Singer Sarah McLachlan is resurfacing after years away from the spotlight

VANCOUVER, British Columbia – Sarah McLachlan was just 30 hours from beginning her first full-band tour in a decade, and she could not sing.

She was in the final heave of preparation for eight weeks of shows stretching through late November that commemorate Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, the sophisticated 1993 album that turned her into an avatar for the sensitive, mysterious singer-songwriters of 1990s radio.

But three days into a string of seven-hour rehearsals, her voice collapsed, the high notes so long her hallmark dissolving into a pitchy wheeze.

“It goes away only when I project, push out,” she said backstage in Vancouver, a near-whisper following the first of the day’s mostly mute run-throughs. She slipped a badge that read “Vocal Rest” around her neck and winked. “Luckily, that’s only a third of what I do.”

For the last two decades, McLachlan, 56, has contentedly receded from the spotlight and the music industry she helped reimagine with the women-led festival Lilith Fair. Since 2008, she has been a single mother to India and Taja, two daughters from her former marriage.

A few years ago, she finished a set of songs about a pernicious break-up, but reckoned the world did not need them. She has not released an album of original material since 2014.

McLachlan, though, now may be on the verge of a renaissance. She is amassing a US$20 million (S$27 million) endowment for her Sarah McLachlan School of Music, and exhaustive interviews for a Lilith Fair documentary just wrapped. In a year, her youngest, Taja, will head to college.

For the second time, McLachlan’s life is opening towards music.

During summer break between sixth and seventh grades, McLachlan’s friends in Nova Scotia labelled her a lesbian. She had indeed kissed another girl, practising for a boy. She instantly became a pariah, a middle-class kid from a conservative family surrounded by wealthy bullies.

“I became poison. Then they started calling me ‘Medusa’ because I had long, curly hair,” she said. “There was physical abuse too. I thought, ‘I am on my own.’”

There was little quarter at home. McLachlan was the youngest of three adopted children that she said her father never wanted.

Music became her refuge. She graduated from ukulele at four to classical guitar at seven after the family moved to the provincial capital. She struggled in school, skipping class to hide in the empty gymnasium and play piano there.

Although she despised the hard stares and high expectations of recitals, she begged to join a band. Her parents relented to a few hours of Sunday practice. The group’s first show, for several hundred dancing kids in a student union, was transformational.

“I was being seen, and I was being accepted,” she said. “It was the first time I felt that way.”

That night’s headlining act included Mark Jowett, who was then running a small label, Nettwerk, in Vancouver. Stunned by McLachlan’s voice and verve, Jowett urged her to move west and start writing songs. Her parents insisted she finish high school and college. Soon after meeting the label’s co-founder Terry McBride, she defied them anyway.

McLachlan soon cut a ponderous debut informed by the folk of her youth – Cat Stevens, Simon & Garfunkel, Joan Baez. Jowett and McBride wanted a producer to push her. They floated the name Pierre Marchand, who had worked with the Canadian folk royalty of Kate and Anna McGarrigle.

The success of Solace, McLachlan’s second album, drifted from Canada into the United States, where it was released in 1992, buying her and Marchand goodwill. They spent 1½ years in a studio in the Quebec countryside, McLachlan often walking home by moonlight, while Marchand built late-night loops and atmospheres.

The result, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, remains an uncanny singer-songwriter record, her frank observations on betrayal, friendship and lust warped by his outre sensibilities.

Marchand and McLachlan added the layered grandeur of U2 and the supple strength of Depeche Mode to these testimonials of yearning and loss. Critics lauded it as smart and sensual. Sales were stronger still. It went quintuple-platinum in Canada and sold more than three million copies stateside.

As McLachlan’s profile grew, letters from stalkers mounted at Nettwerk’s offices, especially from an Ottawa, Ontario, programmer named Uwe Vandrei. They met once, and he slipped her a scarf. But after she read one of his pleas, she asked not to see him any more.

Still, in the album’s opener, Possession, where bass pulses and guitars radiate above droning gothic organs, she worked to mirror his mind, to articulate his misplaced passions. When it became a hit, he sued, alleging McLachlan had lifted his words. Vandrei died before trial.

“I felt a strange sense of relief,” McLachlan said haltingly. “But then I thought, ‘Oh my god, this is somebody’s son. Should I have tried to reach out? Tried to talk some sense into him?’”

The success of Fumbling helped spur McLachlan’s most historic defiance. She demanded to not headline every show, to be partnered with acts who could share celebrity’s weight. Promoters baulked at the idea, rankling McLachlan. She named a genre-jumping touring festival for Lilith, a woman repeatedly lambasted in sacred texts. Lilith Fair dominated the summer concert scene of the late 1990s.

Her hit-laden 1997 album Surfacing (Building A Mystery, Adia) and Lilith Fair made her wealthy and famous, affording her a family and an activist legacy. Her career steadily slowed, with more years passing between albums and her experimental ardour fading. She did not mind.

“I’m a middle-aged woman. You kind of became invisible,” she said, leaning in with a wide grin. She whispered: “And I really like that.” NYTIMES