Sarah McLachlan Marks 30 Years of Fumbling Towards Ecstasy at the Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory

Before she appeared on the stage at the Pavilion at Toyota Music Factory on Wednesday night, Sarah McLachlan appeared on the screens beside it.

The Grammy-winning singer-songwriter was making a pitch to support her Sarah McLachlan School of Music — three locations throughout Canada! — and amid the explanations, B-roll and requests for donations, the 56-year-old made a remark which unintentionally illuminated what was to come.

“Music is often the way into understanding ourselves and others,” she said, which is an apt summary of her third studio album, 1993’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy. The album's 30^th anniversary is the impetus for her current tour, which brought her back to North Texas for her first performance here in more than four years.

Ecstasy, a breakthrough for Nova Scotia native McLachlan (who would go supernova with its follow-up, 1997’s Surfacing), was a collection of songs playing to multiple strengths: bewitching, layered textures; her sparkling mezzo-soprano; vulnerable, earthy lyrics; and a sophisticated pop-rock sheen to the whole affair that has the weird effect of feeling timeless even as it is unmistakably a product of the early 1990s.


The near-capacity crowd, sweltering in the summer heat, was primed for nostalgia from the moment the lights went down (in what I’m sure was an absolutely intentional touch, the house music between sets featured exclusively female artists), but McLachlan, playfully, explained to the restless, fervent gathering they would have to wait: “We’re going to play some other songs first,” she purred. “Get you warmed up.” So, the first 45 minutes or so were given over to the rest of McLachlan’s catalog, pulling heavily from Surfacing, but also 2003’s Afterglow (“World on Fire”) and 2014’s Shine On (“Song for My Father”). (Tragically, there would be no justice this night for either of McLachlan’s Christmas records.)

The Surfacing material — the show-opening “Sweet Surrender,” “Building a Mystery,” “Adia” and “Witness” — was a delightful appetizer, although the highlight of the evening's first portion had to be “Answer,” from Afterglow, which found McLachlan seated at a grand piano as her five bandmates grouped around a single microphone to provide luminous harmony vocals.

Indeed, those bandmates — guitarist Lyle Workman, keyboardist Vincent Jones, drummer Matt Starr, bassist Luke Doucet and bassist-vocalist Melissa McClellan — were McLachlan’s secret sauce Wednesday, faithfully reproducing the dense, lush qualities of her music and providing considerable muscle and color throughout.

After darting off-stage for a quick clothing change, McLachlan returned, barefoot and ready to dive into the thorny beauty of Ecstasy. “I think Fumbling is my favorite record,” she observed early on. “I was young and unencumbered; I lived and breathed music for six, seven months. It was super cathartic to write my way through my challenges. ... The sadder the song, the more joy I get from singing it. It feels like a beautiful release — it heals me every day.”

That catharsis flowed from “Possession” (a still harrowing evocation of being stalked, seeking empathy for evil) to “Plenty” to the gorgeous “Good Enough” to the brittle “Ice” through to the title track, as McLachlan moved from acoustic to electric guitar to piano and back again.

Her voice, in fine fettle throughout, has made a few slight concessions to age — a previously stratospheric vocal flourish now pitched down, say — but incredibly, she pulled out all the stops for late album highlight “Fear,” which was astonishing to behold. The songs themselves were rendered faithfully throughout — sensual, searching and richly assembled — and part of that presentation was McLachlan’s still-peerless singing, lightly aged, but otherwise undimmed.

“We love what we do — it’s just magic,” McLachlan said late Wednesday. “I’ve been out of the game for close to 10 years doing shows with big bands, so I’m grateful. Thank you.”

The cascade of affection she received at that moment and throughout the night (cries of “I love you, Sarah!” ricocheted in the dark from beginning to end) affirmed the dedication of her fans, but also the durability of her work. Anniversaries can provide cause for reflection, and the work, viewed in hindsight, does not always hold up.

However, when it’s a fine-grained work of art like Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, a journey into an artist’s keen understanding of herself and the world around her, the excursion into the past makes for a deeply pleasurable evening in the present.