Pierre Marchand calls his approach to production “disorganized” and “chaotic,” but his results sound the exact opposite. He is the producer who has made the difference on pristine recordings by singer/songwriters such as the McGarrigle sisters (Heartbeats Accelerating, 1990) and Sarah McLachlan, with whom he worked on five albums: Solace (1991), Fumbling Towards Ecstasy (1993), The Freedom Sessions (1994), Rarities, B-sides, and Other Stuff (1996), and Surfacing (1997).

During the past few years McLachlan’s albums have been amassing bucketsful of critical and commercial success—huge album sales, lots of industry awards and a high media profile. Surfacing and Fumbling Towards Ecstasy went triple-Platinum in the U.S. and Canada. There have been songs for movies (for Better Than Chocolate, Toy Story and Toy Story 2, and City of Angels), and there’s even a Sarah McLachlan cookbook. It’s a bit surprising, therefore, that the man who has been instrumental in helping create her music has remained virtually anonymous.

So, let’s give credit where credit is due: Pierre Marchand plays many of the instruments, including bass, keyboards and drum programming, on McLachlan’s studio albums. He also records, mixes and produces all her material and co-writes some of her songs.

Almost all of McLachlan’s material is recorded at Marchand’s studio, Wild Sky, in beautiful, forest-covered hills an hour’s drive from Montreal (see sidebar on page 90 for more on the studio). But getting a hold of him there proved difficult, and the reason quickly became clear. Unlike many other producers who appear to have an eight-days-a-week attitude toward their work, Marchand spent some of his royalties on a 47-foot sailboat a couple of years ago, and he spends a fair amount of time sailing. “It gets very cold up here in Quebec,” he explains, “and after eight years here I had enough of freezing. Also, I burnt out at the end of Surfacing. I was going to turn 40, I had dreams of world travel and of pursuing my interests in visual arts. I ended up in California, found a boat and installed a small studio and a dark room in it. The idea was to get more creative, but being on a ship is just not conducive to writing. It’s too easy to just swim!”

Meanwhile, Marchand handed the running of Wild Sky Studios to two brothers, Dominique and Silvain Grand, who keep the studio running as a commercial facility. When I finally caught Marchand on the phone at Wild Sky in late 1999, he was back at the studio for a few months, because, he says, “At one point, vacation life gets a little boring. I wanted a little culture, and I’m considering doing some studio work again.”

An Early Start
Born in Montreal, Marchand’s first language is French, but he told his musical history in accent-free American English. “I started playing the piano at age 12. By age 15, I had a big rack of synths, and in the ’80s, I also had a 286 IBM-compatible PC with Sequencer Plus software. Playing with my racks and sequencer was all I did with my days. I played in a rock band for three years but didn’t like it very much. I discovered that I get much more of a kick in the studio, sculpting away at a piece of music for hours on end. I don’t get a rush from the presence of an audience. I guess I am a bit of a hermit. So during my 20s, I did a lot of theater and film music. When I was 30, I showed my music to Daniel Lanois, who suggested that I play it to a record company. They liked it, and they also happened to have Kate and Anna McGarrigle under contract. The record company and Daniel suggested I produce them, and so I did Heartbeats Accelerating with them.”

Although Heartbeats Accelerating was widely acclaimed, the phone didn’t start ringing, and Marchand carried on doing theater and film music. Then in 1991, McLachlan was looking for a producer to help with her second album, and Marchand was one of several her record company approached. McLachlan remembered in a November 1997 Keyboard interview: “Pierre was given to me in a list of producers, but the different thing was that he sent a tape of his own compositions, which was wonderful. I can’t say enough good things about Pierre. He’s just so awesome.”

SHIVERS UP THE SPINE
Marchand helped set the singer on a very fruitful course, with the modern technology-influenced folk-rock that started to find form on her second album, Solace. McLachlan’s third album, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy, followed two years later and is still widely regarded as her magnum opus. A marvelous mixture of drum machines and synths with all manner of acoustic instruments, it stands as one of the classic albums of the ’90s. Her most recent offering, the Grammy-winning Surfacing, is a starker, purer, more acoustic album, with a powerful melancholy streak.

“I have definitely been influenced by trip hop folks like Massive Attack, Portishead and Tricky, and that has found its way into my work,” Marchand says. “The drum machines and synths and dance music influences are really me having fun with the technology. Sarah doesn’t really like drum machines. I used the sounds of an 808 on a few tracks on Fumbling, like the title track and ‘Mary,’ and Sarah told me afterward, ‘I don’t like the 808.’ That was very funny. She must have realized this after the record was done, because she certainly does not keep her opinions away from me. But I do believe Fumbling Towards Ecstasy was our best album. I was determined to make the best record ever—in my book, of course—and I think ‘Fear’ was my highest achievement. The end result still sends shivers up my spine.

“The approach to Surfacing was a reaction to Fumbling,” he continues. “We all thought we could never do another Fumbling, and I thought we should make a simpler, less ethereal record. I think we achieved this. I love Surfacing. There was a conscious decision to just go with the song, simply make them what they are. ‘I Love You,’ for example, was a romantic song with violins, and we decided to go all the way. No need for the big drums and the three-second reverb on the heavy big snare that you’ll get in big ballads. Instead, I added a hypnotic sub-bass feel—using a sine wave from an E-mu IV sampler—and drum machine to the string arrangement, to keep it away from a Hollywood sound. By contrast, on Fumbling, we always tried to go in nonobvious directions, like with the song ‘Hold On,’ which was a very slow, jazzy, dark, quiet song. I tried to offset that with a rocking rhythm on the drum machine, taking the feel in a completely different direction.”

So, while Fumbling is complex and technology-oriented, with a central place for the drum machine, Surfacing is more acoustic, organic and straightforward. On one song on Surfacing, in fact, the stripped-down arrangement consists of just an acoustic piano and acoustic bass, and on many others the only players are McLachlan, drummer Ash Sood and Marchand.

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Reprinted with permission from Mix Magazine, June, 2000
© 2000, Intertec Publishing, A Primedia Company All Rights Reserved