← All Of It with Alison Stewart
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- [00:06]
Alison Stewart
There's more.
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Sarah McLachlan
All of it on the way.
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Host/Interviewer
Sarah McLachlan is next.
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Singer (performing song lyrics)
Dude.
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Scott Detrow
After a city dredging project in Munich, Germany, a wave at one of the world's most popular inland surfing spots has disappeared.
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Listener/Caller or Commentator
It's very sad.
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Sarah McLachlan
The wave is not working.
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Singer (performing song lyrics)
People really are missing it because surfing is a lifestyle.
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Scott Detrow
I'm Scott Detrow. How the surfing community is uniting to get their gnarly wave back on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News, Today at 4 on WNYC.
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- [01:52]
Host/Interviewer
This is all of it on WNYC.
- [01:54]
Alison Stewart
I'm Alison Stewart. The Grammy Award winning musician Sarah McLachlan released a new album, her 10th, her first album of original music in 11 years. Here's the title track called Better Broken.
- [02:10]
Singer (performing song lyrics)
Maybe if I catch my breath, maybe if I wait a little, I remember how it hurts then stop for a fall. I'd forget to come apart and catch myself and hold on tightly. Let memory wash over me. Forgive but don't forget.
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So you come back to me begging, why'd you leave?
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Tell me why. How could you let this go or let it be all it is, Small and still a memory like a stone jagged edge made smooth by time.
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Host/Interviewer
When Sarah McLachlan joined us to talk about the new album, we had just wrapped up a conversation about the legacy of the Lilith Fair, the All Women Music Festival. We talked with her about that since she was the founder of the Lilith Fair and since she's playing tonight at the Beacon Theater. We wanted to revisit our conversation today. I started by asking her when she wrote that title track from her new album, better broken.
- [03:20]
Sarah McLachlan
Actually almost 14 years ago when I actually went back and did the timestamp thing. Yeah, it was meant to be originally on my last record, shine on. And then I didn't finish it in time. We ran out of time. And so I kind of archived it away and forgot about it. And then when I was going through all those old records. I. I found it when we're trying to find material for this new one and went, oh, this is actually pretty good. I gotta finish this.
- [03:45]
Alison Stewart
How much did the song change over that?
- [03:47]
Sarah McLachlan
Very little. The only thing we just added the bridge. So the lyrics were essentially there. There just wasn't a bridge. And I felt like it needed. It needed to go someplace. And then Benny Bach came in. He was kind of the fourth member of our band. Myself, Tony Berg, Will McClellan, my two producers. And he just is this musical, musical prodigy. And I' so can you just do a little bridge on these chords? And I had these really simple chords, and he just turned it into this crazy, weird kind of Prague fusion thing. And I'm. Okay, yeah, that'll. That'll work. That's great.
- [04:19]
Alison Stewart
Well, it's sort of interesting because I was listening to the song and I asked somebody else. I'm like, do you hear, like, a record player in the middle of the song? There is a record player.
- [04:28]
Sarah McLachlan
There is in the bridge, yes. It goes into this sort of retro nostalgia moment.
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Alison Stewart
Why did you want to start with this particular song for your album?
- [04:38]
Sarah McLachlan
Well, you know, it didn't turn out that way. As you build a record, as you put all the songs together, you know, an emotional arc starts to take place and form. And the title just kind of made sense for everything that I was working on. The reclamation of self, this idea of, you know, resilience. And this is a new chapter in my life. My little baby has just gone off to university, so I'm now an empty nester. And there's been a lot of times over the last bunch of years where I've had to sort of think about how to redefine myself. And, you know, none of us gets to this point unscathed. I'm 57, and I've lost both my parents and my brother to really hideous cancer. I've gone through a yucky divorce and, you know, one or two sort of disastrous relationships after that that really, you know, that I had to climb out from under, you know, and figure out who I was. And. And so those stories, a lot of them kind of appear on this record because even though I wrote a lot of this qu. You know, I'm drawing on inspiration from things in the past, things that I actually have now a little more objectivity about that I can write about with some more clarity.
- [05:46]
Alison Stewart
How deep is that song archive of yours? Are we talking, like, Prince Vault deep? Are we talking how.
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Sarah McLachlan
No, honestly, I think better. Broken is probably it. There might have been. There's six or seven other ideas from that time, but they weren't as strong, they weren't as fully formed. That being said, at some point they may well come back to the surface because musically I think they're strong. It's just the lyrics are the things that I really struggle with.
- [06:11]
Alison Stewart
It's interesting. So I looked at the whole record track and your songs are, in my opinion, normal length songs. They're four minutes.
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Sarah McLachlan
Yeah.
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Alison Stewart
They're five minutes. They're not two and a half minutes, which a lot of artists are doing.
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Sarah McLachlan
I have too much to say. I was gonna ask you about.
- [06:25]
Alison Stewart
I was going to ask you about that. Did you ever have that. That conversation with yourself or did you say, no, I'm just.
- [06:31]
Sarah McLachlan
I'm making songs. I. I've been incredibly lucky in my career that I've kind of had creative control since the get go. And so certainly times early on when it's like, you know, if you want radio play, it has to be under 3:30. You have to work on that. So, yeah, for a few songs I went down that road. But generally speaking, for me, a song dictates, you know, it dictates what it's going to be, how long it's going to be, and I just kind of let that flow.
- [07:00]
Alison Stewart
It's your creative process. Just let it go.
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Sarah McLachlan
Yeah, I mean, that's where the good stuff comes out. When you're freed uninhibited, you know, you're not editing yourself, you are just playing, singing with abandon for the medicinal pleasure of it.
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Alison Stewart
How do you know when a song is done?
- [07:22]
Sarah McLachlan
There is no mathematical equation, that's for sure. It feels right. That's about. That's, you know, it feels like I've taken it and experimented and, you know, gone down as many roads as I could and done the best possible job that I can with whatever subject matter I'm talking about musically, you know, getting it to a really solid place where I feel proud of it, where I'm feeling like, okay, I can now let this go to the world. And that's the point at which we go into the studio and then this super collaborative process happens where, you know, you get other musicians and they all add their colors and their nuances to it to elevate.
- [08:05]
Alison Stewart
Sounds like you are into collaboration.
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Sarah McLachlan
I love collaboration. I love it because of that elevation, you know, I can take things to a certain place where I feel good about it, but I love what other people will bring to something to make it. In my opinion, even Better and more interesting.
- [08:23]
Alison Stewart
My guest is Grammy award winning artist Sarah McLachlan. She's here for a listening party for her new album, Better Broken. This song has an extra special significance for you. Gravity.
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Sarah McLachlan
Yes. Sorry. Well, you go ahead.
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Alison Stewart
No, you go ahead.
- [08:37]
Sarah McLachlan
So I wrote this song as a love letter to my firstborn daughter. She and I have had a very challenged, almost combative relationship for very many years. We're both terribly similar and really stubborn and we just didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things. And by the time she went away to university, like we were ready for a break. And she came back after a year. This was Covid 2020. It did not go well for her. She didn't have a good time. You know, a lot of unpleasant things happened and she was a mess and I could not reach her, I could not help her. She wouldn't open up to me. And after a couple weeks I was like, I think we need some help. So we went to see this family systems counselor that we'd been to before. And after peeling back all the layers of the onion, what came out was the fact that she didn't feel safe to tell me what had happened to her because she thought she would be judged. She thought that, you know, I would blame her somehow, which is an awful thing to reckon with as a parent, especially because my mother was exactly like that. And I thought that I was being so different as a parent and I feel like I was. But clearly the way I was communicating with her, she was not getting that. So I had to learn how to change the way I talk to her. And also within the counseling, what we often, what we thought in the past was ADHD actually was anxiety. And we finally unraveled that and realized that all those challenges when she was younger, when this wall would go up, when hard things would be put in front of her, it wasn't obstinance or laziness or any of those things. It was this massive anxiety that was undiagnosed because I don't have it. So I didn't recognize it. She didn't have the language for it. So to recognize that's actually what it was. So then to have tools to manage that our relationship since has blossomed. And you know, I talked to her about obviously, you know, talking about publicly about something that's very private and very vulnerable, a very vulnerable time in her life and mine. And she's like, oh no, mom, I want you to talk about it. I think this is really important. And it helped us so much. I want people to know about family systems counseling and. And how beneficial it can be for the whole family, really. And so, so far, she's still on board with that. So I'm being pretty open. I mean, I'm very open about my own life, but it's quite something different to bring someone else's personal things into a very public forum.
- [11:08]
Alison Stewart
But let's listen to gravity.
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Singer (performing song lyrics)
Yours is an island of wild weeds.
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And lush, tangled crops.
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Unbridled energy, all possibility. You pull yourself up on two feet.
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That have not stood alone.
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Slowly and gingerly reaching with toes.
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It's hard the way you look at.
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Me With a rage I cannot place.
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But I'm not the enemy.
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I'll carry you through your pain.
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You can hide away hold your heart at bay I know you wanna love no life will come apart and break and break your heart.
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I will be my gravity always true. I won't give up on you.
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Host/Interviewer
A beautiful song for a child to.
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Sarah McLachlan
Hear that I won't give up on you. Yeah, well, I think that's what everybody kid needs to hear, is that, you know, they've got a solid and safe place to land.
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Host/Interviewer
So you're Sarah McLachlan, the Grammy winner.
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Alison Stewart
Do your kids treat you like Sarah McLachlan, the Grammy winner?
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Sarah McLachlan
No, no, no, no. You know, kids have a wonderful way of keeping things real and keeping you humble. They do not care unless I can get them tickets to shows. That's true. Then all of a sudden, I'm mildly elevated for a moment.
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Alison Stewart
How has being a parent affected your songwriting?
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Sarah McLachlan
Well, the recognition that one's heart can expand way beyond what I thought my capacity for love was, that's opened up a whole new world of joy and terror. Honestly, the only other thing that's really changed is that being a parent is very busy making. There's a lot of work involved. I used to be able to go and sequester myself away in the mountains for months and do nothing but write. So being add myself, there's a lot of, you know, my day punctuated by waking the kids up, giving them breakfast, taking them to school, picking them up. I became a, you know, big dance mom for a bunch of years because my daughter was super into dance and still is. So, you know, I was distracted by all those things, so it slowed the process down. Really distracted or wildly distracted? Joyfully distracted by parenting. Yeah, it just, you know, it especially in the last. The last 10 years, like having two teenage girls dealing with, you know, with the challenges. With my daughter, I was also principal fundraiser for My free music schools off the side of my desk. And I continued to play shows and tour a little bit. But, yeah, songwriting kind of took a back seat a little bit. Yeah.
- [14:42]
Alison Stewart
What brought you back into focus?
- [14:43]
Sarah McLachlan
I think I finally had enough material. But also actually the first song that I wrote in a long time was Rise. I wrote that with Luke Doucet and later on with Ann Previn. And it was kind of coming out of COVID really, with this hopeful idea that, you know, this thing could actually bring us together, bring humanity together, and didn't really turn out that way. Right. So. But it's this hope that, you know, hey, we need to remember that ultimately, ultimately, we need each other. And if we keep, you know, just standing on opposite sides of the street and screaming at each other, nothing's going to move forward. So it's a sort of utopian version of what's not happening right now, but what we'd like to happen, which is, you know, hey, we. We need to figure this out together.
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Alison Stewart
Let's listen to that track. This is rise by Sarah McLachlan.
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Singer (performing song lyrics)
But we're gonna need each other Quiet the thunder who do we if we turn on each other? Yeah, we're gonna need each other and listen in hunger Chances and choices dreams of tomorrow will arise. This time we're gonna do better if we can cool things down I know your tail's the warning bells your thirst for higher ground but there's nothing gained from envy or your lust to prove me wrong Embrace it what divides us it'll never make us strong Come on, we gonna need each other Quiet the thunder who do we turn to if we turn on each other? Yeah, we gonna. Chances and choices dreams of tomorrow I'm.
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Host/Interviewer
Speaking with Sarah McLachlan. She's here for a listening party for her new album, Better Broken. So on the show, I love music, as you know. I've had all the women who are on Lilith Fair. We've had, like, Liz Phair, Suzanne Vega, Paul Cole's been on the show.
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Sarah McLachlan
But we also have a lot of.
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Host/Interviewer
Young musicians who come on the show. And Katie Muna, Kayna Gavin from Muna was on the show, right.
- [17:16]
Alison Stewart
And she told us she's a big.
- [17:18]
Host/Interviewer
Big fan of yours. A big, big fan of Lilith Fair.
- [17:21]
Sarah McLachlan
I want to play this little clip that she.
- [17:24]
Host/Interviewer
We talked about it.
- [17:25]
Listener/Caller or Commentator
I mean, I think they're my favorite musicians. And there's so much brilliant songwriting going on there. There's so much action. And I really think about the importance for me of seeing women and queer People like seeing themselves as just the subjects in their own lives. And I also think about the community. I remember, like, watching think about the Indigo Girls bringing everybody together and trying to encourage, like, collaboration on the road. And I also have to give a shout out to Sarah. Building a Mystery was like my On Spotify wrapped. It was like my top listened to song for like, a couple where.
- [18:03]
Sarah McLachlan
I love that.
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Alison Stewart
I love it too. Where do you hear the Lilith Fair influence in our new generation of female songwriters and male songwriters?
- [18:15]
Sarah McLachlan
I more hear it. Well, I more see it in, you know, women are dominating the airwaves. Women are championing other women, and women are having other women open up for them. So that shift, I think, really changed things. I mean, over the years, one of the most beautiful stories that constantly comes up, young women in particular will come up to me and say, I was there. You all showed me that I can do and be anything I wanted. I'm now running a corporation and I'm hiring women. And, you know, it's that idea that, you know, we. We have always been in competition with each other for this very small sliver of pie that's been allotted to us in pretty much, you know, every walk of life and all the systems that have been created by men for men. And if we want to change things, ultimately we have to start, you know, celebrating each other and lifting each other up and giving each other opportunities to create that change. And I feel that I've seen that happen time and time again in the industry now.
- [19:11]
Alison Stewart
And Katie Gavin is on your record.
- [19:13]
Sarah McLachlan
And she's on my record. Yeah. I will say as well, I'm a massive fan of her. She is hugely talented and a lovely human.
- [19:22]
Alison Stewart
Let's listen to Reminds Me featuring Cady Gavin.
- [19:27]
Singer (performing song lyrics)
Baby, love's what I want but everything's changing Yours is the light that I lean Reminds me how healing good luck can be we started out as friends and then we fell into the deep when we first kissed I nearly drowned but you took my hand and you led me to wonder like all it was love have been found Baby, when I'm feeling blue, your smile can save me Pulls me up out of the trenches Reminds me how easy my life is with you Used to think love was heavy work Trying to lift up the broken ones I wasting so much time but those mistakes led me to you Now I know it was worth walking that crooked line. Cause you and me were meant to be A sweet and simple melody And I want to sing this song for you until our time has all run.
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Through you're all I want, all I need.
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All I have is you.
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Alison Stewart
We'Re.
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Host/Interviewer
Talking to Sarah McLachlan. Her new album is called Better Broken. You have a new production team in place.
- [21:15]
Sarah McLachlan
Yeah. So Tony berg and Will McClellan. And before I started making this record, I've been working with Pierre Marchand for 35 years. I love and adore him and what we created, but at the time, I thought, you know, this might be my last record. And I kind of owe it to myself to step out of my comfort zone and challenge myself a little bit. It honestly kind of felt like cheating at first, but Pierre was really gracious and lovely about it, and he's like, no, no, go do it. Go try it. And we had the best time. It's kind of like blind dating, you know, you get into this instantly. You get into studio, and it's this very intimate, kind of vulnerable environment that you put yourself in where it's like, o, okay, I'm just gonna open my world up to you and show you all the things I've been working on. And I played Gravity for Tony the very first day, and he heard it once, and he sat down at the piano. He says, may I? He sat down at the piano and played the entire thing back to me, but added a couple of interesting chord changes in it that actually, in my opinion, made it better. And I'm like, okay, first of all, it's not the simplest song to just, wow, how did you do that? And then he actually made it better. So I thought, okay, this is gonna be good. And then, you know, getting in there, like, within three days, it had felt like I'd known these guys forever. It was so creative and so inspired.
- [22:33]
Alison Stewart
What. How did they push you? A producer's job is to make you look good, but it's also to push you.
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Sarah McLachlan
He. Tony pushed me a lot lyrically. We were. Yeah, he really was like, yeah, you know, the music is really, really great. This song, you know, that it needs a little bit of help, you know, And. And first of all, I was like, oh, damn you. No, I like it. It's really good. But as soon as he said that, I couldn't unhear it or unthink it. And then because I had so much respect for him, I went back in and reworked a few things, and I made them better. So he forced me not to settle, which is great. So he did a very good job. Never mind being a brilliant musician, an arranger, and having just the greatest ideas when introducing a new musician to a song, just creating a story around it around the kind of drum kit, for instance, we needed for if this is the end, he said, I need the saddest Salvation army drum kit. And Matt Chamberlain said, okay, okay, and went over to his studio and pulled out these sloppy old drums and put together this kit that just somehow sounded so sad but fantastic as well and perfect for the song. So he's really great at pulling out not only great performances, but just, you know, creating a picture that really allows a musician just to, you know, to fully shine.
- [24:02]
Alison Stewart
You were kind enough to let us release to play one more song, which you're not releasing until Friday. One in a long time. What do you want people to know about this song?
- [24:10]
Sarah McLachlan
Oh, one in a long line. Yeah. So this was the last song. That's okay. So this is the last song I wrote. I wrote actually with Ann Previn for this record. And I think when I was starting to make music for this record and starting to produce it, I was a little bit concerned about how vocal I was going to be about certain things I saw going on in the world. I've never been political in my music, but I felt like considering since Roe v. Wade getting overturned and watching this insidious erosion of the rights of women, not only in America, but all over the world and thinking, how is it that we're going backwards? And the anger and the frustration around that. I have two daughters who are coming up in the world, and, you know, I believe every woman should have agency over their bodies. Anyway, so this song is kind of about that.
- [24:54]
Alison Stewart
The name of the album is Better Broken. It is out this Friday. My guest has been Sarah McLachlan. It has been lovely to chat with you.
- [25:02]
Sarah McLachlan
Thank you. So nice to be back.
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Singer (performing song lyrics)
Don't block the sun from warming me when it's so cold in this forest and heavy branches hang over me and.
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Winds whisper and cold I have a.
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Soft side and a forgiving heart don't mistake me for weak I travel roads that you will never own I carry treasures you will never own conside I'm.
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Wanting a long miles out of body.
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Strong.
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You I've worked hard to know myself you don't get to decide the way I live but I. Take me as I.
- [26:09]
Try to see could never.
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Bleeding heart.
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Of a frailty it's getting harder to.
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Fight calm when you want to deray I'm alive I am a searing ember.
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Rising from the deep the sound of.
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Fury of our mother's voices all they fought for carrying me I been wanting a long life sound of body strong I've worked hard to know myself. You don't get to decide.
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Host/Interviewer
That was Sarah McLachlan. Her new album is Better Broken. She's playing tonight at Beacon Theater.
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