Recently, the trend of Gen Z discovering cultural touchstones that occurred before they were born landed on Lilith Fair. On TikTok, twentysomething women have been marvelling about learning of Canadian singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan’s brainchild: the groundbreaking all-female touring summer music festival that ran from 1997 to 1999.
“Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery,” a new documentary film that traces the origins and impact of the festival, opens with several of these viral posts and an interview with pop superstar Olivia Rodrigo (born in 2003) gushing about its influence. Her eyes light up as she recalls realizing that the tour featured so many of the artists she’d grown up listening to: “I was in disbelief that I’d never heard of it before.”
Directed by Ally Pankiw, the Canadian-American co-production debuts on CBC and CBC Gem on Sept. 17, following its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival.
The film is both a nostalgic trip down memory lane for those old enough to remember attending Lilith Fair — and a cleverly contextualized introduction to the festival for those who’ve never even heard of it.
As one of the youngest journalists accredited to cover Lilith’s Toronto tour stops in the late ’90s, I had a front-row seat to the phenomenon, quite literally, as I attended the pre-show press conferences and was right up against the stage in the photo pit. I saw how McLachlan’s idea to mount a tour featuring all female artists turned the music industry, and the wider cultural landscape, on its head.
Known for her unforgettable voice and deeply poetic lyrics, McLachlan had painstakingly built a career through endless touring but was frustrated that she and other female artists breaking through in the mid-1990s remained pigeonholed. Radio programmers across North America still refused to play songs by women back-to-back, while the notion of two women sharing the same touring bill remained anathema.
“Lilith didn’t start out as a social or political statement. It started out with a really simple concept: Why don’t we just do something ourselves? And it was selfish, too. I wanted to hear — and sing with — all these women and create a community,” said McLachlan, who collaborated closely with the filmmakers on the documentary but gave them complete creative control.
“I certainly wanted to dispel this idea that we were all in competition with each other, so having all these other women agree and say they wanted to be part of [the festival] was so heartening. And then to get to know them, create friendships, and lift each other up — we got to be part of something bigger than ourselves and prove these old-school male attitudes wrong.”
Armed with moxie but no real sense of what it would take to mount a massive summer touring festival to go up against the male-dominated likes of Lollapalooza and H.O.R.D.E., McLachlan convinced her manager, label head and agent to co-found Lilith Fair (named after Adam’s first wife in Jewish lore, who refused to be subservient to him).
The film features interviews with many of the musical icons who played Lilith Fair, including Erykah Badu, Paula Cole, Sheryl Crow, Indigo Girls, Jewel, Natalie Merchant and Liz Phair. Highlighting archival footage from the festival’s three summers, including performances by then-unknown talents like Christina Aguilera, Dido and Nelly Furtado, it also reveals the obvious sense of community Lilith fostered among the artists and audience alike.
Lilith Fair would go on to play 134 dates across 34 cities in enormous outdoor venues, raising $7 million ($1 per ticket) for local women’s shelters and nonprofits along the way. But it proved an easy pop-culture punching bag for late-night talk shows, magazine headlines and other mainstream media at the time, becoming the subject of jaw-droppingly misogynist punchlines, epithets like “Vulvapalooza,” body-shaming of the performers, and much worse.
When Pankiw was approached by the production company to direct the film, she immediately set out to dispel the misconceptions.
“I wanted to rectify my own understanding of Lilith Fair, because I think I was sold a very unfair version of it as a young adult. It was such a massive success, but when I learned about it after the fact, everything about it in pop culture was very reductive,” said Pankiw, who was too young to attend the festival but gravitated to many of its artists as she was growing up and getting her start making music videos.
“Anything vulnerable or feminized is trivialized in contrast to how we celebrate male accomplishment in pop culture. As a woman and a queer person, it’s been many years of unlearning the stories we were told about ourselves in that era. So I wanted to be part of fixing that.”
In contrast to the aggression and corporate excess of other music festivals at the time, Lilith offered a safe space for female and LGBTQ+ concertgoers — something the film’s co-producer Dan Levy (“Schitt’s Creek”), who attended Lilith as a closeted teen, recalls vividly.
“It was one of the very first times I remember feeling comfortable. That’s a huge thing for a young person, and those formative feelings stay with you,” Levy said, noting it felt like a “full-circle moment” when he was asked to be part of the project.
“To get to help Sarah tell her story and share this monumental accomplishment with the world — it felt necessary,” Levy said. “Lilith was an act of rebellion against the status quo. It rewrote the rulebook of what the men in charge stupidly presumed women were capable of.”
It also laid the groundwork for today’s summer festivals, as one of the first tours to include a village area featuring artisans and nonprofits, and side stages to showcase local and emerging artists.
Ontario singer-songwriter Emm Gryner was in her early 20s and just starting her career when she was tapped to play Lilith Fair 1997 at Toronto’s Molson Amphitheatre (now Budweiser Stage). She recalls the spirit of camaraderie and feeling welcomed by McLachlan, who gave handmade gifts to all the artists.
“I remember the first year being extraordinarily special because of how new it was, and that it was a bit of a mystery — pardon the pun,” she said with a laugh.
“Looking back on it, I see that it was a wave of celebration, and I think Sarah headlining the festival was a huge lesson for those of us who might not have been quite ready to step into that spotlight to see that and recognize that we were also worthy of it.”
Singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards was equally inspired. As a young barista who had just started playing open mics and opening spots, she jumped at the chance to work at the Starbucks tent at Lilith’s Ottawa stop in 1998.
When Edwards got the call to compose the interstitial music for the documentary alongside fellow Ottawa musician Ian Lefeuvre, “My first question was, ‘Isn’t there already enough music in a documentary about a music festival?’ Apparently not,” she quipped. “In a purely support role to the incredible story that is Lilith Fair and the music of these great artists, I am deeply humbled to have contributed to the soundtrack.”
While the pop-culture pendulum has swung around to recognize Lilith’s influence, the festival wasn’t without its challenges and controversies. There were protests and bomb threats stemming from its support of pro-choice organizations; cringeworthy questions about feminism at each of the tour stop’s press conferences; criticism over a perceived lack of diversity in the lineup; and, years later, the failed revival of Lilith Fair in 2010.
Despite lineups that included iconic acts like The Bangles and a then-emerging Janelle Monae, the tour fell apart due to low ticket sales and last-minute dropouts by headliners such as Kelly Clarkson, Norah Jones and Carly Simon.
McLachlan is pragmatic about the 2010 bust, chalking it up to a perfect storm of financial and demographic factors. But in the current cultural zeitgeist where female superstars top the charts and sell out stadiums, she agrees it could be an ideal time to revamp the Lilith concept.
“People ask me, ‘Well, could you just give someone the name?’ And I’m too much of a control freak for that,” McLachlan said, laughing. “It would need to be spearheaded by a young artist who can create something different. One of the things the film shows is that Lilith left a legacy, so if someone were to do something in those footsteps, they should make it their own.”
McLachlan isn’t resting on that legacy. She’s setting out on a fall Canadian tour marking the 30th anniversary of “Fumbling,” just after releasing her first new album in over a decade: Better Broken, a collection of burnished ballads reflecting on parenthood, women’s rights and love lost and found.
“I think I had a lot of trepidation about coming back — what do I have to say as a 57-year-old white woman of privilege? But music has always been the vehicle for me to express my joys and sorrows and everything in between,” McLachlan says.
“Lilith was the perfect example — we were all connected to something that is powerful and unifying. If there’s one thing I hope people take away from the film, it’s this: Never underestimate the power of a woman to create.”
