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How does that Joni Mitchell song go? "I've looked at life from both sides now..." McLachlan has certainly seen both sides in the music business. As the Founding Mother of Lilith--and the only performer playing every date--she is sure to win a wide new audience for her lush, thoughtful songcraft. Her new CD, Surfacing (Arista), out this week, is an elegant, old-soul album, with several standout songs, including the bewitching Building a Mystery and the ravishing Adia. Radio is already all over it. But not too long ago, McLachlan couldn't buy airplay. "When my album Fumbling Towards Ecstasy came out [in 1994], a lot of radio stations said they couldn't play me because they already had another singer-songwriter on their playlist," McLachlan says. "In this case it was Tori Amos. That was very marginalizing because our music is completely different. They were saying, 'Go away--we've added our token female this week.'"
Then Alanis Morissette hit. Fifteen million copies sold. Next came Jewel. More than 70 weeks on the Billboard charts and still going. And McLachlan's own album Fumbling ended up going double platinum. Says Atlantic Records co-chairman Val Azzoli: "Honestly, we in the record business are not leaders. We are a bunch of sheep. When one kind of record does well, we all follow with more like it."
Danny Goldberg, the current CEO of Mercury Records, who signed Jewel to Atlantic before leaving that label, says there's a major musical shift under way. "I associate it with generations of high school students coming along who want ownership of their own culture, who want something different from the people who came before them," says Goldberg, who in the past managed Bonnie Raitt and Nirvana's Kurt Cobain. "So this group is going for a female-leaning, optimistic music, in contrast to the grunge, gangsta-rap chapter that is waning."
The rise of Jewel and other female singer-songwriters has come hand in hand with the growth of a whole new generation-spanning radio format known in the music industry as "modern adult contemporary." Modern AC focuses on acts that are adult friendly but still cool, performers with a folkie feel, such as Counting Crows, Blues Traveler, Sister Hazel and the Wallflowers. The format also tends to feature female singer-songwriters such as Indigo Girls, Shawn Colvin and Jewel--all of whom just happen to be on the Lilith tour. "The blossoming of modern AC was so important," says Terry McBride, who manages McLachlan. "Artists like Sarah, Fiona [Apple] and Jewel have always been at the bottom of [radio] playlists, but about 14 months ago, we started getting some attention. It helped us get the exposure we needed to be able to put on a Lilith. It's helped all these artists get to the next step up."
The format has a special appeal to female listeners: it allows them to hear someone like themselves instead of, say, someone like Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder. And record companies like it because women tend to buy more records than men. "Years ago, there used to be a stigma held by rock-radio programmers against playing too many female artists," says Bob Waugh, assistant programming director at modern-rock radio station WHFS in Washington. "Now there has been such an explosion of female artists and female-led bands coming to prominence that the perception has changed."