R22 I love Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and Surfacing. Sarah’s earlier stuff was lyrically vacant, and her later stuff the same. She was a very good somgwriter during her prime, but after interviewing her once I decided she was more of a businessperson than an artist. I had admired her greatly before then. The interview was almost all business and marketing talk, plus some stuff about her parenting, etc. She said she was in a “good place” or something, so I asked if that would be reflected in her new music. She said something along the lines of, “Siiigh, well, you know, I am really an upbeat, happy person! But the fans want lots of sappy sad songs from Sarah McLachlan, and ya gotta give ‘em what they want or it won’t sell!” So disappointing. She also told me that her early music was lyrically terrible because she really only cared about vocals, but she knew that she would never make it big if she wrote generic songs, so she had to discipline herself to become a better writer. I admire that from a practical standpoint, but listening to her in retrospect, all I hear is someone who wrote strong lyrics that sounded personal for the sake of selling her music.

All of the other artists who played at Lilith Fair, by contrast, were songwriters. You may or may not appreciate their songs, but I think most of them were artists whose hearts were in it. I think Sarah M was more about building a brand, and she saw a huge untapped market because radio stations discriminated against women by limiting airtime for them. In the end it was great for women musicians and for listeners like me who love their music. But Fiona and Tori get a lot more respect from me for just being themselves.