April 13, 2024

30 years of sarah mclachlan's fumbling towards ecstasy

one last 30 year remembrance

Due to technical glitches and a little spacing out on my part, I missed this wonderful essay by Matthew Lawrence. This is an album that means a whole lot to me, and I'm so happy to publish this.

Sarah McLachlan - Fumbling Towards Ecstasy by Matthew Lawrence

I was about to start eighth grade when I first heard Sarah McLachlan in August 1994. The video for her song “Good Enough” had entered light rotation on VH1, which had recently rebranded itself as the “Music First” network. I spent most of that summer flipping between music video channels, MTV and CMT but mostly VH1. “Good Enough” is a slow song, a real downer, the narrator comforting an abuse victim who is probably a child. I have no idea why it was chosen as the third single from Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, McLachlan’s third album (and her first to have any serious commercial impact in the US). The video is quite literal, a little girl flinching at the touch of her deadbeat father while McLachlan, perfectly lit in black and white, sings the song in closeup to a restless camera. The visual hoo-ha has dated badly but McLachlan looks great. 

Fumbling Towards Ecstasy is a great winter album, all gloom and despair and ice and wind and fear. Released in the United States in February 1994, it opens with McLachlan telling us to listen to wind blowing across a great divide. Later in the album she describes the wind raping a trembling flower on a vine. In “Good Enough” the wind operates as an excuse for a victim to cover up the violence committed against her. 

McLachlan had retreated to Quebec to write and record the album, spending seven months in a cabin with her two cats and producer Pierre Marchand, so it’s easy to conclude that her environs inspired the album’s chilly motifs. Articles and reviews certainly frame the album that way, though I suspect a lot of that was just marketing and maybe also the fact that she’s Canadian. 

McLachlan’s lyrics often hint that something is very wrong rather than spelling it out directly—a breakup, someone dying, a general despair. One big exception to that is “Possession”, the album’s lead single and a song about McLachlan’s own experience with a stalker. The song is voiced by her predator (“And I would be the one to hold you down / Kiss you so hard / I’ll take your breath away”). The real-life predator later accused McLachlan of plagiarizing his letters to her, an attempt to get physically closer to her, but he committed suicide before the case ever went to court. 

I spent a chunk of last week crying in the car, because it’s Christmas and because several parts of my life are in shambles right now and this season really pours vinegar into all of the wounds at once. I’ve probably listened to Fumbling Towards Ecstasy twenty times lately and know firsthand how it appeals to people whose hearts are broken for one reason or another. It’s funny, because I also remember playing it all the time when my grandfather died in early 1995. (I may have gotten the CD for Christmas? My memory is good but not that good.) “Hold On” is a great grief song, a woman singing to God while attending to her husband’s deathbed—it was inspired by a documentary about AIDS. 

Having come of age in the nineties, I’m partial to a cryptic lyric. It was the era of Beck and Tori Amos and REM and big alternative hit singles with lyrics that made zero sense whatsoever. And while McLachlan would never write a “Devil’s Haircut” or a “Caught a Lite Sneeze” or a “What’s the Frequency Kenneth” she did exist comfortably on the radio in the context of those artists. And songs like “Mary” and “Wait” offer little glimpses of meaning that can be interpreted in all sorts of ways.

The album is not perfect. “Ice” is broken by a mournful saxophone that I love unconditionally but which is also very corny. The song is also apparently inspired by the exploitation of sex workers in Southeast Asia, a fact I wish I had never learned. The folksy “Ice Cream” is the album’s lightest song but also its weakest, even if I did throw it on lots of mixtapes as a teen. But the lyrics—”It’s a long way down to the place where we started from”—are just trying too hard. And then there’s the last song. 

Fumbling Towards Ecstasy ends with two connected songs in which the narrator overcomes her fear and succumbs to ecstasy, the exact nature of which is left to the listener. (The album is named after a line from Wilfred Owen, a queer World War I soldier and poet.) Producer Pierre Marchand has called “Fear” his favorite production, and it’s certainly the song that comes closest to the Peter Gabriel and Talk Talk influences that he and McLachlan cited in interviews as inspirations for the album. McLachlan sings in a higher register than usual, backed by a cello and squonking keyboards. It’s an outlier on the album and one that I think has actually aged particularly well. Then the album segues into the title track, which starts with the lines “All the fear has left me now / I’m not frightened anymore.”  Over the course of the song she actually says thirteen times that she won’t fear love, but in this song ecstasy sounds like settling down. I think I'd prefer the fear. 

Matthew Lawrence is an editor of the queer art journal Headmaster and is currently working with his partner to film a musical documentary project called Scandalous Conduct: A Fairy Extravaganza. 

Now that is a wrap on this project. Thank you again for reading. Regular newsletter programming resumes Monday.