How Sarah McLachlan lost and rediscovered her one-of-a-kind voice
Sarah McLachlan’s singing voice is one of the wonders of the pop music world.
It has alternately belted out and whispered hit songs (“Adia,” “Building a Mystery”) as well as the most devastating Disney song of all time (Randy Newman’s “When She Loved Me” from “Toy Story 2”) 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 — and she transforms into an angelic chorus of one when she tracks layers of her own harmonies.
So it was downright terrifying when McLachlan almost lost this voice last November, when a viral infection silenced it while she was preparing for the Canadian leg of her “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” anniversary tour. She had already finished recording the vocals for her new album, “Better Broken” — out Friday — and she was uncharacteristically proud of the results.
“It was this whole last winter of, like, ‘OK, I love this record so much, and I might not be able to sing it,’” says McLachlan, 57. “I might never be able to sing like that again.”
“Better Broken” is McLachlan’s first record of new songs in 11 years. She’s 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. “I was a very busy parent,” she says. “My little one is a big dancer, so I was full-on dance mom.”
Sitting casually in an office space in Century City, the veteran songstress had just dropped her youngest at college 24 hours earlier. (“I’m still OK,” she insists. “When I have to fly home, I’m gonna be a mess — but right now I’m good.”)
The two girls are “wildly different, they’re night and day,” McLachlan says. Both sing with her on a fiery feminist anthem, “One in a Long Line,” on the new record. “They’re both beautiful and strong and fierce in their own ways, and I’m 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.”
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 — the all-female music festival, also her brainchild — as a way to keep the spirit of that phenomenon going.
McLachlan had already donated much of the profits of Lilith Fair to women’s charities, and “I wanted that energy to be transferred to something,” she says, “and 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’re doing and how they’re creating.”
A new Hulu documentary, “Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery,” will premiere Sept. 21. McLachlan was interviewed alongside Sheryl Crow, Jewel, Natalie Merchant and many others who were involved or inspired by the late ’90s movement — 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.
McLachlan is an admitted Swiftie (“Folklore” and “Evermore” are her favorites), and it’s 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 “What Was I Made For” in 2023, I suggested that her gossamer vocals reminded me of McLachlan’s.
“I love, love, love Sarah McLachlan,” Eilish said, beaming. “I always have.”
So, plenty of talented acolytes filled the void McLachlan left during her lengthy hiatus, and “it was really an easy shift for me to step out of the limelight,” she admits. “I’ve never liked being famous.”
Sarah McLaughlin.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
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 “raised by wolves”: “I left the house at 9 a.m. and didn’t 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 — and thank god for music, because that was the thing that got me through. Music was my mother, really.”
Throughout her childhood, she formally studied piano and guitar and had years of classical voice training. But “honestly, I just faked it,” she says of the voice lessons. “I could pretend to sing opera. I can mimic anything.” She didn’t 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 “because I didn’t really know how to control it.”
She contacted a local singing coach, who told McLachlan to run around the block as fast as she could. “I came back panting, and she goes, ‘Lie on the floor. Now breathe for me. Do you recognize that feeling? That’s your diaphragm actually working. Now sing me something with that feeling in mind.’”
Initially, McLachlan styled her singing after Kate Bush and Peter Gabriel, which most reviews of her debut album (1988’s “Touch”) pointed out. With her sophomore album, “Solace,” she “purposely made a concerted effort to move away from that,” McLachlan says, “because I wanted to know what I sounded like.”
She gives credit to her longtime Canadian producer, Pierre Marchand, “who was instrumental in creating that foundation for me. Because at the beginning of the second record, he’s like, ‘I know you can do all that flowery stuff. I want to hear what you sound like. I want you to sing low.’ So he forced me to sing way lower than I normally do, and that’s kind of where my natural register came up.”
With Marchand, McLachlan climbed the charts of ’90s pop; “Aida” and “Angel” were top 10 mainstays, and the albums “Surfacing” (1997) and “Afterglow” (2003) both went platinum.
“Afterglow” — which featured such addictive bops as “World on Fire” and “Train Wreck” — was made right as she started her journey as a mother. “I tried to get as much of it done while I was pregnant,” she says, “knowing that life was going to completely change.” Nine months after giving birth and “starting to feel human again,” she returned to a studio in Los Feliz to finish it, while renting Dan Aykroyd’s house in the Hollywood Hills — “and punctuated by, you know, I have to go home and breastfeed.”
“Better Broken” is a bookend to that moment, coming out right as her children are emptying the nest. It, too, was made in Los Angeles — but this time without Marchand.
“I wanted to be put out of my comfort zone,” she says. “I wanted to be challenged. Pierre and I worked beautifully together, but we have our complacencies and our habits, and I wanted to be pushed out of that, and try something new. It’s like dating! I felt a little bit like I was cheating on him … but he gave me his blessing.”
She turned to Tony Berg and Will Maclellan, two California-based producers who have shaped albums by Swift, Phoebe Bridgers, boygenius and other young stars.
“I went in with a ton of trepidation,” she says, “and a ton of, not insecurity, but just like: Well, I think these are really good songs, but it’s been so long since I made a record…”
“Three days in, I’m like: Oh, this is going to be great.”
And she has discovered new parts of herself.
The years away from making new music and the experiences of life, both joyful and scarring, have refined her voice like a barrel-aged wine. The new songs are diary entries about an unpleasant breakup (“Wilderness”), loving a teenage daughter who is filled with rage (“Gravity”) and surrendering at the apocalypse (“If This is the End…”). Berg and company wrapped lo-fi textures, warm and wobbly, around McLachlan’s vocals (and piano, and guitar) in a way that simultaneously feels very much like 2025 and an old, unearthed vinyl.
The title track, which McLachlan started writing 13 years ago, is an instantly unforgettable melody; the chorus (“Let it be / all it is / small and still…”) has her incrementally climbing, climbing — then athletically pirouetting in midair on the line “and better left alone.”
She says she writes her songs through exploration, just playing piano and making sounds with her voice: “And because I have a relatively versatile instrument in my voice, I just try things and see where it goes. Melodies often appear with a couple of chord progressions, and that’s usually the start of things. It’s melody long before lyrics — you sort of say random things, and it’s about how vowels and consonants roll off your tongue.”
“I don’t know how to be any other way,” she adds. “I like to see what my voice can do and where it can go, and push it to the edges of pretty, and make it sound gruff and unpleasant and ‘how ugly can I make that with it still sounding kind of cool?’”
Leaving the limelight, getting broken and finding new love — and then almost losing her voice — Sarah McLachlan found new depths and heights in her priceless voice. It was worth the wait.
