Still Fumbling Towards Ecstasy With Sarah McLachlan 30 Years On

Sarah McLachlan's Fumbling Toward Ecstasy continues to speak, 30 years on, to those possessed with and still Fumbling after ecstasy. 

Technically, Sarah McLachlan's breakthrough album was released in 1993, but that was in her native Canada so for American pop consciousness it is still only 30 years old at this point since the American release came on February 15th 1994. Like many music fans who came of age in the early to mid 1990s (I turned 20 in 1994), the popular music you liked, be it rock or hip hop--especially at that time--was more than just what you liked listening to. It was part of your identity. It informed your style of dress, was reflective of you social, political, intellectual, and often times sexual identity. For many suburban males such as myself, Pearl Jam, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, and Smashing Pumpkins formed the core of our listening habits and identities. Aggressive music with a purpose, a platform, and something important to say, or at least so we thought, and we weren't particularly wrong. Eddie Vedder wrote songs from a female perspective with insight and compassion that bedeviled his legion of what we would now call "bro" fans. You haven't lived until you've seen a gaggle of drunk fraternity bros singing "don't call me daughter!" in chorus live. Alice In Chains, for all their metal come grunge sound, was not afraid to be fragile and (gasp!) acoustic. Billy Corgan and James Iha wore full length skirts and played with gender roles while melting entire arenas with heavy guitar radiation. So when a beautiful, doe-eyed redhead (yes, like legions of male fans I had and still have a crush on her) with a voice unlike many of the other female singers and bands of her age broke through with a song called "Possession" capturing not just the ears, but the attention and intellect of the boyfriends of her female fans, it was no surprise. Like most of the great albums, events, and personal milestones of the 1990s for adults of my generation, it's hard to believe that the album that "Possession" spearheaded, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, is no only 30 years old, but also still so damn engaging. It's one of those rare songs, and albums, that gives voice to passions and emotions that are dangerous, delicious, and unrequited, and therefore truly artistic and rocking.

   

Fumbling Towards Ecstasy has little in common with most of the rock music of its time. Piano ballads, romantic atmospheres (as defined classically), and love songs (both tortured and sweet) tinged with just enough electric guitar to make it all interesting are the hallmarks of the album. Many of the songs on the album were more expansive and experimental than the ones on McLachlan's previous album. Solace, released in 1992, was a much more straightforward soft rock album and actually had more catchy tunes on it than Fumbling Towards Ecstasy did. Catchy doesn't always make for transcendent though. Fumbling Towards Ecstasy got McLachlan much closer to artistic relevance, even though she wouldn't really put it all together until the next album Surfacing. While there are many great songs that accompany "Possession" on its home album, such as "Good Enough," "Elsewhere," "Hold On,' and fan favorite "Ice Cream," it's "Possession" that still gets airplay, is covered by contemporary artists, and invokes the kind of engagement in both the artistic as well as musical sense. 

The story behind the lyrics of the song has been told many times before so another dive into them here really isn't warranted. If you don't know the story, it can be easily found through a quick Google search. Putting aside the circumstances of the song's genesis, and looking at the song itself on its own merits is what the song, and McLachlan deserves since it really is one of those moments where a complicated and powerful feeling is captured in song and made approachable, which is what any great work of art should do. The song never reveals whether the all consuming passion that is possessing the narrator actually drives them to reign or ruin though. The greatest passions, when they are consummated, burn as bright and gloriously as only heaven can. When they aren't, they burn as only the torments of hell could. "Possession" leaves the listener on the edge of either possibility, never revealing if the narrator/lover actualizes their passions in union with the object of said passions. Forever fumbling towards the ecstasy that is just one glorious night away, the narrator pledges to be the one to "hold you down, "take your breath away" and then "wipe away your tears." Will this act be one of physical love or physical violation? We are never to know, forever suspended in the moments before the beloved surrenders or succumbs. 

It's that unresolved tension that, while it has its obvious origin in physical and emotional love, is metaphoric of the very quest that is a life lived. Does the narrator fulfill their goals in life? Do they hold life down, tame it, and end up possessing it, for better or worse? Ah, here's where the song, and McLachlan, the artist, engages our intellect as well. She creates art that transcends its superficial sheen and speaks metaphorically, and surprisingly personally, to anyone who has not only an unrequited, possessed, or achingly just out of reach love, goal, or delicious torment. So many of McLachlan's contemporaries wrote songs of consummation or condemnation, but very few had the artistic insight that she did, or the ability to create such a song and moment. "Possession" is a song that forever will teeter on the edge of madness or ecstasy as it constantly reminds its listener of the pain they experience just before that first glorious, liberating kiss or that deep buried pain that still smolders and threatens to erupt destructively ever time the object of their possession surfaces in their memory.

So Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, and "Possession" in particular have aged very well over the past thirty years by really not aging at all. The album and the song address one of the fundamental human experiences, but never finishes the story, leaving it open to be relevant to whatever the ending to its listeners' story was. Did legions of listeners come to the realization of the artistic depths of "Possession" or Sarah McLachlan's works immediately? No. I have to admit that I was one of those "bros" who booed, much to the chagrin and embarrassment of our girlfriends also in attendance, along with his fellow bros when McLachlan introduced her then husband during live shows, who was at the time the drummer in her touring band. Did it take 30 years to figure out what McLachlan was doing with the narrative in "Possession?" No, but I do hope I get another 30 years to savor the sweet surrender she conjured there.