Sarah McLachlan isn’t up for remounting her ground-breaking 1990s all-female music festival but told the sold-out audience at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall yesterday for the world premiere of the documentary Lilith Fair: Building A Mystery that she would happily be on the bill if someone else took up the mantle.
During the post-screening Q&A, in which the multi-platinum singer-songwriter was joined by director Ally Pankiw, co-producer Dan Levy and executive producer Cassidy Hartmann, Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) CEO Cameron Bailey asked her, “If Lilith were to exist today, what do you think it would look and feel like?”
“That’s a really hard question to answer. And I do get that almost every day, including, ‘Can you please bring this back?’ When I sat there and watched this film on the big screen, I want to bring it back,” McLachlan said.
While her comment was met with prolonged claps and cheers, from the audience that included original Lilith Fair performers Joan Osbourne, Paula Cole, and writer Jessica Hopper, whose 2019 Vanity Fair article, with Sasha Geffen and Jenn Pelly, Building A Mystery: An Oral History of Lilith Fair, inspired the film, McLachlan added that in today’s climate, “I do think it needs a reinvention of sorts, but if something like this were to exist, it would need to be championed by a young artist, someone of today, like an Olivia Rodrigo.”
“That being said,” McLachlan continued, “artists are doing their own versions of Lilith. Taylor Swift has women open up for her consistently. Brandi Carlile is a massive champion of women. This is happening. The reverberations are continuing on. Do we need more of this? Do we need more women supporting women? Do we need the general idea of ‘we all need each other, and we should be lifting each other up instead of tearing each other down?’ Yeah, we need more of that,” she continued, as the claps got louder.
Rodrigo, 22, appears in the film, as well as Brandi Carlil, 44, who attended Lilith Fair as a kid and was profoundly inspired by what she experienced. Original Lilith Fair performers Bonnie Raitt, Sheryl Crow, Erykah Badu, Paula Cole, Jewel, Mýa, Natalie Merchant, Indigo Girls and Emmylou Harris are also interviewed in the doc, sharing their memories of the bonding and support they felt at the festival. It is intermixed with never-before-seen archival footage from the tours and shows how everyone involved pushed that boulder up the hill to make it happen. Incredulously, it’s revealed in the doc that they couldn’t get a water sponsorship because the corporation was focused on the male demographic
“I’m 57. I’m tired,” McLachlan continued, laughing. “And I don’t know if I’d have the bandwidth to do something like that again. It was all-encompassing. It was three years of Lilith, and I was young, and I was so exhausted at the end of it. It took over every piece of my life, and I’m so glad it did, but I’m not sure I could do that again. I’d love to be part of it. If someone else wants to take it forward.”
McLachlan — whose 10th studio album, Better Broken, her first in a decade, drops Sept. 19 — created Lilith Fair in the late ‘90s after the enormous success of 1993’s Fumbling Towards Ecstasy.
The male-dominated industry and media frequently pitted women artists against each other, made vulgar comments about their appearance, and believed the public would not support a bill featuring more than one female act. Radio programmers would not play two female artists back to back, believing listeners would change the channel. With support from her then managers and agent — Terry McBride, Dan Fraser and Marty Diamond, all interviewed in the doc — she proved them wrong. Lilith Fair made millions of dollars during its run from 1997 to 1999, and its return in 2010.
“I’ve been doing a lot of unlearning in my adult life and in my adult career of trying to undo what we were taught to think of ourselves as young women and as gay people in the 90s. That really stays with you and haunts you. You have to do a lot of active work to undo that learning. This [film] felt like a really cool opportunity to continue that work and look at that time period.” Pankiw said.
“It’s unfortunately a very timely doc because we’re in a moment of contraction in pop culture. We’re losing financing and funding all over the place to uplift diverse voices and women’s voices and stories. It felt like a way to potentially do something in a moment in our industry that we can feel a little bit proud of.”
At the end of the Q&A, Levy said he feels the documentary can inspire not just the next generation of young artists, but anyone wanting to break down barriers or try something that has not been done.
“There’s a big conversation about ‘just give people what they want,’ but the truth is people don’t know what they want. You have to give them something new and allow them to build the bridge between what they don’t know and what they want.
“I feel like what Lilith did, and what I hope people take away from this documentary, is this idea that if you’re being told no, but you feel something in your gut that is not right, you want to override the system, try it, because look what could happen.”
Lilith Fair: Building A Mystery can be seen in Canada starting Sept. 17, on CBC and CBC Gem, and Sept. 21 in the U.S. on Hulu and Disney+, and internationally on Disney+.
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