About Sarah McLachlan
Sarah McLachlan was born in 1968 in Nova Scotia, Canada. She started music at an early age, playing the ukulele when she was four and later studying classical guitar, classical piano, and voice at the Maritime Conservatory of Music. She fronted the band October Game while still in high school. After their first concert McLachlan was offeed a recording contract with Nettwerk, a Vancouver-based independent record label. WK
She wouldn’t sign with them until two years later after finishing high school and a year of school at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design at the insistence of her parents. WK She released her first album, Touch, in 1988. It peaked at #132 on the Billboard album chart and eventually went gold.
Her follow-up album, 1991’s Solace, would also achieve gold status in the United States and again dent the lower regions of the Billboard album chart (#167). Three singles charted in her native Canada where the album reached #20 and sold 200,000 copies.
American Success
Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, her third album, was “a slow-burning success story.” SL It saw McLachlan reach the Billboard Hot 100 in America for the first time. While the album only peaked at #50, it would go on to sell three million copies.
About the Album
It is “a softly assured album that combined the atmospheric production of Pierre Marchand (a former apprentice – and evident disciple – of Daniel Lanois) with some of McLachlan’s strongest songwriting to date.” AM “Tales of sin, lust, and love are delivered alongside piano arpeggios and electronic flourishes.” AM
“At the center of everything was her voice, an ethereal, lilting soprano that helped pave the way for Paula Cole, Lillith Fair, and a decade’s worth of successful female songwriters. McLachlan utilized the crack between her chest and head voice, emphasizing the changing tones as her melodies climbed into the vocal stratosphere.” AM
“Fumbling Towards Ecstasy takes most of its strength from the lush, rhythmic dreamscapes that dominate the album.” AM It is “alternately dark and shimmering, intimate and ornate, soothing and slyly unsettling.” AM “McLachlan’s work was rarely as raw or honest as it is on this record.” AM
The Songs
Here are insights into some of the individual tracks.
“Possession”
Possession, the album’s lead-off single, “is a jarring love ballad with lyrics inspired by a stalker’s correspondence.” AM It “is an intensely dark account of a man (or woman) who becomes obsessed with a pop singer and ultimately finds satiation in dreams.” SL “There’s a double-edged quality to the song’s eerie lines – ‘I’ll take your breath away,’ ‘I won’t be denied,’ ‘Just close your eyes, dear’ – and Marchand underscores that tension by setting McLachlan’s melodies to a nocturnal trip-hop beat.” AM
The song “took its time fluttering around the bottom regions of the pop charts, but it’s ultimately become one of the artist’s signature songs.” SL
“Good Enough”
Good Enough, the second single, gave McLachlan her first top-ten hit in Canada. Like “Possession” it would also crack the Billboard Hot 100’s lower regions and reach the modern rock chart. “Allusions to forbidden love, temptation, and shame are littered throughout tracks like ‘Good Enough’ and the propulsive Wait.” SL
“Ice Cream”
Ice Cream would also reach the Canadian top-ten, although it wasn’t until it was released as a live version in 1999. The song “likens love’s sweetness to decadent deserts.” AM
“Hold On”
Hold On was a minor hit for McLachlan, reaching the Canadian pop chart and the American modern rock chart. It “was inspired by the AIDS documentary A Promise Kept, and serves as a woman’s impassioned plea for God to keep her dying lover safe both in life and death. “ SL
“Ice”
“The foreboding Ice finds McLachlan imploring, ‘You enter into me a lie upon your lips / Offer what you can, I’ll take all that I can get.’ The track begins with an anxious acoustic guitar riff, a serpentine saxophone winding its way in between the beats of a pulsing drum machine and menacing kick-drum.” SL
“Elsewhere” and “Plenty”
“Longtime producer Pierre Marchand expertly stacks McLachlan’s vocal harmonies one on top of the other, as on the exquisite Elsewhere, in which the brittle percussion chips away at the ‘heaven’ she claims to have found and on the stunning Plenty, where Marchand’s ‘found sounds’ mingle with McLachlan’s hesitant vocal overdubs.” SL
“Fumbling Towards Ecstasy”
So much of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy is about restraint, so that by the time she (and we) reach the album’s title track she truly is on her way toward ecstasy. The trouble with the album’s title, however, is that she never fumbles. Not even once.” SL
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