Glimmers of Ecstasy

By DAVID THIGPEN

Beneath the placid surfaces of Sarah McLachlan's songs runs an emotional torrent. As her piano and lonesome guitar sketch folk-rock tunes of elegant simplicity, McLachlan sings vivid tales of love gone wrong, of troubled souls grappling with infatuation, rejection and other extreme conditions of the heart. On Circle, a cut from her gorgeous new album Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, McLachlan captures the fractured hopes of a love affair headed south: "What kind of love is this that keeps me hanging on/ Despite everything it's doing to me?" In Possession she sings of a love that has crossed into obsession: "My body aches to breathe your breath/ Your words keep me alive/ And I would be the one to hold you down/ Kiss you so hard, I'll take your breath away." Far from indulging in simple emotional bloodletting, McLachlan creates exquisitely poised songs that resist anger or pathos.

Growing up in Halifax, Nova Scotia, McLachlan was a shy, awkward child who never fell in with the crowd. By her teens, accomplished on guitar and piano, she would kill time on long, frozen winter nights writing songs. She recorded her first album, Touch, at 19, drawing rave comparisons to another Canadian songwriter, Joni Mitchell. But McLachlan's background gives only partial clues to her emotion-laden style. "I write in an instinctual way that can apply to anyone who's fallen in or out of love or felt lost and hopeless," she says.

Now 25, McLachlan cuts a refreshingly lyrical path against the rage pervading society by suggesting that the answers to life's emotional earthquakes can come through perseverance and compassion. "It's a long way down," she sings on Ice Cream, reaching out to a brokenhearted lover. At such moments, McLachlan holds out hope for the desperately troubled. "To work through this stuff and come out on the other side," she says. "That's the ecstasy."