Yes, even Sarah McLachlan was terrorized by her infamous ASPCA commercial.
For those living under a rock (or not yet alive in the ’90s), McLachlan starred in an emotional commercial for the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which featured her 1997 hit “Angel” set to melancholy montages of sad animals. “The music and the visuals … it’s painful,” she admitted of the tear-jerker in a new interview with Rolling Stone. “I couldn’t watch it. It was just like, ‘Oh, God is awful.’ But it worked like a hot damn.”
As for how it all came to be, McLachlan recalled, “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.”
She added, “And in a year, it raised $30 million or something like that.”
McLachlan told the outlet the commercial also introduced her to a whole new generation of fans, but despite all of this success, when she got the opportunity to poke a bit of fun at it all, she jumped at the chance.
“It’s funny, because I’m a super-happy, super-optimistic person, but that showed me as this sort of quiet, sad person with all my puppies and kittens,” she said, adding, “I’ll never forget the director saying, ‘I just need a little more [makes a sad face] from you.’ So 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.”
McLachlan, who is gearing up for the release of her first new album in nine years, Better Broken, has previously reminisced on the ASPCA commercials, and how “brutal” they are to watch. “I can’t watch them! It just kills me,” she told video blog Makers in 2015.
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Sarah McLachlan attends the 2024 Canadian Songwriters Hall Of Fame Induction Ceremony
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But, she added at the time, “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 Rolling Stone describes as “a collection of songs both new and long in gestation that chronicle two breakups, strained relationships with her oldest daughter, and the war on women,” is available now to preorder.
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