Ep. 305: The Next Lilith Fair?
I Skipped Lilith Fair Because I Thought It Was "a Bunch of Lesbians." I Was Influenced by the Patriarchy. And I was Wrong.
I never went to Lilith Fair. I was right there for it, a music-obsessed kid in the 90s who went to Lollapalooza and Woodstock 94, and I skipped the biggest all-women festival in music history because I'd absorbed the idea that it was, in my own words back then, "a bunch of lesbians." I'm not proud of that. I'm telling you anyway, because Olivia Rodrigo just built Lilith Fair's direct descendant, and it's forcing me to reckon with a version of myself I'd rather not look at too closely.
The festival is called Daisy Chain Fields. One day, August 29, 2026, at the Great Park in Irvine, California. All-women lineup: Chappell Roan, Doechii, The Breeders, Garbage, Bikini Kill, Mitski, Santigold, Katseye, and more, with Stevie Nicks and Sarah McLachlan joining as special guests. Every artist is performing for free. A hundred percent of the net proceeds go to organizations for women and girls, groups like the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood, and Baby2Baby. Tickets sold out in a thirty-minute presale. There's a waitlist now.
What Lilith Fair Actually Was, and What It Cost the Women Who Built It
Sarah McLachlan started Lilith Fair in 1997 because radio programmers had a rule: they would not play two female musicians back to back. Not because the music didn't hold up. Because "the format" supposedly couldn't handle it. Two women couldn't headline the same bill. They wouldn't sell tickets. That was the industry logic, stated out loud, not implied.
So Lilith Fair booked them anyway. Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt, Jewel, Queen Latifah, Missy Elliott, the Indigo Girls, Joni Mitchell, hundreds of artists across three summers. It became the highest-grossing touring festival of 1997, raised millions for women's charities, and gave a side stage to a teenage Christina Aguilera and an unknown India.Arie. And still, the women on that stage got called angry, hysterical, emotional, difficult, before anyone talked about the music.
I was listening to Talk Easy with Sam Fragoso's interview with Alanis Morissette recently, and one line stopped me. She talked about Joni Mitchell not supporting her early on, and how she came to understand it: "That's a woman who's been baked in patriarchy, projecting it on a fellow woman." I recognized myself in that sentence immediately. I did that too. I looked at a festival built entirely to give women a stage they'd been denied, and I wrote it off with a slur before I ever heard the music.
The Line I Can't Stop Thinking About
There's a moment in the interview that I keep replaying. Alanis Morissette wasn't handed a blueprint for how to survive being a groundbreaking, wildly successful female artist in the 90s. She built it herself, in public, while being called angry for using her actual voice. Joni Mitchell built hers alone before that. Tori Amos, alone. The Indigo Girls, Amy Ray and Emily Saliers, spent years absorbing so much backlash for being who they were that Amy has talked openly about the toll it took, addiction, depression, the fear of simply being seen. And they kept filling rooms anyway, bigger rooms every year, until the rooms became stadiums.
None of them had each other's playbook. Lilith Fair was, among other things, the first time a lot of these women got to stand next to someone who understood exactly what it cost to be up there.
Why This Is Happening Again, Right Now
Olivia Rodrigo has said plainly that Daisy Chain Fields is Lilith Fair's direct descendant, and that she built it because young women need to see other women supporting each other, out loud, in public. None of this is happening in a vacuum. Reproductive rights are actively being litigated and rolled back. The trad wife movement has turned "submit to your husband" into a political identity, not just a personal choice. Christian nationalist leaders are using language like "dominion" to argue, plainly, that women shouldn't have an equal say, not at home, not at the ballot box. There are people openly floating the idea that the 19th Amendment went too far. Against that backdrop, a one-day festival where women perform for free and the money goes straight to reproductive health and family advocacy groups isn't just a nostalgia play. It's the same fight Lilith Fair picked in 1997, run by a 23-year-old who wasn't even alive for the original.
What I'd Tell 22-Year-Old Me
I think about what it would have taken for me, at 22, to have the nerve Olivia Rodrigo has at 23. I spent most of my twenties and thirties trying to be exactly what everyone around me hoped I'd be, agreeable, neutral, easy to work with, careful never to let anyone pin down what I actually believed. I built an entire professional voice around not offending anyone. It took me decades to understand that hugging the middle that hard isn't neutrality. It's compliance dressed up as professionalism.
Sarah McLachlan, I owe you an apology. So does anyone else who wrote off what you built because of who was in the crowd. You were doing the actual work. I was scared of being associated with it.
If Daisy Chain Fields is the new Lilith Fair, and it is, then the job isn't just to buy a ticket or stream a documentary and feel nostalgic. It's to stop doing the thing I did in the 90s: looking at women using their voices and deciding it's safer not to stand with them. The daisy chain only works if enough of us actually link up.
Listen to the full episode, wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on YouTube.
xo,
Allison
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