Sarah McLachlan shines at concert hall

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 03/11/2014 (4339 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Sarah McLachlan has always kind of been Our Lady of Sorrow. There’s a reason she’s provided the soundtrack to upsetting montages of neglected animals and starving children — but she’s also been there for us in our darkest times. I mean, who hasn’t had a good, long cry with Sarah McLachlan?

But a Sarah McLachlan concert isn’t a sad-sack affair, and on her latest record, Shine On — which she brought to the Centennial Concert Hall on Monday night — she proves she can be there for us in the good times, too. It’s not all rainbows and sunshine, exactly, but it’s an album rooted in strength and perseverance, two things the West Coast songstress knows a few things about. 

Indeed, McLachlan, 46, seems like she’s in a good place these days, and she wants to spread the good vibes. She addressed the audience breezily before opening her two-hour show — presented in an An Evening With… format, two sets with an intermission and no opener — with In Your Shoes, her Malala Yousafzai-inspired lead single from the new album. It was the first of an evening’s worth of ethereal performances. She is absolutely stunning live. (Of course, she’s not all by herself up there; her band is a force.) Although she sounded like she was battling a bit of a cold while she was chatting between songs, she brought it during the performances. 

McLachlan wants to make you feel like you’re sitting in her living room on this tour, and she was successful; it often felt like she was singing right in your ear — particularly on an arresting performance of Answer early in the first set. The lighting design on this tour is, fittingly, warm and inviting, with ropes of white café lights, bare-bulb chandeliers and pendant light fixtures setting the mood.

Fans were rewarded with the hits early on; gorgeous renditions of Building a Mystery and Adia, from her landmark 1997 album Surfacing, were the second and third songs in, respectively. McLachlan isn’t the type to be overly faithful to the recorded versions of her songs, her keening vocal acrobatics adding new life to well-played singles such as Fallen and World on Fire. A held note here, a break in her voice there — one gets the sense that she performs in the moment. Those glimmers of spontaneity were welcome, especially in a year marked by tightly choreographed arena pop spectacle. 

Indeed, the show had an informal vibe, with Sarah (it feels appropriate to call her Sarah at this point) taking questions from the audience and chatting up the contest winners who got to enjoy the show from plush couches onstage. She signed autographs, cracked jokes and took photos. It was a lovely gesture — Sarah McLachlan is possibly the nicest lady in all of Canada — but it also felt a little awkward and threw off the pace of the show. 

“How about a nice, frothy love song? I don’t have too many of those. I have to pepper my set with them so we don’t get too depressed,” she quipped when she returned to the mic, before launching into the bouncy Loving You is Easy from 2010’s Laws of Illusion. After Monsters, she closed the first set with a soaring, cinematic performance of Stupid, that indelible voice beautifully wrapping around the peaks and valleys of the chorus.

She returned to the stage at ten minutes before 9 p.m. for the second set, which she opened with the earnest Song for my Father, which segued beautifully into I Will Remember You. She dedicated Brink of Destruction — it’s not how it sounds — to her “sweetie,” former NHL player Geoff Courtnall, eliciting a small chorus of “awwws” from the crowd. She rocked out a too, jamming on the piano during Love Beside Me, another new one.

Later on, she revisited the Q&A/couch format, chatting with a new group of fans. It was no less awkward, but Sarah’s so damn likeable that it was hard not to be touched by the whole thing. Few artists are so gracious. 

After a piercing performance of Fear — an acquired taste, that one — she brought home the second set with charging renditions of Sweet Surrender and Possession before returning for a four-song encore that included a mix of old favourites (a goosebump-raising solo piano performance of her signature tear-jerker Angel; the now-classic Ice Cream, a show highlight) and two more new songs (Beautiful Girl, and show closer The Sound That Loves Makes — a sweet ukulele love song penned by Winnipeg’s own Luke Doucet). 

It was a cherry on a truly lovely evening. Shine on, Sarah.

 

jen.zoratti@freepress.mb.ca