Sarah McLachlan Says Music Helped Her Get Through ‘Painful Divorce’

Singer Sarah McLachlan is back in the spotlight this week, with a much buzzed about appearance on South Park as a nurse caring for crack-addicted babies (lampooning her nightmare-fuel ASPCA commercials) and now, talking about her divorce.

McLachlan- who split from drummer Ashwin Sood in 2008- jokes that the “marriage part didn’t quite work out,” but adds that levity surrounding the circumstances were hard won. She explains:

“Coming to terms with the fact that my marriage was a failure was devastating and very difficult,” she says. “I blamed myself for a lot of things. It took me a very long time to get over it.”

But the singer says that it wasn’t always easy to keep in good spirits:

“I have amazing friends, great family and two kids, so I just got out of bed everyday and kept moving forward,” she continues. “I’m not one to sit and wallow — I would rather figure out a way around so I can move past it and be at peace with things. I don’t like bad feelings gnawing away at me.”

She adds:

“…I’ve certainly done a lot of growing up in the past couple of years, recognizing bad traits in myself and others.”

McLachlan says she’s making music again now, but that it was a struggle to get to that place:

“Music has always been incredibly cathartic for me, whether it’s writing my own stuff or singing other people’s music; it’s very freeing. But it did take me a long while to be able to write again because I was just too far down a deep dark hole to do anything,” she says. “I had to crawl back up, get some light in and have some objectivity before I could start writing again.”

McLachlan’s latest work, the album “Laws of Illusion,” was released last summer.