CLOSER - The Best Of Sarah McLachlan

HERE'S another compilation album filled with the best of the greatest hits of Sarah Ann McLachlan, the Grammy-winning Canadian musician, singerand songwriter.

Closer - The Best Of Sarah McLachlan contains 14 classic tracks personally selected from her award-winning catalogue, as well as two previously unreleased songs, Don't Give Up On Us and U Want Me 2.

Playing music throughout her youth while rigorously studying classical guitar (12 years), piano (six years), voice (five years) and opera (threeyears) at the Nova Scotia Conservatory of Music, her teenage influences included Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, Cat Stevens, Simon and Garfunkel and the British group Talk Talk.

And you can hear them all in most of her greatest hits.

In 1988, she recorded the first albums, Touch, which received both critical and commercial success and included her first hit song Vox.

The next two hit singles The Path of Thorns (Terms) and Into the Fire comes from her second album, Solace (1991).

Her 1994 Fumbling Towards Ecstasy album was an immediate smash hit in Canada and her piano version of the song Possession was included on the first Due South soundtrack in 1996.

Angel is another hit song that originally appeared in her 1997 album, Surfacing, about the Smashing Pumpkins touring keyboard player Jonathan Melvoin, who overdosed on heroin and died in 1996.

McLachlan explained that "there's nothing constant when you are on the road; everything becomes the same".

Another hit from that album is Adia, co-written with her longtime producer, Pierre Marchand. The song reflected an apology to her bestfriend for becoming involved with, and later marrying, her friend's ex-partner.

Building A Mystery also came out of Surfacing and was her biggest chart hit in Canada, spending eight weeks at No. 1 on the RPM charts and ranking as the No. 1 single of the year in the magazine's year end chart.

It won her the Juno Award for Single of the Year in 1998 and madeMcLachlan the recipient of the Grammy Award for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance at the Grammy Awards of 1998.

I Will Remember You was co-written by McLachlan, Seamus Egan and DaveMerenda.

It first appeared on the soundtrack of the film The Brothers McMullen in 1995, and was featured on her remix album, Rarities, B-Sides And Other Stuff. It became a hit when McLachlan released a live version of the song from her 1999 live album Mirrorball.

Mirrorball also generated her three Grammy Award nominations in 2000,winning Female Pop Vocal Performance for I Will Remember You.

Fallen is the first single from her 2003 album, Afterglow. The song was nominated on the 2004 Grammy Awards on the Best Female Pop Vocal Performance field, losing to Beautiful by Christina Aguilera.

Stupid is also from Afterglow. The music video features McLachlan in different time periods.

Another masterpiece from Afterglow is World On Fire and is one ofMcLachlan's most political songs, intended to graphically illustrate theimpact that even relatively small individual donations might have on third-world poverty.

The video for World On Fire opens with the claim of having costUS$150,000 (RM530,000), despite the ensuing low-quality footage ofMcLachlan in a plain room playing her guitar. The video continues toreveal it actually cost US$15, then tracking how the remainder went to enriching lives all around the globe through charity donations.

Other songs included in the album are Hold On, and Good Enough.

Closer - The Best Of Sarah Mclachlan is the album for fans of her powerful soprano voice, which is frequently compared to Tori Amos andSinead O'Connor, and her music often described as "ethereal". – NST 02/11/2008