Sarah McLachlan | photo courtesy of the artist
‘Have I gone too far?’: Sarah McLachlan faces her toughest critic on new album
The Grammy Award-winning musician is used to playing for big crowds, but there was one person whose opinion mattered more than anyone else’s: her eldest daughter.
Sarah McLachlan has won multiple Grammy and Juno awards and she’s sold tens of millions of albums. She’s used to playing for crowds of thousands.
On her latest album, Better Broken, there’s one person whose opinion mattered more than anyone else’s, especially on the song “Gravity”: her eldest daughter.
“I sent it to her and said, ‘Hey, I wrote this song about us and our experience’ and ‘What do you think?’,” McLachlan says. “The silence for two days and I was, like, ‘Have I gone too far?’ “
Her daughter did reply, and in today’s session, you’ll hear about how “Gravity” came together, plus more stories about the making of Better Broken. It’s McLachlan’s first album of original material in more than a decade, and it’s her first time working with a new producer too.
“It was a little bit, like, at the beginning, blind dating,” she says. “I’ve been with my other producer, Pierre Marchand, for 35 years. I felt a little bit like cheating at the beginning.”
McLachlan also revisits Lilith Fair, the traveling music festival she founded in 1997.
This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod. Our digital producer is Miguel Perez. World Cafe’s engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.