Fumbling Towards Ecstasy

Four years before she founded Lilith Fair—a traveling music festival which prioritized the work of and the collaboration between women musicians—and just before she broke into the upper regions of the American charts with “Building a Mystery,” Sarah McLachlan was alone in the Canadian woods. In order to write and record her third album, 1993’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, the Nova Scotian singer-songwriter isolated herself and her two cats in a cabin located in the mountains of southern Quebec. She felt incapable of writing anything for the first three months, faintly aware of something stirring inside her which routinely failed to assemble into words or songs. It was cold. Snow had accumulated on the windows of the cabin in thick columns, and the temperature sank into the negative 30s. Outside were mammoth rock formations and woods and ice and an empty dark that invaded them at night. She felt small and alone.

McLachlan had grown self-conscious about her previous two albums, considering them either too amateurish or rigid in their writing and production. Her debut, Touch, consisted of the first songs she’d ever written; in lieu of any personal experience, she adapted her lyrics largely from the material of her dreams. Her second album, Solace, expressed a confusion and displacement she associated very specifically with her early twenties, a “mourning of [her] lost innocence,” as she told Hot Press in 1994. So she settled herself within the vastness of the mountains of Quebec longing for a kind of self-annihilating perspective—to get close to herself by getting as far away from her life as possible.

In the year before she situated herself in the wilderness, McLachlan had found herself stalked by two of her fans. They followed her from show to show and wrote her letters that progressively warped into disturbing exposures of their inner psyches. One of them moved to Vancouver, where McLachlan lived at the time, and routinely materialized in her neighborhood. “[There were instances] like running into them a couple of blocks from my house, and saying they’d been there for a couple of days,” she told the Toronto Star in 1993. “It was pretty scary. I stopped answering my mail a long time ago. I had my best friend answering it for a while, and then she had nightmares so she’s not doing it anymore, either.” A court issued a restraining order against the fan, but McLachlan was considerably shaken by the experience. She started looking over her shoulder whenever she left her house, checking her periphery for any menacing, incoming blurs.

While writing the album, McLachlan kept a small journal. Every morning she’d fill three pages of it with free association, circular thoughts about coffee that would barely solidify in her head before disintegrating, but which, halfway through her second page, would evolve into a kind of accidental introspection. She would play Tom Waits records, and she would focus on the slow redistribution of detail on one of her favorite albums, Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden. On that record, Mark Hollis, the principal member of Talk Talk, abandoned his band’s synth-pop aesthetic and stretched his new compositions out like canvas, applying his voice to them in minimal, liquid strokes that interrupted and gave shape to the yards of silence that surrounded it.

Then spring arrived. The snow evaporated and McLachlan discovered that a river, recently thawed, flowed just behind her cabin. Small blooms unfolded on branches of the trees outside. “The whole world just blew up like I’ve never seen it before,” she said. “Everything became so amplified.” She started writing songs again, and would now routinely walk the two miles from her cabin to the studio with whatever ideas she had gathered over the course of the day. Whether it was a fully-formed song or a flicker of an idea, she and her producer, Pierre Marchand, would add musical ornaments—the scattered pulse of a drum machine, a few pale shimmers of electric guitar—until they sounded like whatever it was that Sarah McLachlan songs were beginning to sound like. The songs were located somewhere between the suggestive adult contemporary gloss of her previous albums and something as boundless and figural as Spirit of Eden, a vast stone temple in which her sourceless voice echoes and decays.

This is the image that Fumbling’s first song and lead single, “Possession,” places in my head, or rather it’s the painterly details of its sound design that submerge my head in that colossal space. “Listen as the wind blows/From across the great divide,” McLachlan sings, her voice drowsy, delayed, unraveling at the same pace as a pale ribbon of smoke, “Voices trapped in yearning/Memories trapped in time.” McLachlan wrote “Possession” about her stalker; the song actually takes place in the tortured, pressurized depths of his perspective. The lyrics reproduce the rhetorical and metaphysical somersaults that appear in devotional religious texts; the narrator of “Possession” conceives of his own desire as an empty tomb where he sits and yearns, consumed by an ancient longing.

For McLachlan, inhabiting this perspective was a way for her to convert her trauma into a kind of investigation of the often porous border between desire and obsession. (Her stalker attempted to sue her for harvesting the details of the song from the content of his letters; before the suit could ascend into any court, he killed himself.) The question that animates “Possession” is the question that animates the majority of her work since, most visible in songs like “Sweet Surrender” and “I Love You”: Why does falling in love feel like lightning forking through the body?

“Possession” begins an album significantly shadowed by sexual violence. It had begun to drone constantly in McLachlan’s life—in addition to her experience of being stalked, in the previous year she had accompanied the relief organization World Vision to Thailand and Cambodia, assisting in the filming of a documentary about poverty and child prostitution. What she saw there opened up unexpected and unfamiliar space in her. “I came away with a broader understanding of the world, of the darkness that exists out there,” is how she explained it to Maclean’s in 1994. “I’ve tried to express that as honestly as I could.” This darkness flows even into “Good Enough,” which McLachlan recently described as being about “the love and the trust and the companionship that’s shared between women”; its warm reassurances sound as if they’re responding to an abusive relationship still hovering at the song’s edges: “Don’t tell me why he’s never been good to you,” she sings. “...I’ll show you why you’re so much more than good enough.”

In several of her interviews from around the time, McLachlan describes songwriting as a form of therapy, a method of contemplating and analyzing a life experience by pulling it through yourself in reverse. ”Ice,” the most harrowing and skeletal song on the record, is where McLachlan tries to process the bottomless dark she encountered in Cambodia and Thailand. “I’ve always tried to portray a sense of hope in the songs before, but that one doesn’t really have much,” she said. The song, initially supported only by McLachlan’s vocal and guitar, is slowly circulated by saxophone phrases, which then lapse, as if responding to the song’s subject, into sustained dissonances. “The only comfort is the moving of the river,” McLachlan sings. “You enter into me, a lie upon your lips.” Her voice multiplies and wreaths the song in ghosts of itself, which make it feel more complete but no less hollowed out.

Pierre Marchand, McLachlan’s producer, was a protégé of U2 and Peter Gabriel producer Daniel Lanois; like Lanois, Marchand’s productions tend to make individual instruments sound as if they’ve been drawn through a thick bruise of pigment. Fumbling isn’t particularly swathed in reverb; there’s enormous clarity in the mix. But Marchand’s effect, via Lanois, makes each instrument appear caught in a kind of luminous aura, as if filmed by the space age lenses which gave the candlelight in the movie Barry Lyndon its plural glow. You can hear it in the guitar that McLachlan strums at the start of “Hold On”; even suspended in empty space, the chord seems to ripple and catch light like the skin of a lake.

After recording Fumbling, McLachlan toured for almost two years before she and Marchand assembled its follow-up, Surfacing, her commercial breakthrough in the U.S. It’s a simpler, more straightforward, less immersive album about love and guilt; on “Angel,” her most enduring hit from the album, she traces the slow narcotic spiral of someone’s heroin overdose with just her piano and voice. Barely a month after Surfacing came out, Lilith Fair began, which rewrote the idea of a festival as a space where women could celebrate each other, and which helped invent space on radio and on the charts for musicians like Paula Cole and Shawn Colvin. McLachlan’s music now supported structures larger than herself. Her songs became more general than liminal; they’ve rarely revisited Fumbling’s cathedral immensity, the sensation of feeling remarkably alone in a haunted space.

The title Fumbling Towards Ecstasy comes from a poem McLachlan first encountered in high school—“Dulce et Decorum Est,” written by World War I poet Wilfred Owen. The line had circulated through McLachlan’s head for years: (“Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling/Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time.”) It depicts the fluttering rhythm issued by of a group of soldiers desperately trying to secure their gas masks and helmets in a fog of poisonous gas. This is the kind of imagery McLachlan was drawn to, of tragedy and horror producing, against all odds, what felt like excerpts of grace. When she explained the title to the Calgary Herald in 1993, she said, “You can get glimpses of [ecstasy]. You can get there for a second but it’s always going to go away.” Even the most untroubled song on Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, “Ice Cream,” is suspended over a deep dread. “Your love is better than ice cream/Better than anything else that I’ve tried,” McLachlan sings against soft blushes of piano. “It’s a long way down to the place where we started from.” For McLachlan, the substance of ecstasy is its elusiveness. Its absence invents its possibility.