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| Sarah McLachlan |
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Three time Grammy Award winner:
- Grammy Award 1999 "I Will Remember You" - Best Female Pop Vocal Performance - Grammy Award 1998 "Last Dance" - Best Pop Instrumental Performance - Grammy Award 1998 "Building a Mystery" - Best Female Pop Vocal Performance "Described as folk/pop, Sarah McLachlan's music has sold over 22 million records worldwide since her 1988 debut. Born in Nova Scotia in 1968, McLachlan is a product of childhood piano and guitar lessons. Sarah has received an award for advancing the careers of women in music and founded the Lilith Fair tour that brought together two million people over its three-year history and raised more than seven million dollars for charity."
-- abc.net.au, 3/04
 1989:
Touch
"Nova Scotia-born singer/songwriter Sarah McLachlan was only 20 years old when 'Touch' was released in 1988. This is an impressive first effort, though maybe too earnest in its attempt to break new ground in otherwise familiar terrain of late-'80s synthesized textures. Yet McLachlan's pristine vocals and intricate guitar work yield several memorable tracks, including the opening Out of the Shadows, the popular Vox, and the enchanting Strange World. Her youthful romanticism is perhaps captured best in Trust, a catchy tune that is embellished with male vocals, sparkling keyboards, bongos, and distant electric-guitar licks. Later tracks become more endearing with each listen but in certain moods can be nauseatingly dreamy and vaporous.
-- Rebecca Robinson, amazon.com
1991: Solace just click here! to send us your review of this album 1993:
Fumbling Towards Ecstasy
"Hers was a slow-burning success story and her third album’s lead single Possession was no exception. The single took its time fluttering around the bottom regions of the pop charts, but it ultimately became one of the biggest recurrent radio hits of the 1990s. (...) Hold On, a song McLachlan was inspired to write after seeing the AIDS documentary A Promise Kept, is a woman’s impassioned plea for God to keep her dying lover safe (both in life and death). (...) Despite the semi-fictitious aspects of Ecstasy, the record is an irrefutably personal one. There are Bible-worthy allusions to forbidden love, temptation, sin and shame throughout tracks like the folky Good Enough and the propulsive Wait. 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.” (It’s a lyric you won’t find her singing in her post-Lilith Fair days.) 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. Producer Pierre Marchand expertly stacks McLachlan’s sticky-sweet vocal harmonies one on top of the other; (...) So much of the album is about restraint, so that by the time she (and we, vicariously) reach the album’s title track she truly is on her way towards ecstasy. The trouble with the album’s title, however, is that she never fumbles…not even once."
-- Sal Cinquemani, Slant Magazine, 04
½
1997:
Surfacing
The simple truth is that there is a lot to like about this album. Together with her band, McLachlan has managed a rich weave of lyrics, melody, voice and arrangements that is hypnotically seductive. (And makes it really hard to both write and listen to at the same time.) She speaks from places both personal and universal -- confessing the doubts and desires, the infatuations and insecurities, that we all share, male or female -- with the tacit implication that she has gotten past them, or surrendered to them, or somehow accepted them, at least this time around. Oddly enough, she is perhaps most eloquent when she abandons lyrics completely on Last Dance, the CD's final cut, having so completely set the stage for the listener to contribute their own images and memories of relationships past and present. Or, more importantly, to face the issue of how honest the rest of us are willing to be in expressing what we think and feel about those we love.
-- Gary 'pigboy' Swartz, Drop-D Magazine, Issue 88
1999: Mirrorball
"Grafted from McLachlan's supremely satisfying 1998 performances, Mirrorball is drawn almost equally from the multiplatinum 'Surfacing' and its superior predecessor, 'Fumbling Towards Ecstasy'. Live, a haunting ballad such as Possession becomes a fevered, aggressive bit of psychedelia. Hold On reveals new depths when performed behind the beat with morphing time signatures and driving piano. McLachlan's warmly expressive voice is still at the epicenter of her performances. She roams through these 14 songs with agile ease, riding the rails between singing for dramatic arena effect--huskily growling, airily trilling--and knowing what to play down with her sensually controlled crooning."
-- Paige La Grone, amazon.com
2003:
Afterglow
"Sarah McLachlan has a gorgeous voice -- malleable and exotic. She is a skillful composer, sensitive enough to write an album inspired in part by the death of her mother and the birth of her baby girl. But at its worst, McLachlan's music can be overly obsessed with the pursuit of beauty, soporific and self-absorbed - no matter how intelligently crafted it may be. McLachlan's first studio album since 1997's multiplatinum Surfacing, Afterglow finds her surrounded by a coterie of fine musicians concocting cinematic moments of orchestral fervor on Stupid as well as an unstoppable groove of swirling optimism on the crackling Train Wreck. Die-hard fans will be delighted. Others might yawn. If McLachlan ever chooses to let herself go, she might come up with something much more transcendental than pretty background music."
-- Ernesto Lechner, Rolling Stone.com, 12/03
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