“Possession” – Sarah McLachlan
(Words/music: Sarah McLachlan, available on Fumbling Towards Ecstacy, Arista 1993)

When Sarah McLachlan retires to the Canadian countryside, the Lilith Fair will be the biggest part of her legacy.  While the fair was fodder for jokes (and, in retrospect, helped fill playlists in Starbucks nationwide), it provided a tremendous spotlight for female musical acts.  These days, she’s most commonly seen in those super depressing (which I guess means “super effective”) commercials for the ASPCA with all the sad looking animals.  These commercials use her song “Angel,” a piano ballad mourning someone who recently died.  It’s a song that’s become a convenient pop-cultural requiem, popping up whenever someone needs to soundtrack a montage of the recently deceased (and sure enough, someone on YouTube made a video for Michael Jackson using this song).  As someone who believes that a song contains many meanings to many people, I’m fine with this even if I think it’s a superficial interpretation.  McLachlan’s revealed in interviews that she wrote the song for deceased Smashing Pumpkins touring musician Jonathan Melvoin after overdosing on heroin.  Looking past the titular line, the song describes someone who buckles under his addictions – specifically, someone who only finds peace when they have passed on.  This makes sense in the context of Jackson (or even those poor rescued animals), but perhaps not for someone’s great grandmother who dies of natural causes.  Then again, who am I to judge – we all have our own demons, and that’s just my reading of the song.

Still, my point is that McLachlan gets lumped in with the rest of the Paste Magazine, Starbucks counter adorning singer-songwriters singing middle of the road songs, but many of McLachlan’s songs run deeper than face value.  Take “Possession” – a song famously written based on letters McLachlan received from a stalker.  It can be read as a song about obsessive love, which naturally some people will interpret as “passionate love” or “unrequited love,” but McLachlan fills her song with so many charged words and phrases.  The narrator feels “betrayed,” “trapped,” and finds truth “enslaved” and wants to “kiss you so hard” and “take your breath away.”  McLachlan fills the arrangement with minor chords and electronically affected drums that give the song an icy feeling almost like it’s the stranger making eyes at you from across the room.  McLachlan’s vocals are strong but largely stay in the safe area in her vocal register, however, when she lets her voice climb to the top of her range on key lines (the “I won’t be denied” line in particular), it underscores some of the more disturbing parts of her lyric.  It’s a song that, like a prospective disturbed lover, doesn’t reveal all of its secrets right away.  If it came out fifteen years later, it would have been quoted all over Facebook walls and AIM away messages.  I’d like to blame them, but it’s darkly seductive and hides its pathos well.  Sure, interpretation lies in the individual, but make sure you read the details closely before making that next mix tape for a potential romantic interest.

More on Sarah McLachlan: Allmusic | Amazon MP3 | Emusic | Last.fm