Recently I was sitting (uncomfortably) with some pain, thinking about my innocence as a child, namely that I feel I never got to occupy that position, was rarely seen as an innocent child. The person I was talking to (okay fine, it was a therapist) said I was innocent now, too. Not bad. Deserving of belonging. A revolutionary idea that reached me quite profoundly, even if I don’t feel it yet.
Later that afternoon, the idea of this persistent innocence kept running through my mind and after a few days, I found myself absentmindedly singing Sarah McLachlan’s hit song “Adia,” in which she sings “…’cause we are born innocent/believe me, Adia/we are still innocent.”
Like many other teenagers in the 90s, I loved Sarah McLachlan. I mean, loved her. Loved her even though I also loved Nirvana and revered Kurt Cobain, which in my mind was hard to hold together. But I haven’t thought about her or chosen to listen to her in roughly twenty-five years, until the day not too long ago when I wanted to hear her remind me of my innocence, over and over again. Turns out I still know all the words to her two big records, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993) and Surfacing (1995).
Listening to her now, I can’t believe how much more this music resonates for me. It pains me a little bit to admit this because I think I like good music, and there is lot about the production on her records that I really dislike. It’s also a matter of taste, of course, and the important role it can play in understanding who we are. Music is and has always been a significant part of my life, and I trust myself with and around music. In many ways, I know myself through my relation to music. I like CAN, I like Nina Simone, I like Soft Machine, I have seen Mahmoud Ahmed in concert, I have shared a bottle of whiskey on my back porch with the late, great Jack Rose (RIP, dear one), etc. In other words, I like music that others (or those whose opinion I care about) would confirm as quality. Good taste. But I also like Sarah McLachlan?
And in this moment, I might like her more than I did before, which is to say quite a lot, considering I auditioned for high school drama with “Hold On” (Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, 1993). And somewhere there is a VHS tape of 15-year-old me performing the acoustic version of “Possession” wearing an iridescent purple spaghetti strap top from Club Monaco in front of an auditorium full of people. (Strange that a Catholic high school was okay with the lyrics of that song being performed. Strange also, that I went to a Catholic high school, but it was necessary to get away from the horrible bullies I went to middle school with…It was a great school and I wasn’t proselytized much, at least not in any damaging way. In fact, that’s where I was first exposed to Bergman, Antonioni, Camus, and the enneagram.) By the time 1995’s Surfacing came out, however, I was already embarrassed about tender, earnest Sarah, even if I couldn’t stop staring at her beauty and style in the video for “Sweet Surrender.” She was everywhere, revered and upheld (cynical ones might say propped) by the Canadian music industrial complex known as CanCon. The imperative to protect cultural heritage against the behemoth influence of the big bad USA by means of plundering the airwaves with Canadian artists. It became cool to laugh at her, to cringe at how it seemed her marriage to Ashwin Sood allowed her to wear Indian textiles (maybe still okay to cringe at that, though), to not attend Lilith Fair. This isn’t an essay about bad taste, though. People have been theorizing these questions of valuation, aesthetic judgment, and subjectivity for centuries and not too long ago music critic Carl Wilson explored these questions in relation to another Canadian diva.
As a teenager, I wasn’t able to understand the pain, longing, and hard personal work running through all her lyrics. Of course, I recognized the mood as melancholic and that was part of the appeal, but now I see a woman working hard to come into her own power. She managed to take up space, for herself and other women, in a structural, material way when she began Lilith Fair. It wasn’t just the festival, but a real way of getting more women on the radio airwaves. In the songs, however, she is working so hard to get close to what she wants and needs. It seems that on Fumbling she is desperate for others to understand her, whereas on Surfacing she has confronted the fear of not being understood and nevertheless made her choices, yet she wrestles with guilt and feeling bad. When I started drafting this piece, I came across a short essay by Kaitlin Fontana that touches on a lot of my thoughts on why McLachlan is more relatable now, and more soothing. Fontana talks about how the word “good” is all over McLachlan’s lyrics—the striving to be seen as good and to feel one is truly good. There are certainly a lot of events in McLachlan’s personal life that could lend themselves to the absence of this feeling, including her adoption as a baby, her experiences of being stalked by fans, the way the press responded to her, her divorce, etc. Not knowing oneself as good, not feeling good enough is so strikingly pervasive, and especially for anyone who has been marginalized. It starts as a kind of self-preservation (it’s because I’m not good, but I can be better, I can be good) in the face of some psychic threat of obliteration. A plea to be understood by others won’t bring it about. Nor will achievement or external validation or the fulfilment of ambition.
“The more I tried I failed,” she sings on “Plenty.” What was once fumbling may have become surfacing, but it is decidedly not a transcendence. No finish line. Just the practice of finding what is the thing that is “heaven to no one else but me.” Therein lies the goodness.
Thank you for reminding me of my love for Sarah Mclachlan!
The Path of Thorns!
Ice!
Angel!
I went to Lilith Fair, and it’s cool to see how VISIONARY that was!
This piece brought me back to my teenage self, cruising around in my hometown with the windows down and the music up!
Oof, this piece hit me right in my '90s teenage heart!