29 November 2025, Orpheum Theatre, Los Angeles, CA

I re-watched the Lilith Fair documentary on Hulu a few days after seeing Sarah McLachlan’s flawless performance at The Orpheum, the final date of her nine-city tour in support of her latest album, Better Broken, which I have been listening to a lot these past couple of months.

Sarah will be the first to put herself out there as imperfect but her version of being broken is a state of being human that most of us who are brittle, vulnerable and deeply flawed, women especially, would aspire to. She is profoundly talented, an extraordinary vocalist, an ingenious and honest songwriter, a translucent performer.

The Orpheum really is a special performance venue. When I saw Nick Cave there two years ago I saw and heard how perfect it was for a piano-centric concert and a unique singer, and last Saturday night Sarah McLachlan proved that a piano plus guitars with a celestial and distinctive voice in a theatre that is as acoustically lovely as it is ornate makes for a divine experience.

That 57-year old McLachlan can sing as beautifully and powerfully as she did 30+ years ago, and even with an extensive band and some electronic tracks behind her can make it about that voice, and especially that voice as it relates to her songwriting, is a truth that can never be conveyed through photos. But my camera’s viewfinder tracked her every move and expression nonetheless, as it dawned on me that when I had seen her previously – and for the life of me I cannot find when and where that was, most likely LA or Sydney or both – I had not taken photos. Or, if I had, they were late 90s, pre-digital camera, and are unfortunately stored away with all my other print photos in my storage unit.

So anyway, I made up for it at this show, from my 10th row seat, focusing in on terrific lighting design moments that enabled me to get some good close-ups of an artist having a whole new peak in an already incredible career.

That Lilith Fair documentary – an absolute must-see in an overcrowded field of great music docs – reminds those of us that were, if not literally there, very much aware it was happening, of how pivotal Sarah McLachlan was in shining a collective spotlight on the insanely talented women singer-songwriters that were dominant or emerging in the nineties, so that people like me, who adored Heart, Linda Ronstadt et al two decades before, could find our way through an era of grunge and hard rock that made no sense – at the time – to our ears.

I was living in Byron Bay NSW, in those days still a quiet coastal town, and I was very active on the community radio station, BAY FM, where I presented a breakfast program for several years. I heard another presenter play Sheryl Crow in 1993 and that’s how I found her. Then one of my weekly guests on my “Julian Rocks Discs” segment in 1994 – this was my version of a Desert Island Discs thing, where guests brought in three songs to play – the delightful Gabrielle Morrissey, American-raised daughter of a best-selling Australian novelist, brought in Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy album. Right now I can’t recall which song she chose to play, but I immediately bought the album and the earlier ones and then went on to keep accumulating her music.

Getting to know a Sarah McLachlan album is to allow melodies to wrap around you like silk and cashmere and then to go deep into lyrics that can pierce the heart like being impaled into past or present experiences that she describes meticulously. “Adia” and “Angel” from the Surfacing album really did that to me, and then this new album, Better Broken, is laden with songs that I want to appropriate for my own stories (something I do, that I refer to in my recent Heart review). I have never sought out Sarah’s detailed background notes, interviews, explanations, on her songs, and I am not sure if, outside her live performances, she goes in deep with backstories. So in this concert, when Sarah told the story behind “Adia”, about a lifelong girlfriend she had a painful falling out with but then they found their way back to each other, I fell in love with the song all anew. And the story of her complex, pained relationship with her eldest daughter (can you imagine anyone not being enthralled to have Sarah McLachlan as their mother?) brought such new light and love into “Gravity” on the latest album that now I cannot stop hearing it in my head. My favourite song on Better Broken is actually the simplest, sweetest song, “Reminds Me”, and now that Sarah has explained that she wrote it as a cowboy sweetheart ballad for her partner, I cock my head and think, well, okay, but in my personal storytelling I have a much deeper more profound backstory to this song.

Through being in the presence of an artist so true to herself and authentic in the wider context of popular music, one can also feel the presence of the artists that have stood with her, beside her, behind her, been touched, influenced, inspired by her. So during this show at different times and sometimes in a chorus of togetherness I saw and heard Sheryl Crow, Paula Cole, Natalie Merchant, Joan Osborne, Fiona Apple, Heather Nova, Julia Fordham, Shawn Colvin, Lisa Loeb, Jewel, Alanis Morisette. Especially Paula Cole – the two are so individual and yet in many ways alike. I have always adored Paula, but each time I have seen her live it’s been a venue with very moody lighting so the photos have never amounted to a post. I met her once at McCabes in Santa Monica and told her how important she has long been to me and how I played her songs constantly on my radio show all those years ago. She looked back at me in that way of taking it in graciously and gratefully, she sighed and just said, “Oh, Debbie.” I will always love her for that moment of generosity and understanding.

Back in those lovely nineties you could come to LA and spend hours in Tower Records on Sunset at the listening stations, which is where I discovered Joan Osborne long before she was in Lilith Fair. I truly believe I was the first person in Australia to play Joan Osborne on radio, albeit community radio. And that listening station is where I discovered Heather Nova and Lisa Loeb too. I’ve told the story of discovering Julia Fordham here and I have never covered the Natalie Merchant side of things because although I have seen her a few times in concert I’ve never been able to photograph her. But the Tigerlily and Ophelia albums were essential for me, being so diametrically opposite to Nirvana and Soundgarden and Pearl Jam and every other male-dominated grunge band that was around then.

In 2017 I wrote here about Sheryl Crow, and called it “The summer of girl power”, because I had also planned to post about seeing Paula Cole, Natalie Merchant, Rumer and others that year, but for various reasons I didn’t. I guess this piece while largely about Sarah is also about so many others, those that were bundled up in Lilith Fair, all the while fighting the misguided notion of women artists being so similar that they could not get individual performing slots at the Grammy Awards in spite of their massive number of separate nominations. I meet young women sometimes, these days, who still don’t know about Sarah McLachlan or Lilith Fair or how – as the documentary gently points out – artists such as Christina Aguilera and Nelly Furtado and India Arie and Dido first got exposure on the smaller stage there. Or how Erykah Badu and Missy Elliott expanded their audience being on a bill with the Indigo Girls and Bonnie Raitt and Emmylou Harris and Tracy Chapman. And vice versa.

As a child of the seventies, forever wedded to the music of my adolescence, I can sometimes lose sight of how influential the nineties decade was on my sonic iconography too. Watching the Lilith Fair documentary brought this all home for me powerfully 30 years on, and that ultimately is so much about Sarah McLachlan and everything she did and was and still is.

All of which I have perhaps fumbled to express here as I went off on one tangent after another, trying to express just what makes Sarah McLachlan a seriously exquisite artist for me and why seeing her do this show on this tour at this point in her career felt really important. I loved that she played seven songs from the new album, which is a lot, and which I had really hoped she would, and that her older songs felt more pertinent than ever, that the vocals on “Fear” were startling and intense, and that “Ice Cream” was as sweet and creamy as we needed. And that she stood there, open, honest, heartfelt and true.

By the by, on the subject of her own authenticity, from what I could tell Sarah wore the same outfit at each of the shows on the tour, and while she looked beautiful and sparkly there was also a lack of vanity in that that struck me. As did her pure joy, and the respect and affection she and her band evidently have for each other. Lots of hugs at the end. Ecstatic hugging. You know I love the bows and the hugs.

Camera still going; fumbling towards extinction, but not just yet. Click on through.