Sarah Ann McLachlan, OC, OBC (born January 28, 1968) is a Canadian musician, singer, and songwriter. Known for her emotional ballads and mezzo-soprano vocal range, McLachlan's best-selling album to date is Surfacing, for which she won two Grammy Awards (out of four nominations) and four Juno Awards. In addition to her personal artistic efforts, she founded the Lilith Fair tour, which showcased female musicians on a scale that had never been attempted before. The Lilith Fair
concert tours took place from 1997 to 1999, and resumed in the summer
of 2010. On May 6, 2014, she released her first album of original music
in four years, titled Shine On.
as of 2009, she has sold over 40 million albums worldwide.
Sarah McLachlan was born on January 28, 1968, and adopted in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
As a child, she took voice lessons, along with studies in classical
piano and guitar. When she was 17 years old and still a student at Queen Elizabeth High School,
she fronted a short-lived rock band called The October Game. One of the
band's songs, "Grind", credited as a group composition, can be found on
the independent Flamingo Records release Out of the Fog and the CD Out of the Fog Too. It has yet to be released elsewhere. Her high school yearbook predicted that she was "destined to become a famous rock star."
Following The October Game's first concert at Dalhousie University opening for Moev, McLachlan was offered a recording contract with Vancouver-based independent record label Nettwerk by Moev's Mark Jowett. McLachlan's parents insisted she finish high school and complete one year of studies at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design before moving to Vancouver and embarking on a new life as a recording artist, and McLachlan finally signed to Nettwerk two years later before having written a single song.
In 1994 McLachlan was sued by Uwe Vandrei, an obsessed fan from Ottawa who alleged that his letters to her had been the basis of the single "Possession." The lawsuit was also challenging for the Canadian legal system: Vandrei was a self-admitted stalker
whose self-acknowledged goal in filing the lawsuit was to be near
McLachlan physically. Consequently, special precautions were planned to
ensure McLachlan's safety if she had to be in the same location as
Vandrei at any time. But before the trial began, Vandrei was found dead
in an apparent suicide. This topic was explored at length in Canadian
author Judith Fitzgerald's book, Building a Mystery: The Story of Sarah McLachlan & Lilith Fair.
In 1997, Sarah McLachlan married her drummer, Ashwin Sood,
in Jamaica. While she was pregnant, she lost her mother to cancer in
December 2001. She gave birth to daughter India Ann Sushil Sood in
Vancouver on April 6, 2002, by which time she had already completed
three quarters of the production on her next record, Afterglow.
On June 22, 2007 she gave birth to her second daughter, Taja Summer
Sood, in Vancouver. McLachlan announced her separation from Ashwin Sood
in September 2008.
As of May 2014, McLachlan was dating former NHL player Geoff Courtnall.