Fact #155630

It's never easy being the geeky kid. "I had braces and greasy hair," remembers Sarah McLachlan. "I was called Medusa. Boys would fall down on the ground and writhe and scream and say they were going to turn to stone."

Most kids, tortured by the unthinking cruelty that only other children can really inflict, would cry or scream or kick and scratch. McLachlan, however, took their rejection and transformed it into her own personal triumph, believing in herself against all the odds, working towards the international stardom that is now hers. "This all goes back to being twelve years old," she says, "and so wanting people to accept me and like me. It's like I'm still living that dream. I get to go up on stage and have all this adulation. People accept me. People like me. That feels great. It's the best drug in the world."

Sarah Ann McLachlan's need for the best drug in the world started the day she was born, 28 July 1968, in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her mother didn't want her. With no opportunity to know the woman who had carried her, she was adopted by Jack and Dorice McLachlan, a pair of ex-patriate American academics living in Halifax.

Buffetted by the chill winds that blow off the North Atlantic ocean, Halifax is Canada's main Eastern sea port. A friendly city, with a wealth founded on fishing, ship-building, oil refining and electronics, it's hard-working and worthy, dull enough to encourage practicality in a young girl, and small enough to inspire dreams of wider horizons.

The McLachlans provided Sarah, and her two elder brothers, also adopted, with a strict but loving family environment. "They were very, very strict. It wasn't out of meanness. My mother was strict because she loved me and she wanted to keep me safe. It's easy to look at those actions as an adult and not find any blame. I sure did when I was younger. I blamed her for everything."

And even then, the natural tendency to observe and absorb which would ultimately find expression in Sarah's songs, meant that Jack and Dorice were already her unwitting raw material. She revealed in 1994 that the song Good Enough, on the album Fumbling Towards Ecstasy "started out as fiction, about a couple in which the woman was pretty much alienated by just about everybody, because her husband was abusive and domineering, which sort of somewhat mirrors my mother and father's relationship."

Whatever problems lurked within the family, her adoptive parents recognised Sarah's love of music early on. "Since I could open my mouth I was singing. My idol, from the time I was four years old was Joan Baez. I wanted to play guitar and sing just like her. So my parents bought me a ukelele and I took lessons until I was big enough to hold a guitar."

A lifelong folk music fan, Dorice introduced her daughter to the songs of Cat Stevens, Simon And Garfunkel and "A lot of old, traditional folk music and I fell in love with it. I always loved music." She was seven when she was finally 'big enough to hold a guitar' and, soon after, started classical guitar lessons.

Her obvious musical gifts led her parents to enrol Sarah in the Nova Scotia Royal Conservatory of Music, where she began five years of operatic vocal training. In retrospect, she can look back and say, "Opera training gave me lots of control I otherwise would have lacked. There are glottal stop things where you sing really low, then open up and go really high. It's all in the control of your throat muscles." But the fact that she was exceptionally good at it, didn't necessarily mean she liked it. "I did spend years and years studying classical music, but I always resented it."

Inevitably, the McLachlans' pride in their angel-voiced daughter led them to push her further, encouraging her to perform at recitals and competitions. Although she appreciated the attention, Sarah's memories of singing at recitals are not happy ones. "Everybody's parents would sit there and say, 'That's my kid that I've been paying all this money for. Well, you'd better do good or you're going to get whacked when you get home.' All the proud parents were there and, of course, all the kids were just shitting their pants because their neck was on the line."

But the kid was good. Sarah won several singing competitions, most notably while in Grade 6 she walked off with the first prize in the Kiwanis Music Festival, singing Where The Bee Sucks in front of 2,500 people at Halifax's Rebecca Cohen Theatre.

By the time she was nine, the trophies had started to mount up and Sarah McLachlan's name featured from time to time in the local media. In a bizarre pre-echo of an incident that would haunt her in later life, her first photographic appearance in a local paper provoked disturbing phone calls from a never-identified sex fiend.

Luckily, kept constantly busy even after school with a ritual of piano practice before dinner, guitar practice after dinner, then homework until bedtime, Sarah was too pre-occupied to let an anonymous pervert prey on her young mind.

As she entered her teens, Sarah developed into a frail child with frizzy hair and teeth that needed braces, a lonesome outsider, constantly teased by classmates who seemed cool, popular and, worst of all, free to do whatever they liked. Sarah, in stark contrast, was allowed out of the house once a week, but always on condition that she had to be home by eleven. On one humiliating occasion, her open defiance of authority resulted in Sarah being grounded for an entire summer.

Another bitter memory involves the time when, desperate to be like the other kids, she begged Dorice to buy her a pair of fashionable cowboy boots. When Dorice finally agreed, Sarah was briefly bouyed up, only to be plunged back into the depths of adolescent despair when her mother insisted on buying the wrong style. Wearing them to school, Sarah quickly learned that the only thing that would attract more teen disdain than no cowboy boots was the wrong kind of cowboy boots.

Finding it impossible to be accepted by the crowd, Sarah chose to reject them and turned increasingly inwards, finding solace in an inner world where small minded schoolmates couldn't go, and where the only limit was her own fertile imagination.

By the time she was fourteen, Sarah found herself seduced and inspired by the lyrical imagery of poetry. "It's funny, the little things that stick with me my whole life. Wilfred Owen, he's a World War 1 poet, and he wrote about being in the field in the war and all the horrors that went on. But somehow, without glamourising or romanticising it, he made it incredibly beautiful. In the same breath, he'd be talking about something horrendously grotesque. I just really loved that. That's actually where the title of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy came from. It was taken from a line in one of his poems. 'Quick, boys, in an ecstasy of fumbling we fit the masks just in time.' And I thought that was amazing. It was so beautiful and since grade nine I've been trying to fit that into something."

Totally immersed in a world of music, art and poetry, it was hardly surprising that she was drawn to the 1984 movie Amadeus, about the life of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. As the images unfolded on the screen, Sarah couldn't stop herself from identifying with the composer from a bygone age. "I was so happy … he was this supposedly repulsive little fellow who made this absolutely beautiful, incredible music. I thought, 'That's me.'"

Around the same time, she was beginning to free herself from her mother's musical dictates. "When I was sixteen I started to listen to progressive music and new wave by The Cocteau Twins and Kate Bush. Then I discovered Peter Gabriel, who is a god to me. He just opened up a whole new meaning of music. He's so articulate, he writes great lyrics and has explored so many different kinds of music. He makes me want to achieve more and more with my own music."

Now, inspired by the diversity of popular music outside the confines of the classical world, Sarah McLachlan had a dream. "I wanted to become a musician, be like Kate Bush or Peter Gabriel, have a cult following and create the most amazing music." What she couldn't know was that, from the moment she started making her own music, her life would begin to change irrevocably.

Very much against her parents' better judgement, she joined her local Halifax high school band - The October Game. "It was a Sunday a week kind of thing where I was allowed to go out and rehearse with these guys," she remembers. They landed their first gig, a support slot to visiting Vancouver band, Moev, while Sarah was still in Grade 11. For the first time, she walked out on a stage without the feeling of dread that had accompanied her classical efforts. "I got up there, this lonely kid who had been kind of dissed her whole life, and people were smiling at me. It was so clear to me what I wanted to do." As she sang, she was aware that kids she knew from school were dancing to her music. It felt better than anything she'd ever done. "It was, 'Finally! Somebody likes me!' I knew I wasn't all messed up and ugly and stupid."

Out there in the dark, one young man she didn't know at all was watching with special interest. His name was Mark Jowett, and he was the guitarist for the headline band, Moev. Jowett was immediately taken by the quality of McLachan's voice, and the sincerity of her performance, but his interest was more than just the natural curiousity of one musician about another. Jowett was also the co-founder of a fledgling independent record label, Nettwerk, based in Vancouver out on Canada's west coast. Within minutes of hearing her sing, Jowett had decided to invite her to sing with his band, on a permanent basis.

"After the show," remembers McLachlan, "Mark came up and said that they were looking for a singer and asked if I was able to move to Vancouver… It was the best high of my whole life, and Nettwerk tried to sign me right then and there. It just felt so right. Everything was perfect - until I told my parents."

Her parents 'freaked out' and turned Jowett's offer down on her behalf. "My mother and father had a fit because I was barely getting through High School and they wanted me to finish and go to University and get a normal job - music was a very fun hobby, a nice diversion, but not something to be taken seriously and, of course, it was my dream. I was so angry that they wouldn't let me go…"

The October Game played just two more shows before splitting up, leaving Sarah to continue in the bars of Halifax as a solo performer. "Everybody was going to University, didn't have any money or any time to stick together, but I continued making music." She also continued studying and, to her parents' relief, graduated from high school. "I didn't give a shit about high school., but I'm glad they made me finish… But, you know, there's so much emphasis put on education. there's people out there with PhDs, driving cabs."

Although Sarah was devastated at losing the opportunity to further her rock career in Vancouver with Moev, no-one can be certain how it might have worked out. She had a great voice, but had never had any sufficiently cathartic experience to push her beyond performance, to take the giant step of writing her own soul-searching songs. As it turned out, if she had gone to Vancouver, that step might never have been taken.

In 1986, Sarah enrolled at Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, planning to design jewellery. While at the college, entirely by chance, she was introduced to an older woman, Judy James. But this wasn't just any older woman. This was the woman who had given birth to Sarah and then abandoned her. Speaking of that re-union, McLachlan has said, "It was strange and continues to be strange. I never was really interested in knowing her. I love my mother dearly, and she's really insecure about the whole thing. I don't want to hurt my birth mother, either, but my mother is my mother. To me, it's fascinating to know my birth mother, genewise. That's really it. My mom and dad gave me a Wonderful Life."

Nevertheless, that meeting was the experience which has inspired many of McLachlan's songs of abandonment and her intense examinations of the power of relationships, shot through with images of mother-figures.

A year after their first approach, Nettwork boss Terry McBride returned to the east coast, looking to find the girl they'd missed out on before. "Terry was in Halifax with Skinny Puppy and he came to Club Flamingo when I was working and asked to see me. He took me out to this $80,000 tour bus and offered me a five-record contract. Then I went back to work. This time, I freaked out."

By now, Sarah was legally old enough to make her own decisions without reference to her parents, so, after checking out the label with friends in the music business, she put her name to a contract with Nettwerk Records in June 1987. "They offered me a five-record deal based on ... really on that one show where they heard me sing, and I said to them 'Well, I've never really written a complete song in my life before - Are You Sure you want to do this?' And they said, 'Well, yeah, just come out Vancouver, we'll give you an eight-track and see what happens.' I'm really, really lucky - I was in the right place at the right time and I got this handed to me on a silver platter - and obviously I had to have had enough talent to sustain it and keep it going, but I was incredibly lucky."

The Nettwerk deal certainly wasn't going to make her rich, but the chance to make an album of her own was enough to ensure that a few months later Sarah McLachlan moved to a Vancouver, took a job in a sandwich bar and rented a modest apartment just up the road from Nettwerk's West Fourth Street office. Although she admits to having missed Halifax, she soon found herself falling in love with her new city and its warmer ocean. "Water plays a huge part in my life. I need to be near water; I love being in it. It's like being back to the womb… The whole of Vancouver is surrounded by oceans and beaches and there are a lot of great musicians and a lot of great people. Everybody is laid back but very socially, environmentally and politically aware."

For the first time in her life, the geeky kid with the greasy hair was surrounded by friends. She was in demand, and her opinions mattered. The only possible problem was that she now had to write a whole album's worth of songs. "I'd always found great joy and solace in music, and I was perfectly happy doing other people's music. At the same time, I'd always been writing little bits of things, but I'd never had the discipline to sit down and write a whole song. I'd never felt there'd been any reason for it. The contract was like, 'Okay, you're supposed to write a record, I guess I'd better get to work.' And I really had no clue what I was doing. It was just trial and error. I'd been rehearsing for this my whole life, and...I dunno...at nineteen I didn't have any fear. I don't remember having any fear anyway. It was just terribly exciting - and the thrill of my life, and my dream come true. So I just threw myself into it and... granted, certainly I had a lot of fun hanging around Vancouver and exploring, and I didn't work as hard as I probably should have - but that's mainly because I was following my instinct and I felt that these things had to come out naturally."

Eight months later, the songs were written and it was make or break time. Sarah McLachlan had an album to record.