Sarah McLachlan on the Devastating Divorce That Nearly Ended Her Career

 Sarah McLachlan had the fairytale life most young girls who sing into their hairbrushes can only dream about. She nabbed two Grammy awards, married a hot drummer, welcomed two gorgeous daughters and co-founded Lilith Fair. Her angelic voice echoed through monumental events from weddings and first dances to funerals and memorials. But then...

"Yeah, the marriage part didn't quite work out," she tells Spinner with a laugh after having just put her "screaming three-year-old" to bed. "Apparently that's a bit of an epidemic, so I just make light of it."

Epidemic indeed. Three years on, the 43-year-old Canadian may chuckle at the demise of her marriage as another statistic in a divorce-saturated world, but it wasn't always so easy for the songstress to joke about. In fact, she admits at one point she entered an emotional hole so horrid that she never expected to be able to make music again, let alone return to the stage.

The thought of never singing and touring again was a grim prospect for the girl who grew up spending her spare time taking vocal lessons and her school hours studying classical piano and guitar. It wasn't exactly down to her genes -- the Halifax, Nova Scotia-born Aquarian was adopted by an American couple, Jack and Dorice, shortly after her birth and it was Dorice who taught McLachlan her first song and had her performing at tea parties. The story goes that it wasn't until McLachlan was a college student at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design that a peer commented on her likeness to another friend -- who turned out to be her birth mother Judy (the two would eventually meet).

By that stage, McLachlan had found solace in music through her teens. It's a typical celebrity story -- the geeky girl who finds herself an outcast at school then goes on to become a global superstar. She never doubted that she was destined for a career in the arts.

"I knew I'd be making music or art, just like I knew ever since I was 17 that I'd have two daughters," she says, matter-of-factly. So it was hardly surprising when her high-school band the October Game's debut concert saw her immediately offered a record deal. After finishing up school and one year of college at her parents' insistence, McLachlan signed with the label and moved to Vancouver.