Sarah McLachlan

About Sarah McLachlan

Sarah McLachlan emerged from Halifax, Nova Scotia in the late 1980s as a classically trained musician who ended up defining a particular strain of introspective adult contemporary that became unavoidable in the 1990s. She started with the Halifax club scene, playing guitar and doing vocals, before getting signed to Nettwerk Records when she was still a teenager attending the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design.

Her early albums, Touch in 1988 and Solace in 1991, established her as a serious artist with actual musical chops, but they didn't exactly set the world on fire. She was building something methodically, working with producer Pierre Marchand to develop a sound that was lush without being overwrought. Fumbling Towards Ecstasy in 1993 changed things. That album had "Possession," which became her first legitimate hit and came with its own disturbing backstory about an obsessive fan who later sued her and died by suicide before the case went to trial.

Then came Surfacing in 1997, which is probably what most people think of when they think of Sarah McLachlan, assuming they're old enough to remember the Clinton administration. "Building a Mystery" and "Sweet Surrender" were everywhere, but it was "Angel" that became the inescapable one. You know it from those ASPCA commercials with the sad animals, which is both the best and worst thing that ever happened to that song. The album sold something like sixteen million copies worldwide and won her a pile of Grammys.

Around the same time, she founded Lilith Fair, the traveling festival showcasing female musicians that became a significant cultural moment from 1997 to 1999. It was commercially successful and made a point about women in music being viable headliners, though the name hasn't aged particularly well and the whole thing was very much of its moment.

Her subsequent albums followed the pattern you'd expect. Mirrorball was a live album that did well. Afterglow in 2003 had "Fallen," which showed up in approximately every television drama for the next decade. Laws of Illusion came out in 2010, Shine On in 2014. The albums were professionally executed and sold respectably but didn't recreate the cultural saturation of the Surfacing era.

These days McLachlan keeps working steadily without chasing trends, which seems appropriate for someone who carved out her niche and stuck with it. She's done Christmas albums, toured regularly, and occasionally revived Lilith Fair with mixed results. She was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2017. She remains what she's always been: a technically skilled vocalist and songwriter working in a very specific lane of earnest, piano-driven pop that connects with a particular audience. The ASPCA thing will probably be her lasting legacy to people under forty, which has to be weird.

Her shows are quiet affairs, audience holding back to listen rather than lose it. People go to cry, mainly. Lots of phone lighters, later phone lights. She's a careful performer, not trying to fake spontaneity. The crowd with her on every word.

Known for Angel, Building a Mystery, Possession, Arms of the Angel, Adia

See Sarah McLachlan Live