Sarah McLachlan

Sarah McLachlan’s intimate, lush singer/songwriter fare—forged in alt-rock drama—renders personal moments and inner emotional landscapes with cinematic grandeur. Born in 1968 in Nova Scotia, McLachlan was offered a record deal while still in school, but turned it down to focus on her studies. After rethinking things, however, she headed to Vancouver and eventually released her atmospheric, folky debut record, 1988’s Touch. A few years later, 1991’s Solace signalled major growth in her songwriting and sound, but it wasn’t until 1993’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy—partly inspired by her time working on a documentary about poverty and child prostitution in Thailand and Cambodia—that she truly established herself as an artist. With a voice that was fearless, personal and backed by full-bodied production, she breathed life into moments of heartbreak (“Good Enough”), romance (“Ice Cream”) and even dangerous obsession with “Possession”, which included lines parsed from letters received from a stalker. It set a high bar that McLachlan promptly vaulted over with 1997’s Surfacing, which contains megahits like the shadowy “Building a Mystery” and elegiac “Angel”, which gained a reputation as a heartstring-tugger for charity commercials and memorials. That same year, McLachlan also founded the enormously influential Lilith Fair—a festival that booked women and woman-led groups—providing a platform for a new generation of musicians. In the 21st century, McLachlan has continued to push her sound to explore new emotional depths (notably with 2003’s Afterglow), founded the Sarah McLachlan School of Music to provide kids quality, free music education in 2002, and was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 2017.