Warm sunlight streamed through the windows onto the gently stained wood floors of Sarah McLachlan's West Vancouver home on a recent Thursday morning. The lady of the house was in her kitchen, making truffles.
"Organic raw chocolate!" she said, pouring the confection into a mould. Later, after saying goodbye to her yoga partner and sharing a few choice hugs with her three-year-old daughter, Taja, the singer-songwriter would pack those sweets in Tupperware and bring them downtown to a band rehearsal for her summer tour headlining the revived Lilith festival.
The pop star as deeply fulfilled mum, surrounded by friends and family and the flowers in her lovely garden, with a recording studio in the guest house and three pianos scattered throughout the property for whenever inspiration strikes. Yet this 42-year-old working mum has troubles others will recognise.
Taja is an easy kid, but her older sister India is "challenging". Grandpa, who lives five minutes away, suffers from Parkinson's disease. Family demands are "the reason it takes so damn long" to make music, said the singer-songwriter, whose Laws of Illusion is her first all-original album in seven years.
Another imperfect reality has bought her more time alone: McLachlan recently split from her husband, Ashwin Sood, the longtime drummer in her band. "There are not many benefits of separation," McLachlan said. "One small benefit is that my daughters go to Dad's a couple of days a week. And so there are those mornings when I wake up and have the place to myself."
McLachlan isn't much for complicated ruses or dark secrets.
When she became a star in the 1990s, some faulted her for being the most facile member of a class of strong women artists that included thornier singer-songwriters such as Tori Amos and Polly Jean Harvey. "That's the way I am in every element of my life. I'll talk to any stranger about everything. I'm not guarded," she said.
On Laws of Illusion, McLachlan's lack of pretence serves her well. It's a vulnerable and clear-headed set, putting McLachlan in the company of Court Yard Hounds, Tracey Thorn and Erykah Badu, a vanguard of artists getting at the complexities of feminine adulthood. "It's terribly pedestrian," said McLachlan of the life that's inspiring her current music.
"There's nothing special about it. Half the bloody world is going through a divorce, more than that are having children. All of us have parents who are dying, or have died. It's just the life cycle."
McLachlan wrote Laws of Illusion with her longtime producer Pierre Marchand, but the mood that rules the album is not the swooning romanticism that made her 1990s albums so beloved. Instead, it has the sober-minded insight that comes after some hard knocks.
Doubting herself
Even the sugar-poppy Loving You Is Easy, about a post-marital romance that's over, was born of McLachlan's doubts.
"I thought, I'm 40, and I've got two little kids," she said. "It doesn't matter how successful I am, how famous, how wealthy. I'm 40 and I've got two little kids! My friends all shook their heads and said, that's crazy talk. But I didn't feel that way. And it took a good while for me to come out from under that and feel good again."
McLachlan values the flexibility the Lilith women's music festival offers — if her dad's health declines, she could take a few dates off and other acts could take the final slot. But she's also eager to stress the festival's ideal of female-centred community.
Equally important to her is the roving community it creates. It's a realisation of an approach to life that puts connections with other women, and the feeling of family, at the fore.
"Maybe with Lilith, there's not so much of a need," McLachlan said, acknowledging that more women are out front in pop today than in 1996.
"It's more of a want. One of the things I remember the most about Lilith, and that I yearn for, is that sense of community. We are in an age of technology where we sit in our little cubicles and we IM each other and Skype each other and never connect as human beings. There was an incredibly powerful and intangible feeling of being with these women.
"I just spent five days with 21 women on an island in the Caribbean for a friend's 40th birthday," she said, connecting her Lilith experience to her life among Vancouver's professional elite.
"It was powerful. There were some really great conversations and connections. There were a bunch of PhDs there, and heads of NGOs ... and four lactating women with babies under seven months. It just felt so good to be with your clan. "
McBride, along with Nettwerk President Dan Fraser and booking agent Marty Diamond, handles Lilith as a product.
The concert industry is suffering this summer, and Lilith has already had some very visible problems.
Dates in Nashville and Phoenix were cancelled and Norah Jones has left the tour. Live Nation, the tour's promoter, has been offering discount tickets for Lilith along with many of its other current offerings. Asked about the discounts, McBride got a bit defensive.
"How do we respond to fans when they bought tickets and resold [tickets] for 500 per cent profit, and none of that went to the artists," he said, perhaps unintentionally conflating fans and ticket scalpers. "All we're doing is reacting in a very honest way to market conditions. "This summer is going to be a grind," he admitted. Then he scrambled back to his positive stance. "I think next summer will be even more magical. Lilith in 1997 was not that big. In 1998 it grew by 50 per cent."
Laws of Illusion sold 94,000 copies to debut at No 3 on Billboard's Top 200 chart.
McLachlan is far from the only artist on the tour. Its 34 dates feature a diverse revolving bill. In San Diego and Los Angeles, Mexican American regional music star Jenni Rivera will appear alongside Emmylou Harris, Brandi Carlile and Miranda Lambert.
