Sarah McLachlan found her confidence and her breakthrough success with the dark and dreamy meditations of this expressive ethereal exultation. She had established herself with her debut album 'Touch' and her sophomore album 'Solace' made her a star in her native Canada.
Before recording her third album, 'Fumbling Toward Ecstasy', she traveled to Cambodia to narrate a documentary and was influenced by what she saw there: "I went to Thailand and Cambodia a couple of years ago to help make a documentary film for World Vision on Aids, prostitution and poverty. At first it was devastating. From that I felt I’m so lucky. I’m so blessed and all my huge problems seem so tiny. Which is sort of the way I feel when I’m in nature too. Either by the ocean or in the woods. It really puts everything into perspective for you. I think being in the woods for so long really helped do that. It’s very basic and the basic things are the really important things that get lost when you’re surrounded by concrete. The most basic thing of yourself, knowing yourself and being in touch with that...And it was a way of helping. I’d recommend it to anyone. It made me feel so blessed. After all the bitching and complaining. It really opened up my eyes...I’d say that I’ve grown up a lot. Or at least I’ve come closer to knowing who I am. For me, my own musical search and personal search is very entwined. It’s kind of the same thing. I put a lot of things behind me in that time between 'Solace' and 'Fumbling', especially in the making of 'Fumbling' ..Save for going to the studio I was by myself up in the woods in a cottage with my two cats pretty much for seven months while I was recording Fumbling. It made me get really strong because I had nobody to rely on anymore. I had nobody to turn to for distraction. So all this stuff came raging to the surface. I’d lived with my parents. I’d moved out with room-mates. I was on the road for a year and-a-half after that with fifteen people on a bus so I’d never been by myself for more than half-an-hour. Ever. All of sudden there was nobody around. And I wanted to do that. I know I needed to because I’m really easily distracted. Stupidly so. So I really needed to focus and to do that I needed to go away from everything familiar to me...I’m definitely focusing about how I feel on this record though a lot of the things I talk about are subjects outside of myself. In a way I feel I’ve become way more objective about my own situation and I’ve been able to almost step outside of myself and come from a different perspective on it. You know, the material isn’t just coming from me but bigger things outside me. And that, I think, was a result of getting to be in situations where I was terribly small."
'Fumbling Toward Ecstasy' was recorded with producer Pierre Marchand at Le Studio in Morin Heights, Quebec with Sarah McLachlan on vocals, acoustic & electric guitars, and piano; Bill Dillon on acoustic & electric guitars, guitorgan, bass, and piano; Pierre Marchand on bass, piano, keyboards, fake B-3 organ, drum machine, percussion machine, 808, shaker, and found sound; Brian Minato on bass; David Kershaw on hammond organ; Jane Scarpantoni on cello; Michel Dubeau on saxophone; Ashwin Sood and Jerry Marotta on drums and percussion; and Lou Shefano and Guy Nadon on drums. Marchand remembers: "On 'Fumbling' we were always trying to go in non-obvious directions, like with the song 'Hold On', which was a very slow, jazzy, dark, quiet song. I tried to offset that with a rocking rhythm on the drum machine, which took it in a completely different direction...I also hired a local drummer who is legendary in Montreal, called Guy Nadon. He's very eccentric and funny, and a fast player. I asked him to play some rhythms, but it sounded too much like a jazz big band, and I was afraid I could not loop any of his playing for Sarah's songs. So I got a whole bunch of CDs, randomly choose one from the pile, gave Guy a five-second taste of a rhythm, and asked him to do something similar. He would ask me to hear more, but I refused, because my idea was that he wouldn't play exactly like the example, but just a similar tempo, feel, and beat. I created three different loops in the Emu E4 from three dozen different beats, and one was used on the track 'Ice Cream'"
'Fumbling Toward Ecstasy' found its way to number seventy-six in Australia, fifty in the US, and number five in Canada. It spent two years on the US album charts and was eventually certified triple platinum.
http://www.sarahmclachlan.com/
"Possession"
"I tried to put myself into their shoes, into the mind of someone who is so obsessed with another person that they could conceive murdering them. It took me awhile to justify that one. As a woman, living with that fear in the back of your mind every day with the possibility of being raped. And so, it's kind of weird for me, but then I save myself in the third verse by saying I'd never really act on it, except in my dreams. And maybe that's putting me into a false sense of reality, but it did help. Not just that, but writing the whole song, was kind of a cleansing thing for me, because I had two people in particular who just became incredibly intense with the fantasy world that they created, and demanded that that was reality and we had to be together. And they went to great lengths to make this happen. It became frightening, but it ticked me off that I had to look over my shoulder every time I walked out the door. There was one point where I was told I'd have to have a bodyguard. It was like, screw that, I don't want to live in fear. It makes me so angry."
McLachlan was sued by an obsessed fan Uwe Vandrei who claimed that lyrics from the song came from letters he had sent to her. He admitted that he only filed the suit to get closer to McLachlan; but before it went to trial he was found dead from an apparent suicide.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucdnm8iU-5c
"Hold On"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZN0jDwg0UW0
"Good Enough"
"That song has been such an amazing experience for me because I've learned so much from it. There's so many different stories that I attach to it now. But it sort of came from, initially really missing my best girlfriend. It started out as fiction, about a couple in which the woman was pretty much alienated by just about everybody, because her husband was really abusive and domineering, which sort of somewhat mirrors my mother and father's relationship. And basically, I am the friend coming in, saying hey, you deserve more than this, why don't you come with me and I'll take care of you. The video that I'm going to do for that song is the first sort of dramatic narrative that I've done. Everything else has been pretty abstract, trying to find a parallel universe to describe it differently. But we're going to have a little girl, a man and woman, and a friend, possibly an imaginary friend. We're going to look at the relationship between the little girl and her friends and also between the mother and the little girl. And there's quite a bit of alienation from the father, who's been behind the scenes the whole time anyway...One of the things I was focusing on was don't tell me why he's never been good to you, don't tell me why nothing's good enough. For a couple years, every time I'd see my mom, I'd say, you know, you deserve more, you deserve to be happier than you are. Why are you putting up with this? Basically telling her that the only thing she knew sucked. So she never wanted to see me, and I wondered why. I couldn't understand it, then I wrote that song. Around the same time, I tried reverse psychology and didn't hassle her anymore and just accepted that she had accepted. Then she opened up. She completely changed and she started saying, I'm not going to accept this anymore, I'm changing this and this and this. It was fantastic, because I wasn't beating it into her, she was doing it on her own. That song taught me that. I have a lot of emotional attachment to that song."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEWP4HSzNJw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZjKPJbtghvs
"Ice Cream"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpaKL0b4hAI
"Fear"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y1HhslMnU1A
"Fumbling Towards Ecstasy"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PHasG0y158Q
'Fumbling Toward Ecstasy' full album:
all songs written by Sarah McLachlan, except where noted.
1. "Possession" 4:39
2. "Wait" 4:09
3. "Plenty" 4:05
4. "Good Enough" 5:03
5. "Mary" 3:55
6. "Elsewhere" 4:44
7. "Circle" 3:43
8. "Ice" 3:54
9. "Hold On" 4:09
10. "Ice Cream" 2:44
11. "Fear" 3:59
12. "Fumbling Towards Ecstasy" McLachlan, Pierre Marchand 9:49
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