Word: mclachlan
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Coming on the eve of the final Lilith Fair, the all-female concert tour that Sarah McLachlan brought to life two summers ago, her Mirrorball (Arista) marks one of the most exciting and fruitful periods for female singer-songwriters since Laura Nyro and Carole King lit up concert halls in the late '60s and early '70s. Much of the excitement has hovered around Lilith itself, which boosted once underrated talents like Lucinda Williams and Shawn Colvin. But the soul of the new female pop machine is surely McLachlan, whose tunes have gained the kind of prom-night, dorm-room...
...cuts on Mirrorball are drawn from McLachlan's earlier albums, and were recorded live on her spring solo tour. Some of the songs--like the love-racked Path of Thorns, from her 1991 CD, Solace--acquire a spacious, cathedral-like grandeur when performed live with her solo piano. McLachlan's canvas has always been the lovelorn and the obsessed, and her palette, the primary colors of human passions. Mirrorball chronicles her gathering skill at capturing emotional truths. "Emotions are fabulous," McLachlan explains, relaxing in a Manhattan hotel room last week. "I love them because they feed you. You learn...
...heart of Mirrorball is drawn from her breakthrough 1994 album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. McLachlan's studio voice has a serene balance, like a sailboat on still water; live, she unleashes turbulent gusts of feeling. Her new versions of Hold On, about losing a friend to AIDS, and Possession, about a controlling lover, reveal glimmers of rage that her studio albums only hint at. From her biggest album, 1997's Surfacing, the ode to love gone bad, Do What You Have to Do (which popped up in the Starr report when a certain intern's jottings to the President cited...
Parts of this album evoke aspects of other acts: the clear, warm vocals of Sarah McLachlan, the techno-folk of Beth Orton. Dido even looks a bit like Jewel. Dido's strong, throaty singing, however, distills her influences and makes her sound singular. Her lyrics could be a bit more pointed: "I just want to feel safe in my own skin/ I just want to be happy again" go the rather bland words to Honestly OK. But the real energy in Dido's songs is in the rhythm, in the smooth collision of genres and in the emotional details that...
...drink lots of cheap beer and Southern Comfort, go hollering down a road in a pickup truck with some loud rebel yells, bash some mailboxes with a baseball bat, and then go cow-tip-ping. (Quite an endorsement from a 5'4" Asian girl who mostly listens to Sarah McLachlan and likes to read Pablo Neruda poems...