Sarah McLachlan is not sure how many albums she has left in her — but she knew she had to make Better Broken.
The pop rock veteran's first album of new material in 11 years is a cathartic exercise of finding beauty within the madness. While McLachlan has long used music to navigate her feelings — and the malaise and uncertainty ever-present in our modern world — Better Broken shares her knowledge, strength and hope for humans to come together.
The 11-song set is a collection of tracks McLachlan has had for several years and others she's been inspired to write in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the face of the world's current political climate. After taking time away from music to pursue other projects and raise her two daughters, she thought about not only what she needed to say, but how crucial it was to say it.
"When I started to work on the album I thought this might be my last record, so I owed it to myself to step out of my comfort zone," McLachlan tells GRAMMY.com. "It was really important for me to come to a place with this record where I felt brave enough — and confident enough — to speak my mind, perhaps, more directly than I ever have in the past."
The result is arguably the most thought-provoking album of her career. And it's one that lingers — from the beauty of the title track, which finds McLachlan at peace with past failures, to women's empowerment anthem "One in a Long Line," which features hard-hitting lines like, "I've worked hard to know myself, you don't get to decide/ What I believe, what I give up, how I grieve/ So take your dirty hands off of my wheel."
McLachlan has built a career singing songs that resonate with listeners, whether they are about matters of the heart or about the universal human condition. Her legacy was further cemented through Lilith Fair, the groundbreaking all-women's music festival she created in 1997; the fest was recently chronicled in a new feature documentary, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery. Premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival on Sept. 13, the doc highlights several poignant themes that carry through the album. And with Better Broken arriving just six days later, McLachlan reminded fans that the voice behind her message is as strong and powerful as ever.
Catching up with McLachlan a few days after the film's world premiere finds the three-time GRAMMY winner all smiles. Her gratitude is palpable. During an engaging conversation, she spoke about her return to music, Lilith Fair's legacy and the inspiration behind some of the stirring songs on Better Broken.
This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.
Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery recently premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival. That must have been an incredible and moving experience to witness this story come to life on the big screen.
It was quite unbelievable. I know I was there, and I know I did all that stuff, but it felt like I was watching another person. Maybe that's just the magic of cinema? But to see it on the big screen in this amazing cinematic masterpiece that captured those three years in the late 1990s succinctly and beautifully and molding it into 90 minutes, I was just so proud, grateful and overwhelmed.
They did such an amazing job telling the story … I remember all those moments and so much more. It was incredible to revisit it and what made it even more special is Paula Cole and Joan Osborne both showed up at the premiere. I had not seen either of them in years.
The more things change the more they remain the same. This aphorism credited with French critic Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr feels apropos when thinking about today's political climate. Nearly 30 years on since Lilith Fair created a supportive space for women and showed the music industry and the male-gazers the power of the women's voices to stand — and tour — on their own, do you feel things are any better today for women in the music industry and in society?
Well, the music industry definitely looks very different these days, but if you look at the world right now, in many ways, we are heading backwards again. Life is cyclical. Music is cyclical. Patterns are cyclical. In some ways, many things have progressed and moved forward greatly for women.
The challenge often, when there's a huge seismic shift, like the "Me Too" movement for instance, where all of a sudden there's this newfound awareness, obviously not for us as women, but perhaps for men, there's this general consensus now of, Okay, we women can now feel way more comfortable and confident to say, 'Hey, that's not okay. I don't want to be treated like that. I don't want to be talked to like that.' And with that there was this incredible empowerment for us.
The flip side, unfortunately, is the knee-jerk reaction from men of having their power taken away. Not all men, but a lot of men going, "Oh, wow, we have to change the way we behave now." For most evolved men, they're like, "Well, I get it. I can learn. I can change and we'll figure this out." But then, there's a faction of men who are holding on to their power and having no interest in changing things and we're certainly seeing this play out today in the political world.
That's pretty hard to digest most days, isn't it?
It is disheartening and it is upsetting, but I look at Lilith — what we achieved, and the beauty and the strength in that — and I think that message is so important to bring to the younger generation today, especially women who are perhaps feeling like, "Really, are we here again?" or other young women who do not even realize how challenging it was, and being surprised by this, but the reality is that we've seen this time and time again.
We've seen this pattern repeat and there's always a step backwards before there's a step forward. My hope is that what people will take from this documentary, especially women, and especially any marginalized person, is that when we stand together and when we support each other and lift each other up, things shift. Sure, it pisses people off, too, but it's super important to stand together and to stand for what you believe in and to support each other instead of tearing each other down.
That's a perfect segue into talking about some of the overarching themes on the new record Better Broken and some of the songs. Let's start with the hard-hitting, no holds-barred female empowerment song, "One in a Long Line," with acerbic lines like, "F— your judgment, your violence/ I am a wildfire/ I am a forest burned/ But I will rise, you'll see/ And if you think that you can bring me down/ Well, go ahead and call the cavalry." Speak to that song and that moral struggle artists often have of getting overly political and using their voice to speak out on issues.
I had a lot of trepidation going into this record and deciding what I was going to talk about, partly because of that. There's this crazy cancel culture and everybody's sitting behind their screens spitting out the most mean and unpleasant things and judging everybody.
It was really important for me to come to a place with this record where I felt brave enough — and confident enough — to speak my mind, perhaps, more directly than I ever have in the past. Part of learning that ability came from Lilith, and also being out of the industry and out of the limelight for a long time.
It also came from looking at the way our current culture/society is so quick to cancel people for having a different opinion. We can't have discourse about things anymore. People are just instantly off in their corners, left and right, shrieking and screaming, and it's like, This is not going to get us anywhere. We need to speak our minds, but we also need to stay open and curious and continue to try and build bridges. That's a large part of what music does … it creates an opening in our emotional worlds and allows us to see humanity in ourselves and in each other.
Music provides that moment where sometimes we can leave our labels at the door — our politics and our bridges, our religious and social beliefs — and all of a sudden find common ground in something that reminds us of our shared humanity. I know it sounds really Utopian, but I'm a firm believer it's like that.
You can never underestimate the power of a moment, and the power of somebody doing or saying something that resonates really powerfully with other people, that can create positive change, even if it's just a ripple. Those ripples go out into the world, and it allows for a softening and allows for shifts to happen. If we're going to survive, we have to start listening to each other and start figuring out a way together instead of apart.
Better Broken is your first studio album of all new material in 11 years. Why so long between records?
Life just kind of got in the way. I was raising two teenage daughters and was a very busy dance mom for several years! I'm also the principal fundraiser for my music school, which was almost a full-time job, and I still continued to play shows even though I wasn't touring. And, during a lot of this time, I was in between record labels, so I didn't have a deadline. So I just got busy doing other things. I wrote a little bit, and forgot about it, and then I wrote a little bit more, until I felt maybe I had enough material to make a record.
"Rise," which I started writing with Luke Doucet, is one of the first songs that started the process towards this new record. It began just coming out of the pandemic as this hopeful lament about the world, thinking that, maybe this crazy, awful thing that happened would actually bring us together … not so much as it turned out.
But these beautiful lines from that song really struck: "We're going to need each other/ Sisters and brothers/ Who do we turn to/ If we turn on each other." That's so profound and so true and that kind of paved the way for me saying, "I'm ready to make a record" and "This feels like we need to hear this so I need to get this out right now." It still took two and a half years!
Was part of what took time stepping out of your comfort zone and working with two new producers in Tony Berg and Will Maclellan?
For sure. When I started to work on the album I thought this might be my last record, so I thought I owed it to myself to step out of my comfort zone. I've always worked with producer Pierre Marchand and I absolutely love and adore him. I love the records we've made together, but I thought I should try and challenge myself and do something a little different because it just felt like a safe choice to go back to Pierre. Honestly, at first, it felt like cheating, not working with him, but he was very gracious and lovely and told me to go for it.
So I started working with Tony Berg and Will Maclellan, a fellow Canadian, and it reignited this passion that I had forgot about — being in the studio, and the exploration and the discovery of finding out what this song could become above and beyond me just writing it on guitar or piano in the privacy of my living room. That was really exciting. It was also very creative and collaborative.
After that, things came together relatively quickly. I had six or seven songs on top of everything else that was a grouping of songs about an old relationship that had long since run its course and that was well behind me. I needed to write these songs as part of my process … it's really cathartic as a songwriter and it's my therapy.
But, when I brought them back out, I was like, "I don't want to give that old thing any more energy." Tony felt the same way. I had this moment of, "Ah s—! Now I don't have enough songs for a record," but Tony was like, "Let's just start working on what you do have." And, as we did that, creativity just begot more creativity. Then it was other songs that were sort of ideas that were a lot easier to finish because I was just in that mode and I was doing nothing but making music.
"If This is the End," the song that closes the record, is a hopeful tune; yet, it's also quite sad. How did this rumination about the end of the world arrive?
I guess it is somewhat hopeful. That song idea started with a guitar riff from 14 years ago that Lyle Workman showed me using Nashville tuning, which takes all the octave/high strings within a 12-string set and puts them on a six-string guitar. This tuning creates such a beautiful sound. I wrote that part using this technique and I also wrote the bridge to that song, lyrically, but I never had anything else — just the melody.
I played that for Tony and we were talking about the end of the world, just because s— is getting crazy, right? These are things that I've been thinking about, like, What's my place as an artist? What's my place as a humanitarian? and What do I have to say anymore? I figured that I have to find a way to talk about this stuff that's kind of scary and find a place to put it so that it's not overwhelming all the time.
Tony reminded me of this movie, On the Beach, from the 1950s, about the atomic bomb and how Australia was the last place on earth where the bomb was yet to hit. Everybody knew it was coming and there was a whole story surrounding that, but they all just ended up walking out to the beach and singing "Waltzing Matilda." What a beautiful story!
I hadn't seen the film, but Tony told me the story and I started to think that's what I would do if it was the end of the world. I'd go to the beach and I'd probably bring some really good tequila and just hold on to people you love and sing.
Speaking of tequila, I understand you all did a few shots and sang on the final day, and that spirit of camaraderie and joy ended up in the final mix?
Yeah, that was the magic of Tony. He was like, "We should get everybody together, folks who worked on the record, and a bunch of their friends, and we should have this thing at the end." It was our last day in the studio and so we all got together, we got a bartender, and got everybody drunk and sang the song out. It was such a beautiful end to the record.
The song is also sad because we f—ed it all up, didn't we? We really f—ed everything up, and now we're paying the price. But there's some kind of weird, sad hopefulness and sad euphoria in it, too — we're all together here, so let's just drink and sing like an Irish bar/pub song.
That's kind of the overall theme of the record, isn't it? Hopefulness and the power of music to unite us and help us heal.
Music is so personal and I purposely write, to a certain degree, a little ambiguously, about certain things so that there's a story, but as soon as I release it to the world it becomes about what's important to you and what you, as a listener, get from it. What's the story for you? How do you impose your story onto it so it then becomes your story?
I hope that people take this record and take it as medicine, or take it for whatever they need it for, and I hope that it lifts them and helps them feel less alone and maybe helps them feel more connected.
Where did that phrase "better broken," the first single and title of the record come from?
Well, that was actually the first song I wrote with Matt Morris about 14 years ago. Again, it was one of the ones that didn't make it on the record back then because we didn't have a bridge and it wasn't quite done and we ran out of time. So, I brought it out of the archives and played it for Tony and he loved it. So we worked that up, and it just kind of became an emblem for the whole record.
I'm 57, and none of us get to this point unscathed. As privileged and lucky as I am in my life, I've still seen and felt a lot of pain and challenges and loss and grief, and we all have to find a way to process that stuff. For me, music has always been the way through, so "better broken" just felt like it captured this idea.
We all fall down. We all get hurt and have our hearts ripped out. We suffer. And, we have to figure out a way to patch ourselves up and pick ourselves back up and keep moving forward for the sake of ourselves — and for the sake of our children — and find a way to move forward with grace, or as much grace as one can muster and continue to find purpose.
To me, that is the message of this record. It's about resilience. It's about reclamation of self. It's about finding joy and finding love again, and gratitude.