty,"
I decided I was in love with somebody. The problem was that I had
projected the image of the perfect man on to them. And they sort of played
up to it as well. Then it sort of crumbled fairly quickly, and there was a
frightened little boy behind that facade. It was wild for me, because it
was the first time I'd really deceived myself in such a grand manner. I
wanted to believe it, so I forced myself to believe.
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