Too Much of a Good Thing

Sarah McLachlan’s show Wednesday at the Bren Events Center was a chance to bask in the glow of a beautiful, elegant, emotive, perfectly tempered singing voice.

Until, that is, breathtaking beauty turned into a too familiar beauty that no longer could sustain the illusion that McLachlan’s songwriting is a match for her singing.

Touring on her own, McLachlan stretched out in a two-hour set, about twice the time she had as founder and triumphant headliner of Lilith Fair, which played Irvine Meadows last summer. That must have seemed like a gift to a full house of 5,000 mostly female devotees, some of whom cried out their affection during between-songs pauses with rather blunt statements of their fantasies. McLachlan, a self-possessed star whose boyish coif, classically simple, low-cut dress and sandaled feet suggested a combination of Peter Pan and the goddess Athena, handled the enthusiastic come-ons with gracious aplomb.

For the show’s first half, even a more objective listener got swept up in McLachlan’s combination of talent and taste as a singer. Her performance was tonally rich and varied, ambitious in scale and emotionally pitched to project strong feeling without straining for effect. Yet just as it seemed the Canadian star would triumph again, everything turned, not exactly sour, but uninvolving. She had built her mystery, and it just sat there, getting rusty and prosaic with repetition.

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Why? Because elegance and pure talent only go so far. In pop music, an adenoidal wheeze or a half-spoken deadpan can trump the most glorious set of pipes if said wheezer or droner has a story to tell and the songbird doesn’t. In her songs’ style and arrangements, McLachlan could have used some earthy, direct pop-rock zing to complement a typically grand and stately style (although the show did feature nice interludes of acoustic folk-pop and solo piano balladry). As for content, McLachlan needs to open her songs to a wider cavalcade of life.

Drawing from her four albums, with emphasis on the hit releases “Surfacing” and “Fumbling TowardsEcstasy,” she portrayed private meditations or one-on-one encounters. Some were troubled, some were messages of comfort, but none gave this grand voice a story to tell as well as a feeling to project. Abstract writing is certainly valid, but at some point the texture of life, with its people, places, happenings and backdrop of culture and history, needs to emerge. If a glorious voice is giving the account, so much the better, but don’t forget the humble details amid the grand abstractions.

McLachlan’s band provided some treats, especially when guitarist Sean Ashby sent his guitar crashing against the regal, gauzy structure of “Witness,” sounding like an ornery Neil Young. While most of the show was set in a carefully decorated living room, McLachlan and her mates visited the garage on occasion. “Possession,” her breakthrough hit, especially benefited from rough handling.

McLachlan ended the show tenderly, alone at her piano, singing the gospel-informed “Angel” as a valediction to music’s capacity to comfort the troubled by taking them out of themselves. Narrative, the introduction of other lives, is another way to accomplish that. If McLachlan ever combines the twin strands of musical grace and lyrical portraiture, she will be the definitive pop figure her loyalists already think she is.

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Lisa Loeb, the New York City-based singer who became omnipresent on video channels a few years back with “Stay,” covered search-for-love themes similar to McLachlan’s in her opening set, but the high emotional stakes were missing. With her pleasant, girlishly conversational but unremarkable voice, she played the part of a young woman who takes her lumps in love but seems capable of bouncing back without undue devastation.

That may be a good way to be when you’re in your 20s and banking experience (McLachlan, who hand-picked Loeb to open her tour, interrupted her with a cake for her 30th birthday), but it didn’t make for memorable material or a gripping performance.