SARAH MCLACHLAN FLAWLESS IN CIVIC THEATRE CONCERT
If one needed proof that things only get better with age, evidence supporting that supposition clearly was on display Tuesday night at Sarah Mclachlan’s concert in San Diego.
The Grammy-winning songstress — in town at the Civic Theatre for an engagement billed as “An Evening With Sarah Mclachlan” — delivered a flawless performance that served as a melancholic retrospective of a career spanning more than three decades, dating back to 1987, when she released her first album, “Touch.”
In front of a near-capacity crowd, Mclachlan — whose last studio album, “Wonderland,” was released in 2016 — performed a 21song set that blended her greatest hits with deep cuts alongside a Peter Gabriel cover (“Mercy Street”) and a new song (“Wilderness”) from a yet-to-be-completed new album.
“I’m having such a good time,” Mclachlan declared about halfway through her intermission-less, 90-minute concert. “I love this. I love the energy. I love everything.”
The Civic Theatre, which at full capacity can seat 2,967, has proved to be a less-than-adequate venue in the past, especially where music is concerned. Productions of touring musicals have suffered because of muffled sound, making some songs and dialogue unintelligible. On Tuesday, the venue’s acoustics stepped up, with the Canadian singer-songwriter’s voice as crisp and clear as a Nova Scotian summer.
When she began singing the first notes of “In Your Shoes,” from her 2014 album “Shine On,” it was evident that Mclachlan, now 52, still possesses the pristine voice that made her sound uniquely hers — velvety and vulnerable that can soar and sink at her beck and call.
Twenty-three years after the release of her best-selling album, “Surfacing,” she demonstrated the same musical prowess that catapulted her to Grammy fame in 1998, for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance (for “Building a Mystery”) and for Best Pop Instrumental Performance (for “Last Dance”).
For her second song, Mclachlan, accompanied by the quite able vocalist and cellist Vanessa Freebairnsmith,
dipped into her 1993 album, “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy,” and delivered a dazzling rendition of “Possession,” the dark and moody ballad that, she says, “many people tell me they walked down the aisle to.”
“If only they knew it was about a stalker!” she said, eliciting roaring laughter.
Dressed in skintight black leather pants and a salmon-colored top, Mclachlan looked and sounded comfortable on stage, equipped only with a grand piano and the occasional guitar (acoustic and electric) and ukulele (utilized with un-mclachlanlike bounce in the nightclosing song, “The Sound That Love Makes,” from her 2014 album “Shine On”).
By the third song — the ballad “I Will Remember You” from the 1995 film “The Brothers Mcmullen” — we were definitely in very familiar Mclachlan territory, a musical landscape that’s folk, country, rock and Americana all at once. On the piano, with eyes closed, she uttered every lyric and sang every note with such emotion and honesty, it felt sinfully voyeuristic to be in the same room, let alone enjoying every minute of it.
It was that kind of powerful vulnerability that made “An Evening With Sarah Mclachlan” special. The singer proudly carries her badge of honor: “Yes, I love the dark stuff.” Most of her biggest hits were created using a formula right out of the Mclachlan playbook: girl meets boy, boy turns out to be a jerk, girl breaks up with boy, girl writes a song about the breakup.
It’s a foolproof formula that paid dividends Tuesday during her triumphant return to San Diego, from the slow-burning “Sweet Surrender” (from 1997’s “Surfacing” album) to the crowd-favorite-yet-tearinducing “Angel” (Tuesday night, it was part of a threesong encore).
She paid homage to her father, who passed away several years ago, with “Song for My Father,” a tender ballad, also from “Surfacing,” whose lyrics, she says, still ring true: How I wish that I could lean upon you now / Amidst the chaos and the noise.
She paid homage, too, to Peter Gabriel, whom she said in a recent Union-tribune interview “is my singular hero! I studied him. I studied everything about him, his music and lyrics, and why it makes me feel the way it does. I want to make other people feel the way he makes me feel with his music.”
Her cover of “Mercy Street,” Gabriel’s song from his 1986 album “So,” was searingly haunting, musically and lyrically. She followed the goosebump-inducing rendition with a loving tribute to her daughters, a touching “Beautiful Girl.”
Next, she changed the pace with the playful and flirty “Loving You Is Easy,” her 2010 song from the album of the same name. The rest of the evening was vintage Mclachlan: rebellious and honest, unafraid to juxtapose “Monsters” alongside the easygoing “Ice Cream” — “my only singalong,” she joked.
Mclachlan may not be topping charts these days, but she isn’t going anywhere. Next up, she promises, is an album “that’s almost done.”
If the Sarah Mclachlan we heard and saw is any indication — one displaying a refreshing mix of candor and courage — that album will be a keeper once it’s finally released.
Until then, we’ll always have Tuesday night at the Civic.
michael.rocha@sduniontribune.com