You said that it took about six years to learn how not to edit yourself and remain open in your music…
(laughs) Hopefully I’ll get that back again someday.
What kinds of things can a songwriter do to reach that place in their writing?
Well, for me on this new record, it was mainly secluding myself, being away from society and being away from everything. I locked myself up in a cabin in the mountains and stayed there for seven months. It was just an amazing time for me to really focus on a lot of stuff that had sort of been lurking behind the scenes in my brain, but never had the time to come out. Or it kept being put aside, because there were so many distractions. Also I think, I got incredibly in tune with the earth, with nature, like I hadn’t before. I couldn’t write a thing for three months. My brain was eating itself. It was terribly cold out and I couldn’t do anything creative. I was just frozen.
Everything was churning around inside but nothing would come out. Then spring happened and everything totally opened up. I was blossoming as well. Most of the songs–I had written four previous to going to the cabin–were written then, about seven of them, between April and May. The place that I got to in myself of feeling calm and peaceful and also for the first time in my life, feeling I’m happy now. Not ‘I would be happy if . . . ‘ There was always that going on with me. I finally got to a place where I was totally happy and peaceful and living in the present tense instead of in the future, you know and projecting things.
Did you go into that experience with any sort of agenda?
Well, in the process of not being able to write, I kept a journal, these sort of morning pages. I wrote three pages before I’d do anything else, just to try and clear my head. Most of it was totally banal like mmm, coffee smells good, I have nothing to say, I have nothing to say (laughs) for ten times. But sure enough, about midway through the second page, sometimes I’d really open up and all this stuff would come out. You know, you’re not really awake yet and you’re just sort of spewing whatever’s on the top of your head sort of free form. And there was no editing happening there at all, because no one was going to read this book. I could say whatever I wanted. I didn’t have to hide behind anything, and I think that really helped me. To be really open and honest with myself, that was good. I’m pretty good at deceiving myself or I’ve known myself to do that in the past (laughs).
Did you listen to music while you were there?
I listened to a lot of Tom Waits, and Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, which is one of my favorites.
The opening lines of your songs are always captivating and they seem to contain the germ of the whole song in just a few words.
I figure the first two lines usually tell the whole story of a song (laughs). The first two lines are what comes out first when I’m writing, and they basically tell which direction, for me lyrically, the song is going to go. Sometimes those two lines will sit for months by themselves, until they find a completion to the story, or a completion to the stage that I’m in of trying to work through something, until hopefully I’m somewhere near the other side of it, when I can be a little more objective and write it down. It’s the same with titling the songs. Most of the song titles come from the last word in the second line (laughs).
Say you have those two lines and the music wants to continue. Will you let it go on without words?
Unfortunately, I often try to fill it in. I’m sort of still a bit stuck to that convention of writing a song with a four-line verse, the more traditional phrasing of a stanza or whatever. So if there are only two lines, there usually end being four lines. I work at making it four before I stop (laughs). But there’s also this thing, when I go in the studio, Pierre (Marchand, her producer) is great at editing. He’ll say, why don’t you just not sing that line, do you really need to say that, you kind of already said it. He has done that, which is something that I can’t really do, because I’m not as objective about it. And I don’t see things from the same direction that he does, which is why he’s so good to work with.
Do you demo songs before you go into the studio?
Well, I demo them in a very simple way, with acoustic guitar or piano. Sometimes a drum machine. But my sort of restrictions on myself for going into the studio are making it strong by itself in the simplest form. So if you’re hiding behind a lot of production, if you take it away, you can still play that song and it’ll still be strong on its own.
You mentioned a drum machine. Do you ever write with just a groove?
I have never have before. I’m pretty lazy as far as technology, and I think it’s something I’ll probably have to get more into, because I’m sort of exhausting the instruments that I’m using, or exhausting the inspiration that they give me. I can go back and forth, but I don’t have a piano, so I end up doing a lot of stuff on guitar. But when I was in Montreal I did, so a lot of this record came from piano because it was such an exciting thing, a new sound, a new instrument. That happened with electric guitar as well. I started writing with that, because it was a new sound. So maybe I will get into the drum machine. I just have to learn how to use the damn thing first (laughs). I always fight against technology. I want to be grass roots and I want where it comes from to be organic.
Well it sounds like you have a good combination with your producer, because he strikes me as a technically minded guy…
Oh, he’s amazing that way, because he’s such a techno-head. But at the same time, he totally comes from the organic sense of letting the song happen in whatever direction it goes in. Just following and not pushing the song for any wrong reason, whatever feels right go with it.
A lot of your songs have an air of mystery and darkness. Is there something you do during the writing process to conjure this mood?
(laughs) I just think it’s what’s in my brain. It’s not that I’m really pessimistic or anything–I’m not. But I sort of like the effect of two sides of things–one being really pretty and one being really ugly, like when you lift up a pretty rock and there’s all these mites and worms underneath it (laughs). I think that sort of came from this one poem I read in grade nine. It’s funny, the little things that stick with me my whole life. Wilford Owens, he’s a World War I poet and he wrote about being in the field in the war and all the horrors that went on. But somehow, without glamorizing or romanticizing it, he made it incredibly beautiful. In the same breath, he’d be talking about something horrendously grotesque. I just really loved that. That’s actually where the title of the record came from too, “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.” It was taken from a line in one of his poems. “Quick boys, in an ecstasy of fumbling we fit the masks just in time . . .” and I thought that was amazing, that “in an ecstasy of fumbling.” It was so beautiful, and since grade nine I’ve been trying to fit that into something (laughs). I sort of have a little library of phrases and words in my head that I like. Like “murmur.” Never been able to use it yet, but it’s a beautiful word. I like words that say so many things. Language is such a beautiful thing and words are so amazing.
From: https://addictedtosongwriting.com/sarah-mclachlans-walden-pond/
