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'Have I gone too far?': Sarah McLachlan faces her toughest critic on new album

Matt Licari
/
AP

Sarah McLachlan has won multiple Grammy and Juno awards and she's sold tens of millions of albums. She's used to playing for crowds of thousands.

On her latest album, Better Broken, there's one person whose opinion mattered more than anyone else's, especially on the song "Gravity": her eldest daughter.

"I sent it to her and said, 'Hey, I wrote this song about us and our experience' and 'What do you think?'," McLachlan says. "The silence for two days and I was, like, 'Have I gone too far?' "

Her daughter did reply, and in today's session, you'll hear about how "Gravity" came together, plus more stories about the making of Better Broken. It's McLachlan's first album of original material in more than a decade, and it's her first time working with a new producer too.

"It was a little bit, like, at the beginning, blind dating," she says. "I've been with my other producer, Pierre Marchand, for 35 years. I felt a little bit like cheating at the beginning."

McLachlan also revisits Lilith Fair, the traveling music festival she founded in 1997.

Featured Songs

  • "Better Broken"
  • "Gravity"
  • "One in a Long Line"
  • "Reminds Me"
  • "If This Is the End..."

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Kimberly Junod.  Our digital producer is Miguel Perez. World Cafe's engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.

Raina Douris, an award-winning radio personality from Toronto, Ontario, comes to World Cafe from the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), where she was host and writer for the daily live, national morning program Mornings on CBC Music. She is also involved with Canada's highest music honors: Since 2017, she has hosted the Polaris Music Prize Gala, for which she is also a jury member, and she has also been a jury member for the Juno Awards. Douris has also served as guest host and interviewer for various CBC Music and CBC Radio programs, and red carpet host and interviewer for the Juno Awards and Canadian Country Music Association Awards, as well as a panelist for such renowned CBC programs as Metro Morning, q and CBC News.
World Cafe senior producer Kimberly Junod has been a part of the World Cafe team since 2001, when she started as the show's first line producer. In 2011 Kimberly launched (and continues to helm) World Cafe's Sense of Place series that includes social media, broadcast and video elements to take listeners across the U.S. and abroad with an intimate look at local music scenes. She was thrilled to be part of the team that received the 2006 ASCAP Deems Taylor Radio Broadcast Award for excellence in music programming. In the time she has spent at World Cafe, Kimberly has produced and edited thousands of interviews and recorded several hundred bands for the program, as well as supervised the show's production staff. She has also taught sound to young women (at Girl's Rock Philly) and adults (as an "Ask an Engineer" at WYNC's Werk It! Women's Podcast Festival).