Interview: Sarah McLachlan
THEY ARE ALL HERE — the husband Sarah McLachlan sometimes wonders whether she deserves; the parents she battled as an insecure teenager in Halifax, Nova Scotia; the friends who have provided her with a sense of acceptance; and the musical peers who have helped confirm that she has, in fact, made it. They have all come here tonight — head long out of some dream she might have had as an awkward adolescent, a late bloomer who still had baby teeth at fifteen.
It is a surprise party for McLachlan’s thirtieth birthday, and we are at a restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, celebrating. Her husband, Ashwin Sood, who has been helping to plan the event for two months, stands on one side of the room, beaming. You can’t blame him. Around the room, approximately thirty friends sit drinking wine; Joni Mitchell, matriarch of all Canadian singer/songwriters, arrives bearing gifts; Paula Cole, McLachlan’s contemporary, is on the way. Across the restaurant, McLachlan peeks over a wine glass at her parents, who have never been in Los Angeles before tonight.
“I thought Ash might do something,” she says. “But when I saw my parents, my jaw hit the floor.
“It’s been a year for that sort of reaction. First there was her marriage to Sood, her best friend and drummer of seven years. Next came the release of Surfacing, the multiplatinum follow-up to McLachlan’s multi platinum Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. And finally there was the Lilith Fair — the all-female festival that McLachlan organized and headlined, and whose just-released live album now stands as a document of last summer’s most successful concert event. It’s no wonder McLachlan considers her twenty-ninth year the best of her life thus far.
“This all goes back to being twelve years old and so wanting people to accept me and like me,” says McLachlan of life today. “It’s like I’m still living that dream. I get to go up onstage and have all this adulation. People accept me. People like me. That feels great. It’s the best drug in the world.”
Interview: Sarah McLachlan, Page 1 of 9