Better Broken – Sarah McLachlan
A review, by Sean Watkin

It has been over a decade since we had an album of original music from the iconic Sarah McLachlan, and my god have I missed her haunting her voice and the poetry in her lyrics.

Better Broken is a return to form, and a return to something else, too. The songs arrive, one by one, each more raw than the last. They’re untamed and not highly polished like some of McLachlan’s previous work. That rawness is purposeful, not accidental, not through lack of skill. In fact, this album steams with experience, care, and love.

There’s almost an elemental, ethereal charge to the record, and it’s clear McLachlan has taken influence from the natural world around her, and from her hopes for the betterment of mankind.

There is not one inferior track on the album, but personally, I’m more attracted to the songs where McLachlan takes her time. Where she stops the world for us and lets us look at it through her lens. I loved each song on this record, but here are a few of my highlights based on a weekend of listening:

The title track, “Better Broken” is a moment of recognition that not everything can be mended. It’s a song about living with fractures, about carrying what cannot be fixed. It’s tender, but also bracing in its honesty. The production is something I’ve not heard from McLachlan before, fraught with a sort of conflict that fits the song.

“Gravity” is a masterpiece in storytelling, where McLachlan explores her early relationship with her daughter, which she describes as being like “oil and water”.

“One in a Long Line” feels almost like an invocation of ancestral power. There’s a summoning in it, as though it’s reaching back through generations of women; a song steeped in a refusal to let go of choice: the right to love, to say no, to live and act with autonomy. It carries the charge of a defiance in the present. “Rise” builds on this feeling of resistance, inviting us all to make change.

“Wilderness” truly is the most beautiful McLachlan song I think I’ve ever heard, and I’m in love with her entire back catalogue. It speaks of heartbreak, of loss, and isn’t the only time on this record where we feel the passing of time – the urgent slipping away of moments where everything may never be the same again.

“If This is the End…”, the final track on the record, feels more like a pagan ritual than a pop song. There’s something in the melody that feels like a traditional folk song, and the lyrics are like the chanting of a spell, the ushering-in of something ancient. Even the production here feels stripped back, and as it’s the last song of the record, it’s made me long for an album of truly raw, unplugged music from McLachlan.

McLachlan’s unique voice continues to move me. It pulses and swarms and retreats, rising with fragility and power, but always tied to the rawness of her lived experiences. Her hope for a better world, a freer, less broken one, is apparent throughout the record, but so too is her frustration with what it is now. Listening, I’m not sure that I share her hope for the future. My own doubts tend to creep in.

Better Broken is not an easy record, and not entirely a comforting one. It’s restless and insistent, pissed off and also warming. It reminds us that music can still serve as a spell, a lament, and a call to arms. It’s no coincidence or accident that Better Broken, McLachlan’s story of an endlessly changing world, tilting every day toward more hatred, division, and destruction, finishes with the ticking of a clock.

I’ve missed having new music from McLachlan, but Better Broken is definitely worth the wait, and I can’t wait to see what’s coming next.