No Subject

On her first album in 1988, she sang the songs of a teenager--a talented
teenager, who seemed to write the songs of _Touch_ without touching.

Still, with some tunes and a voice that floated between Kate Bush and
Elizabeth Fraser of the Cocteau Twins, Sarah McLachlan was hailed as one
of Canada's promising singer-songwriters.

Her next album, _Solace_, occured somewhere along the path from innocence
to experience: it challenged but without completely letting go. Rolling
Stone magazine described her in glowing terms. More albums sold.

That is the past. This is now. And the time has come to sing of life and
tattered heartstrings, for at the ripe old age of 25 McLachlan has just
released her third album, _Fumbling Towards Ecstasy_.

It is her most accomplished disc; songs still stroke the senses alive but
do so with more of an edge.

"_Fumbling Towards Ecstasy_ is the perfect metaphor for life, as far as
I'm concerned, because we're continually making mistakes. But we're also
always striving for that ecstasy," she says in a telephone interview from
the Nettwerk record company office in Vancouver.

"One of my good friends said to me the othe day that a couple of years
ago, when she first met me, I was so serious and now I'm not anymore. It's
true. When you're younger you want to be taken seriously, so you think you
have to act seriously."

"She said the change is great because I'm not growing up any more. I'm
growing down. I still get serious, I just try to balance whimsy as well."

Whimsy is not the word that springs to mind when listening to _Fumbling
Towards Ecstasy_. Yes, one song features the line, "Your love is better
than ice cream," but that's about all the chuckles you're going to find.
What makes this album more focused, more impassioned is its lyrical
grounding in reality and the fact the music is stak yet strong, buoyed by
arrangements that subtley support McLachlan's impressive vocal range.

"This record is more than a lesson in freedom than _Solace_, where I was
more concerned with craftsmanship. This was the first time I felt I could
truely let go and only by doing so could I be truely honest, musically and
lyrically, just digging way deeper into myself than I've done before.

"That quest for self-identity has driven me quite strongly in the past
year and a half, especially after being on the road (touring) for so long
and feeling like I was skimming the surface because I had so much outside
input 24 hours a day. I was never alone. Life can get diluted so easily
through too many outside influences.

"Your brain starts to eat itself."

McLachlan spent time alone in the mountains outside Montreal and stopped
the brain-ot. The result was her best lyrics yet.
-- 
--------------------------------------------
PGP public key available upon request...
--------------------------------------------