In Thursday’s (6/28) Detroit News, Adam Graham interviews Canadian singer and songwriter Sarah McLachlan about her tour this summer, during which she is performing her own songs backed by a symphony orchestra. Though McLachlan explains that her first experience playing with a symphony orchestra, at the Vatican fifteen years ago, “put a bad taste in my mouth,” she says she “fell completely in love with it” after a show she performed last summer at the Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. “The 44-year-old calls the symphony backing ‘a new pillow blanket,’ ” writes Graham, “and describes it as ‘warm, cozy beauty surrounding the songs in a whole new way.’ It’s given her a chance to reinvent her catalog and bring it new life. ‘The ballads in particular, it breathed new life into them,’ says the mother of a 10- and 5-year-old. ‘Having that huge cinematic approach is really beautiful, and it took the songs to a whole new place for me as a performer.’ ” McLachlan says of composer Vince Mendoza, an arranger who has worked with McLachlan on song arrangements, “His only question to me was, ‘Do you want it big, or do you want to keep it small?’ I said, ‘Oh, go big. I want epic.’ And I got epic.’”
Posted June 29, 2012
