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Sarah McLachlan is reminiscing about her ASPCA commercial.
In an interview published on Thursday, June 26 with Rolling Stone, the three-time Grammy winner reflected on the emotional ASPCA commercial that she starred in, which featured her 1997 ballad “Angel.”
McLachlan, 57, said that there was a range of 25-year-old fans she now has, while the tear-jerker of an ad exposed her to “a whole world of fans who are 80 plus.” “The late-night television thing,” she clarified.
“A friend of mine was on the [ASPCA] board and said, ‘Hey, do you want to do this commercial? We’ve never done this before with a celebrity or someone known.’ I love animals, and we thought it might be a cool thing to do, so I did it,” McLachlan said of how the gig came to be.
She added: “And in a year, it raised $30 million or something like that.”
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Despite its massive success in raising money for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, she found it hard to watch. “But the music and the visuals … it’s painful,” she admitted. “I couldn’t watch it. It was just like, ‘Oh, God is awful.’ ”
“But it worked like a hot damn,” McLachlan quipped.
The commercial, as many may recall, features a montage of animal clips set to the melancholy ballad. McLachlan asks viewers “to be an angel for a helpless animal” and make a monthly donation. The visuals and ballad tug at viewers’ heartstrings, making the emotional ad memorable.
The Canadian singer-songwriter also said that the commercial didn’t reflect who she is as a “super-happy, super-optimistic person.”
“That showed me as this sort of quiet, sad person with all my puppies and kittens. I’ll never forget the director saying, ‘I just need a little more [makes a sad face] from you,’ ” said McLachlan.
Years later, in 2023, she was able to wink at the commercial with other ads, most notably a Super Bowl commercial with Busch Light.
“When I got the opportunity to take the piss out of it, with the Audi commercial and the Super Bowl [Busch Light] commercial, that was just gleeful for me,” she concluded.
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McLachlan is releasing her first new album in nine years, titled Better Broken. She called recording it “such a joyful process.” In 2024, she embarked on the 30th anniversary tour for her 1993 album Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.
“I haven’t been on tour since 2016. So I thought, it was a really important record for me, and I just thought it would be really fun to get up there and play the whole thing,” she told PEOPLE in 2023 ahead of her North American trek.
In 2015, she reflected on the advertisements, calling them “brutal.”
“I can’t watch them!” she told the video blog, Makers. “It just kills me,” she added, while also acknowledging how successful the PSA was.
Added McLachlan: “I got a whole new audience out of it. I swear I’d be at Target in Missouri at 10 p.m. getting off the tour bus and I’d be going down the aisle and these two little old ladies would be like, ‘Are you that dog lady? I love that song!’ Daily. Daily this would happen.”
Better Broken, which will be released on Sept. 19, is available for preorder.
