of a certain age, Sarah McLachlan’s songs have been a constant throughout my adult life. I’ve always had more respect for her talents than been a true fan, but nevertheless, I’ve managed to see her perform a few times – back in the early 90s in Toronto, up at Blue Rodeo’s St-Jean party in Piedmont in the mid-90s, and here in Montreal a couple of times. That whole time, I maintained that her work would come across just as well if not better if she lost some of the precision, control, and “etherealness” in favour of more rocknroll.
Last night, I saw Sarah at the Bell Center and although it was definitely a “Sarah show” I was really happy to note that they brought the guitars (two to three of them throughout) way up in the mix, played with some feedback and re-arranged a lot of her classics with much heavier edge. McLachlan’s material has always had an oddly angry core, but the 36-year-old-mother-Sarah, coming off an extended hiatus, played anger not as the slow burn of desperation but the anger of an adult woman, confident in herself and her talents like never before.
That’s not to suggest that the show last night was some sort of way-past-due riot-grrl moment or anything. The nice thing about adult women performers – and this has almost always been true of Sarah – is that emotions come with perspective and proportion. Sarah and her band, luckily, didn’t overdo it. There were some lovely quiet moments and pseudo-acoustic parts of the set, which were made even more powerful by the dynamics of the more rocking arrangements they brought on tour this time around.
