SARAH McLACHLAN : Hysteria and Tears Help Canadian Singer Bring Out the ‘Good Stuff’

Sarah McLachlan’s second album, “Solace,” has put the Canadian singer-songwriter on the pop-music map, eliciting critical praise that likens her to Joni Mitchell and Sinead O’Connor. It’s also drawn a growing cult of fans attracted to her densely textured art-folk arrangements and abstract but intensely confessional lyrics.

Not all the attention sits well with the 23-year-old singer. “I get a lot of young, lost males,” McLachlan says. “They seem like early to late 20s, and they don’t seem to know what they want to do with their life. I seem to fill some sort of void for them. I get a lot of letters saying that I’m singing to them, which kind of freaks me out, because I’m not. . . . I don’t know them, but they know me. They know a lot of me because I’m really revealing myself (in my lyrics) to them. But I’m not gonna compromise that because of some psycho fans or anything.”

That fringe of her following is about the only drawback McLachlan can find in her rising fortunes. Otherwise, she’s savoring the life of a contender, from the traveling to the performing to the arduous work of writing songs.

This swirl might be new to McLachlan, who plays the Troubadour on Tuesday, but she’s been building up to it: She was “discovered” at 17, signed to a record deal at 19 and had her first album, “Touch,” out when she was 20.

She’d never written a song before she was signed by Vancouver-based Nettwerk Records, whose executive Mark Jowett had been impressed by her voice when her band opened a show for his group, Moev, in her hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her parents wouldn’t let her take Jowett up on his invitation to come to Vancouver and record some demos, but two years later he returned with a five-album contract, and McLachlan signed.

“By the time I was 19 I was hell-bent to get out of there,” she says. “I was bored, and my parents and I didn’t get along at all the last couple of years I was there.”

Nettwerk and Jowett (now the label’s vice president of A&R; and publishing) knew they had a voice to reckon with. The surprise came with the personal, revealing lyrics and supple melodies the novice songwriter came up with. But the process isn’t easy for McLachlan. “I have to bring myself to a point of hysteria sometimes before anything good comes out,” she says. “But that’s when the good stuff comes up, when you push yourself so hard and so long that you’re on the brink of bursting into tears--that’s usually what happens. I usually just lose it, I burst into tears and bawl and bawl and bawl and then five minutes later say, ‘Oh, there’s a chorus, that’s what I’ve been looking for.’ ”

In a way, the Troubadour show will be a make-up date for McLachlan’s L.A. debut at the Variety, which was hampered by the distraction of the riots. For McLachlan, performing for an audience is the ultimate experience.

“I want to take people to another place in the shows. That’s when music really works for me. And that’s what I want to do, bring people to a different place. When I’m really connecting (in concert), I almost feel a continual state of arousal. There’s a heightened awareness.”