Sarah McLachlan finds herself in a van parked on the side of a road outside of her home city, Vancouver.
     It’s been a busy day for the Canadian singer-songwriter, out of the music spotlight by choice for several years, but there still is one more item on her "To do" list: a conversation about where she finds herself in her life and her art.
     The brief light that remains after sunset, that transitional moment of any day—which is the symbolic "afterglow" to which she makes reference in the title of her first studio album since 1997—long ago has passed into darkness.
     It is a reminder that McLachlan, 35, now a first-time mother, sees her new compositions as works of transition, taking people to a place where everything may look quite different.
     "Transition" is a word that also applies to her career, she says. "I think all of us are in a constant state of transition. I definitely feel like I’ve grown up a lot in my career."
     It’s been a major change, she acknowledges: "I’ve gone from an unknown to having huge success."
     That could be somewhat of an understatement. Since Touch, her 1988 debut album, she has sold more than 25 million records, won three Grammy awards and founded the history-making Lilith Fairs tours, which emphasized the depth of female artistry in front of 2 million people as it raised more than $7 million for charities.
     McLachlan has been honored with the Elizabeth Cady Stanton Visionary Award for advancing the careers of women in music, found herself the subject of cover stories in Time, Rolling Stone and other publications, and has had her music used in films and on television.
     She continues to fund the Sarah McLachlan Music Outreach Program, which provides free music education classes to inner city youths whose school music programs have been impacted by budget cuts.
     Afterglow is her first studio record since 1997’s
eight-times Platinum Surfacing, which was on the Billboard charts for more than two years.
     It brought two Grammys and four hit singles spanning 1997, 1998 and 1999: "Building a Mystery" (recipient of 1998’s Best Female Pop Vocal Performance Grammy), "Sweet Surrender," the No. 1 "Adia" and the Top 10 "Angel."
     The song "Last Dance" earned the Best Pop Instrumental Performance Grammy in 1998. Surfacing followed the artist’s triple-Platinum breakthrough with the CD Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, which was on the charts for more than 100 weeks.
     "I Will Remember You" was a crossover hit from the 1995 The Brothers McMullen movie soundtrack, and was a theme for television’s Party Of Five series. It received the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance Grammy in 1999.
     She is well prepared for the question of why it took so long between her last CD and Afterglow. She was simply living her life, she says, explaining that she lost a mother and became a mother.
     Her mother died of breast cancer in 2001. Five months later, McLachlan and her husband, drummer Ashwin Sood, welcomed their daughter, India. After India’s birth, McLachlan took a few months off from making music. She didn’t play piano and did not write in her journals during that period. She says the break refreshed her.
     All of the material for Afterglow was written over the past two and a half years, recorded at either producer Pierre Marchand’s home studio in Montreal or McLachlan’s home studio in Vancouver.
     During the Surfacing era, McLachlan spoke of that CD as the most honest album of her career. She now gives that title to Afterglow. "The older I get, and hopefully wiser, the more insight you hopefully have, and that creates more honesty."
     McLachlan says the loss she experienced with her mother was not reflected in her writing for Afterglow because it was still too close to her. She thinks it will come in an album several years down the road.
     She says that the influence of becoming a mother, though, is found in one or two songs: "Push," which she describes as a love song to her husband, and "World On Fire," which she wrote with her producer. "We started thinking about the world we were bringing our children into," she says.
     McLachlan says she hopes the work on Afterglow moves people and makes them "feel good, feel something. I hope it brings them closer to themselves."
     She took a different approach to the creative process. Instead of living in a cabin in the woods for eight months to write, she stole time during the day from baby minding when she could. For the first time, she did not write anything on guitar. Everything was done on piano.
     Either way, the writing did not come easily. "It was like extracting blood from stone," she says through laughter. "For the most part it’s hard for me to write. That’s why I tried to get as much done before my daughter was born, because I knew I would be distracted, and I was."
     McLachlan believes her songs resonate for people because she writes on a very emotional level. "I talk about pretty basic stuff, issues that everyone goes through. I’m pretty honest. My words are too," she says.
     Music, she suggests, is no less than "a fantastic gift. It’s an amazing tool to share emotions and work through emotions. It’s extremely cathartic for me. It’s the closest I get to feeling religious. Playing music … takes me inward and really helps me clear my head and think about what is going on in my life. I hate to use ‘soul searching,’ but it is."
     There is a lot that is good going on in her life. "I feel like I’ve exceeded any expectations I’ve had so far in my career," McLachlan says. "It’s sort of a nice relaxed place I’m in now. I’m really happy with this CD, really happy and proud of it, whatever it does."
     She did think about the prospect of losing career momentum since she has been away for so long. "I really tried not to let it bother me," she says. "You can’t let that kind of thing enter into the way I make my music. I’m really lucky that my fans are very, very loyal. They are like me. When Peter Gabriel puts out a record, I don’t care if I hear it on radio. I just go and buy it, even if it has been after eight or 10 years."
     The music business is always cyclical, she says. "The day Lilith ended it seems there was a huge resurgence, a whole new wave of angry white male bands, and bubble-gum pop. I certainly don’t know where I fit in it at all. I’m kind of glad I took some time off." She laughs.
     Music remains many things to many people, she says. "It’s such a broad subject. People listen to different things. There is a place for everybody."
     That still includes women in a significant way, she insists. "Really positive things happened out of Lilith. A lot of [positive] attitudes remain in place in the minds of certain artists and, to an extent, in the industry also."
     The entire marketing world exploded— especially using sex to sell the music of both women and men—during her time away, she says. "Women and men alike were being really sexual and portrayed very sexually, which is part of that music, and which is what you would expect if you are singing, ‘Ooh baby, hit me one more time.’" She laughs.
     "When you’re talking about that, it kind of makes sense," she says. "That makes me sad. That’s all you see, especially with these young guys. The way the waistband keeps getting lower, there’s not much left to the imagination."
     In the midst of the success of the Lilith concerts, McLachlan remarked that men and women both should be happy to celebrate the fact that women finally have strong voices. Even with the dramatic changes in the music industry, she believes those voices are still strong. "I think so. My voice certainly is still strong and I still stand for the same things I stood for back then, and I will fight for them. I think most of my peers will as well."
     Lilith was a success and rewarding on many levels, she says. "Look how it changed the attitude of the industry. Before we put that show on, a lot in the industry said you couldn’t put women on the same bill or back-to-back on radio—people wouldn’t want to hear or listen. We blew those ideas out of the water."
     Not to mention, she adds, that Lilith was great fun. "It was fantastic. The artists I got to meet and play with, some of the people I have so much admiration and respect for, and I got to speak with my peers and hear their stories."
     Now Sarah McLachlan is telling hers anew in Afterglow.