Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. We just spent the first part of the show discussing a new documentary about Lilith Fair. Now we're going to talk to the festival's founder, the Grammy award-winning Sarah McLachlan. This Friday, Sarah is releasing a new album, her first new music in 11 years. Here's the title track called Better Broken.

[MUSIC - Sarah McLachlan: Better Broken]

Maybe if I catch my breath

Maybe if I wait a little

I'd remember how it hurts and stop before I fall

I'd forget to come apart

I'd catch myself and hold on tightly

Let memory wash over me, forgive but don't forget

So don't come back to me begging

"Why'd you leave? Tell me why, how could you let this go?"

Let it be all it is

Small and still, a memory like a stone

A jagged edge made smooth by time

Let it be all it is

Small and still and better left alone

Somе things are better brokеn

Some things are better broken

Alison Stewart: Better Broken is out this Friday and Sarah McLachlan is here in studio now. It is so nice to see you again.

Sarah McLachlan: Thank you. I'm so glad to be back.

Alison Stewart: I'm so glad you're back as well. The title track, Better Broken, you started writing that song 13 years ago.

Sarah McLachlan: Actually, almost 14 years ago when I actually went back and did the timestamp thing. It was meant to be originally on my last record, Shine On, and then I didn't finish it in time. We ran out of time. I archived it away and forgot about it. Then when I was going through all those old records, I found it when trying to find material for this new one, and went, "Oh, this is actually pretty good. I got to finish this."

Alison Stewart: How much did the song change over that course of 14 years?

Sarah McLachlan: Very little. We just added the bridge. The lyrics were essentially there. There just wasn't a bridge, and I felt like it needed to go someplace. Then Benny Bach came in. He was the fourth member of our band. Myself, Tony Berg, Will McClellan, and my two producers. He is this musical prodigy. I'm like, "Hey, so can you just do a little bridge on these chords?" I had these really simple chords and he just turned it into this crazy, weird Prague fusion thing, and I'm, "Okay, that'll work. That's great."

Alison Stewart: It's interesting because I was listening to the song and I asked somebody else, I'm like, "Do you hear a record player in the middle of the song?" There is a record player in the back.

Sarah McLachlan: There is in the bridge. Yes. It goes into this retro nostalgia moment.

Alison Stewart: Why did you want to start with this particular song for your album?

Sarah McLachlan: It didn't turn out that way. As you build a record, as you put all the songs together, an emotional arc starts to take place and form. The title just made sense for everything that I was working on. The reclamation of self, this idea of resilience. This is a new chapter in my life. My little baby has just gone off to university, so I'm now an empty nester. There's been a lot of times over the last bunch of years where I've had to think about how to redefine myself. None of us gets to this point unscathed.

I'm 57 and I've lost both my parents and my brother to really hideous cancer. I've gone through a yucky divorce and one or two disastrous relationships after that, that I had to climb out from under and figure out who I was. Those stories, a lot of them appear on this record because even though I wrote a lot of this quite recently, I'm drawing on inspiration from things in the past, things that I actually have now a little more objectivity about, that I can write about with some more clarity.

Alison Stewart: How deep is that song archive of yours? Are we talking like Prince Vault deep? How deep?

Sarah McLachlan: Sadly, no. Honestly, I think Better Broken is probably it. There's six or seven other ideas from that time, but they weren't as strong. They weren't as fully formed. That being said, at some point they may well come back to the surface because musically I think they're strong. It's just the lyrics are the things that I really struggle with.

Alison Stewart: It's interesting. I looked at the whole record track and your songs are, in my opinion, normal length songs. They're four minutes, they're five minutes, they're not two and a half minutes, which a lot of artists are doing now.

Sarah McLachlan: I had too much to say.

Alison Stewart: I was going to ask you about that. Did you ever have that conversation with yourself or did you say, "No, I'm making songs."

Sarah McLachlan: No. I've been incredibly lucky in my career that I've had creative control since the get go. There were certainly times early on when it's like, "If you want radio play, it has to be under 3:30. You have to work on that." For a few songs, I went down that road, but generally speaking, for me, a song dictates what it's going to be, how long it's going to be, and I just let that flow.

Alison Stewart: It's your creative process. Just let it go.

Sarah McLachlan: Yes. That's where the good stuff comes out. When you're free, uninhibited, you're not editing yourself, you are just playing, singing with abandon for the medicinal pleasure of it.

Alison Stewart: How do you know when a song is done?

Sarah McLachlan: There is no mathematical equation, that's for sure. It feels right. It feels like I've taken it and experimented and gone down as many roads as I could and done the best possible job that I can with whatever subject matter I'm talking about, musically getting it to a really solid place where I feel proud of it, where I'm feeling like, "Okay, I can now let this go to the world." That's the point at which we go into the studio, and then this super collaborative process happens where you get other musicians and they all add their colors and their nuances to it to elevate it.

Alison Stewart: It sounds like you are into collaboration.

Sarah McLachlan: I love collaboration.

Alison Stewart: Why?

Sarah McLachlan: I love it. Because of that elevation. I can take things to a certain place where I feel good about it, but I love what other people will bring to something to make it, in my opinion, even better and more interesting.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Grammy award-winning artist Sarah McLachlan. She's here for a listening party for her new album, Better Broken. It is out this Friday. This song has an extra special significance for you? Gravity.

Sarah McLachlan: Yes, this is-- Sorry, you go ahead.

Alison Stewart: No, you go ahead.

Sarah McLachlan: I wrote this song as a love letter to my firstborn daughter. She and I have had a very challenged, almost combative relationship for very many years. We're both terribly similar and really stubborn and we just didn't see eye to eye on a lot of things. By the time she went away to university, we were ready for a break. She came back after a year. This is COVID 2020. It did not go well for her. She didn't have a good time. A lot of unpleasant things happened, and she was a mess and I could not reach her. I could not help her. She wouldn't open up to me.

After a couple of weeks, I was like, "I think we need some help." We went to see this family systems counselor that we'd been to before. After peeling back all the layers of the onion, what came out was the fact that she didn't feel safe to tell me what had happened to her because she thought she would be judged. She thought that I would blame her somehow, which is an awful thing to reckon with as a parent, especially because my mother was exactly like that. I thought that I was being so different as a parent. I feel like I was, but clearly, the way I was communicating with her, she was not getting that.

I had to learn how to change the way I talk to her. Also, within the counseling, what we thought in the past was ADHD actually was anxiety. We finally unraveled that and realized that all those challenges when she was younger, when this wall would go up, when hard things would be put in front of her, it wasn't obstinance or laziness or any of those things. It was this massive anxiety that was undiagnosed because I don't have it, so I didn't recognize it. She didn't have the language for it.

To recognize that's actually what it was, then to have tools to manage that, our relationship since has blossomed. I talked to her about, obviously, talking publicly about something that's very private and very vulnerable, a very vulnerable time in her life and mine, and she's like, "Oh, no, Mom, I want you to talk about it. I think this is really important, and it helped us so much. I want people to know about family systems counseling and how beneficial it can be for the whole family, really."

So far, she's still on board with that. I'm being pretty open. I'm very open about my own life, but it's quite something different to bring someone else's personal things into a very public forum.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to Gravity.

[MUSIC - Sarah McLachlan: Gravity]

Yours is an island of wild weeds and lush, tangled ground

Unbridled energy, all possibility

You pull yourself up on two feet that have not stood alone

Slowly and gingerly

Reaching with toes

It's hard, the way you look at me

With a rage I cannot place

But I'm not the enemy

I'll carry you through your pain

You can hide away, hold your heart at bay

I know you wanna be loved

Though life will come apart, break and unbreak your heart

I will be like gravity, always true

I won't give up on you

Alison Stewart: A beautiful song for a child to hear that I won't give up on you.

Sarah McLachlan: Yes. I think that's what every kid needs to hear, is that they've got a solid and safe place to land.

Alison Stewart: You're Sarah McLachlan, the Grammy winner. Do your kids treat you like Sarah McLachlan, the Grammy winner, or no?

Sarah McLachlan: Oh, no. No, no, no, no. Kids have a wonderful way of keeping things real and keeping you humble. They do not care unless I can get them tickets to shows.

Alison Stewart: That's true.

Sarah McLachlan: Then all of a sudden, I'm mildly elevated for a moment.

Alison Stewart: How has being a parent affected your songwriting?

Sarah McLachlan: The recognition that one's heart can expand way beyond what I thought my capacity for love was, that's opened up a whole new world of joy and terror. Honestly, the only other thing that's really changed is that being a parent is very busy-making. There's a lot of work involved. I used to be able to go and sequester myself away in the mountains for months and do nothing but write. Being ADD myself, there's a lot of my days punctuated by waking the kids up, giving them breakfast, taking them to school, picking them up.

I became a big dance mom for a bunch of years because my daughter was super into dance and still is. I was distracted by all those things, so it slowed the process down, really.

Alison Stewart: Distracted or--

Sarah McLachlan: Wildly distracted?

Alison Stewart: That's interesting.

Sarah McLachlan: Joyfully distracted by parenting. Especially in the last 10 years, having two teenage girls, dealing with the challenges with my daughter, I was also principal fundraiser for my free music schools off the side of my desk. I continued to play shows and tour a little bit, but songwriting took a back seat a little bit.

Alison Stewart: What brought you back into focus?

Sarah McLachlan: I think I finally had enough material, but also, actually, the first song that I wrote in a long time was Rise. I wrote that with Luke Doucet and later on with Anne Preven. It was coming out of COVID, really, with this hopeful idea that this thing could actually bring us together, bring humanity together, and didn't really turn out that way. It's this hopeful lament that, "Hey, we need to remember that ultimately we need each other. If we keep just standing on opposite sides of the street and screaming at each other, nothing's going to move forward." It's a utopian version of what's not happening right now, but what we'd like to happen, which is, "Hey, we need to figure this out together."

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to that track. This is Rise by Sarah McLachlan.

[MUSIC - Sarah McLachlan: Rise]

But we're going to need each other

To quiet the thunder

Who do we turn to

If we turn on each other?

We're going to need each other

If we listen in hunger

Chances and choices

Dreams of tomorrow

Will we rise

This time we're gonna do better

If we can cool things down

I know it tells the warning bells

Your thirst for higher

But there's nothing came from envy

Or your lust to prove me wrong

Embracing what divides us

It will never make us strong

Come on, we're going to need each other

To quiet the thunder

Who do we turn to

If we turn on each other?

We're going to need each other

And we listen in hunger

Chances and choices

Dreams of tomorrow

Will we rise

Alison Stewart: I'm Speaking with Sarah McLachlan. She's here for a listening party for her new album, Better Broken. It is out this Friday. On the show, I love music, as you know, I've had all the women who are on Lilith Fair. We've had Liz Phair, Suzanne Vega, Paul Cole's been on the show, but we also have a lot of young musicians who come on the show. Katie Gavin from Muna was on the show. She told us she's a big, big fan of yours. A big, big fan of Lilith Fair. I want to play this little clip that we talked about it.

Katie Gavin: I think they're my favorite musicians. There's so much brilliant songwriting going on there. There's so much introspection. I really think about the importance for me of seeing women and queer people seeing themselves as just the subjects in their own lives. I also think about the community. I remember watching the documentary and hearing about the Indigo Girls bringing everybody together and trying to encourage collaboration on the road. I also have to give a shout-out to Sarah. Building a Mystery on Spotify Wrapped, it was my top listened-to song for a couple of years.

Sarah McLachlan: I love that.

Alison Stewart: I love it, too. Where do you hear the Lilith Fair influence in our new generation of female songwriters, and male songwriters, or others?

Sarah McLachlan: I more see it in, women are dominating the airwaves. Women are championing other women, and women are having other women open up for them. That shift within the music industry, I think, really changed things. Over the years, one of the most beautiful stories that constantly comes up, young women in particular will come up to me and say, "I was there. You all showed me that I can do and be anything I wanted. I'm now running a corporation, and I'm hiring women."

It's that idea that we have always been in competition with each other for this very small sliver of pie that's been allotted to us in pretty much every walk of life, in all the systems that have been created by men for men. If we want to change things, ultimately, we have to start celebrating each other and lifting each other up and giving each other opportunities to create that change. I've seen that happen time and time again in the industry now.

Alison Stewart: Katie Gavin is on your record.

Sarah McLachlan: She's on my record. Yes. I will say as well, I'm a massive fan of her. She is hugely talented and a lovely human.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to Reminds Me featuring Katie Gavin.

[MUSIC - Sarah McLachlan feat. Katie Gavin: Reminds Me]

Baby, your love's what I want

When everything's changing

Yours is the light that I lean on

Reminds me how healing a good love can be

We started out as friend

And then we fell into the deep

When we first kissed, I nearly drowned

But you took my hand and you led me to wonder

Like all that was lost had been found

Baby, when I'm feeling blue

Your smile can save me

Pulls me up out of the trenches

Reminds me how easy my life is with you

I used to think love was heavy work

Trying to lift up the broken ones

I wasted so much time

But those mistakes led me to you

Now I know it was worth walking that crooked line

'Cause you and me were meant to be

A sweet and simple melody

And I want to sing this song for you

Until our time has all run through

You're all I want, all I need

If all I have is you

Alison Stewart: We're Talking to Sarah McLachlan. Her new album is called Better Broken. You have a new production team in play.

Sarah McLachlan: Yes. Tony Berg and Will Maclellan. Before I started making this record, I-- I've been working with Pierre Marchand for 35 years. I love and adore him and what we created, but at the time, I thought, "This might be my last record, and I owe it to myself to step out of my comfort zone and challenge myself a little bit." It honestly felt like cheating at first, but Pierre was really gracious and lovely about it, and he's like, "No, no, go do it. Go try it." We had the best time.

It's like blind dating, you get into this instantly. You get into a studio, and it's this very intimate, vulnerable environment that you put yourself in, where I was like, "Okay, I'm just going to open my world up to you and show you all the things I've been working on." I played Gravity for Tony the very first day. He heard it once, and he sat down at the piano. He says, "May I?" He sat down at the piano and played the entire thing back to me, but added a couple of interesting chord changes in it that actually, in my opinion, made it better. I'm like, "Okay, first of all, it's not the simplest song to just-- Wow, how did you do that?"

Then he actually made it better, so I thought, "Okay, this is going to be good." Then, getting in there within three days, it had felt like I'd known these guys forever. It was so creative and so inspired.

Alison Stewart: How did they push you? A producer's job is to make you look good, but it's also to push you.

Sarah McLachlan: Tony pushed me a lot lyrically. He really was like, "Yes, the music is really, really great. This song, it needs a little bit of help." First of all, I was like, "Oh, damn you. No, I like it. It's really good," but as soon as he said that, I couldn't unhear it or unthink it. Then, because I had so much respect for him, I went back in and reworked a few things, and I made them better. He forced me not to settle, which is great. He did a very good job.

Never mind being a brilliant musician and arranger and having just the greatest ideas when introducing a new musician to a song, just creating a story around it, around the kind of drum kit, for instance, we needed for If This is the End. He said, "I need the saddest Salvation Army drum kit." Matt Chamberlain said, "Okay," and went over to his studio, pulled out these sloppy old drums, and put together this kit that just somehow sounded so sad but fantastic as well and perfect for the song. He's really great at pulling out not only great performances, but just creating a picture that really allows a musician just to fully shine.

Alison Stewart: You were kind enough to let us play one more song, which you're not releasing until Friday. One in a Long Time. What do you want people to know about this song?

Sarah McLachlan: Oh, One in a Long Line. This was the last song--

Alison Stewart: Ling Line, excuse me.

Sarah McLachlan: That's okay. This is the last song I wrote. I wrote actually with Anne Preven for this record. I think when I was starting to make music for this record, and starting to produce it, I was a little bit concerned about how vocal I was going to be about certain things I saw going on in the world. I've never been political in my music, but I felt like considering since Roe v. Wade getting overturned and watching this insidious erosion of the rights of women, not only in America, but all over the world, and thinking, "How is it that we're going backwards?" and the anger and the frustration around that.

I have two daughters who are coming up in the world, and I believe every woman should have agency over their bodies. Anyway, this song is about that.

Alison Stewart: The name of the album is Better Broken. It is out this Friday. My guest has been Sarah McLachlan. It has been lovely to chat with you.

Sarah McLachlan: Thank you. So nice to be back.