VANCOUVER, British Columbia — Sarah McLachlan was just 30 hours away from starting her first full-band tour in a decade and she couldn’t sing.
She was in final preparation for dates running through November commemorating “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy,” the sophisticated 1993 album that made her an avatar of the mysterious singer-songwriters on 1990s radio. But three days later begin rehearsals, his voice collapsed.
So on stage the day before a sold-out benefit for his three nonprofit music schools, McLachlan only shook his head but smiled each time he tried to hit a note and missed.
“It only disappears when I project, I push out,” he said backstage almost in a whisper. She hung a sign around her neck that said “Vocal Rest” and winked. “Fortunately, that’s only a third of what I do.”
For the past 20 years, McLachlan, 56, has happily stepped away from the spotlight and the music industry she helped reinvent with the female-led Lilith Fair festival. Since 2008, she has been a single mother to India and Taja, two daughters from her previous marriage. She is now a devoted surfer, hiker and skier. Although she writes every morning at her home outside Vancouver, she has focused on motherhood and the Sarah McLachlan Music School, which has offered free instruction to thousands of Canadian children since 2002.
He hasn’t released an album of original material since 2014. “What do I want to talk about?” he said months ago in a video interview. “I’m just another rich, middle-aged white woman.”
However, McLachlan may now be on the verge of a renaissance. He is amassing a $20 million endowment for his schools and has just completed extensive interviews for a documentary about Lilith Fair. In a year, Taja, his youngest daughter, will leave for university. For the second time, her life opens up to music.
While going through his catalog to put together the concert, which begins with a series of personal favorites before moving into “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy,” he flew to Los Angeles for sessions with producer Tony Berg. She has recorded at least a dozen songs there and said she has more to write. “I am so energized by music, now that I live and breathe it every moment,” she said.
As a child, between sixth grade and first grade, McLachlan’s friends in Nova Scotia labeled her a lesbian. In fact, she had kissed another girl, practicing for a boy. She instantly became an outcast. “I became poison,” she said. “Then they started calling me ‘Medusa’ because she had long curly hair.”
His house didn’t offer much respite. She was the youngest of three adopted children who, she said, her father never wanted. “I didn’t have a relationship with my father because my mother didn’t allow it,” she said.
However, music became his refuge. She begged her parents to join a band. The group’s first performance, before several hundred children from a student union, was transformative. “She was being seen and accepted. It was the first time I felt like that,” she said.
That night’s headline act included Mark Jowett, who was then running a small label, Nettwerk, in Vancouver. Amazed by McLachlan’s voice and brio, Jowett urged her to move out and start writing songs. Her parents insisted that she finish high school and college. Shortly after meeting the label’s co-founder, Terry McBride, she challenged them anyway. They barely spoke for two years. “His ambition was to get out,” said McBride, McLachlan’s agent until 2011.
By the 1990s, McLachlan had named a traveling festival after Lilith, a woman repeatedly reviled in sacred texts. Lilith Fair showed viewers and executives that women were not second-class citizens in music.
“She changed the landscape for women,” said singer-songwriter Allison Russell. “She resisted what everyone told her she had to do.”
After her hit 1997 album “Surfacing” and Lilith Fair, music had made her rich and famous. She no longer needed validation from the spotlight, getting it from her daughters and her dogs, from her music school and her morning music practices. Her career slowed. She do not cares.
Now, he said, “I say what comes to mind. I feel more freedom every day to be who I am.”
