In the beginning, all Sarah McLachlan wanted was to prove to music industry gatekeepers that female artists could sell concert tickets. The “Sweet Surrender” singer had a simple, untested idea: put multiple women on a single concert bill and see what happens. Her grand experiment, called “Lilith Fair” (after Adam’s mythologized first wife who left the Garden of Eden because she viewed herself as an equal) proved the theory — and then some.
Lilith Fair, which ran for three summers from 1997 to 1999 (plus a few experimental dates in 1996), is now the subject of a new documentary titled Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery — The Untold Story. Directed by Ally Pankiw, Building a Mystery features never-before-seen archival footage of each year at Lilith Fair, plus interviews with many of its key players: McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Paula Cole, Shawn Colvin, Erykah Badu, Indigo Girls, Natalie Merchant, and Jewel, among others. ABC News Studios will release the film, which includes Diane Sawyer as an executive producer, on Hulu and Hulu on Disney+ on Sept. 21.
Across the better part of two hours, artists, crew members, and festival organizers look back at how Lilith Fair shifted the paradigm of the music industry and pop culture by featuring an all-women bill, a diverse spectrum of genres, and offer a safe space for music fans of every age, gender, and racial background. Meanwhile, Building a Mystery also addresses challenges the festival faced: Even as they sold out venues and raised considerable sums for charity, critics and culture writ large tended to dismiss the festival as little more than a chick fest for overly earnest cat ladies.
Nearly 30 years after the inaugural edition, Building a Mystery offers an opportunity to retell the festival’s origin story. Ahead of the documentary’s premiere, here’s a rundown of everything we learned from going behind the scenes at Lilith Fair.
Prior to Lilith Fair, radio stations were discouraged from playing women-led songs back-to-back
When talking about the creation of Lilith Fair, Sarah McLachlan outlined the male-dominated industry landscape she and her peers were up against when promoting their music in the early Nineties. For instance, not only were radio DJs and programmers discouraged from playing songs by female acts back-to-back out of a concern that listeners would switch the station, culturally women artists tended to be lumped together, treated as an industry fad, and pitted against one another where sales were concerned. “If you play too many female acts, the hard-to-soft balance will be upset,” XTRA-FM (91X) San Diego Program Manager Kevin Stapleford is quoted as saying. “You must be careful — it’s dangerous to play too much of anything.”
“I remember every time I’d go to a radio station and they’d play a song, they’d be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, it’s a really great song, but you know, we added Tracy Chapman this week.’ Or ‘We added Jewel this week,’” McLachlan recalls to filmmakers. “And I was like, ‘And? What’s that got to do with me? Those are all very different artists.’ …We all got lumped into the same category… It just never made any sense to me.”
There was the same issue on the live-music side, where promoters were reluctant to put two (or more) women on the same bill out of a concern that tickets wouldn’t sell, a theory Former President of Sony Music Canada Denise Donlon calls “absolutely ridiculous” in the doc.
Meanwhile, the female artists that were popular at the time — Jewel, Liz Phair, McLachlan, Crow, Suzanne Vega, and more — were under enormous pressure to dress more revealingly. “I was sent to a magazine shoot, and they asked me to wear trousers and suspenders that just went over my nipples,” Phair says in the documentary. “I’m like, ‘I’m devalued. Everything that I was good at, that I was skilled at, that I worked my entire life for boiled down to, ‘Do her tits look good?’”
Female performers were initially cautious about committing to an all-women lineup
At first, McLachlan’s idea for an all-women music festival met with some resistance, not only from talent bookers but from female performers themselves. Interviewed for the documentary, three-time Lilith performer Suzanne Vega said: “At first I didn’t get it. I thought, ‘Why is [Sarah] making this all-female show? And she explained to me that this was deliberate… to show the promoters that you could have an all-female lineup and it would do well. And I thought, ‘Sign me up.’”
Lisa Loeb, who also performed all three years at Lilith, shared Vega’s trepidation, telling filmmakers, “My immediate reaction was, ‘I don’t know if that’s a good idea, I don’t really want to be grouped with a bunch of women musicians. I went to an all-girls school where I really didn’t want to be seen as just another girl who plays guitar.’ But then I heard about who else was on the bill, and it was Sarah, Paula Cole, Aimee Mann, Patti Smith… So I said, ‘Yes, for sure, I would love to do it.’”
In a similar vein, organizers even had trouble securing sponsors for Lilith Fair. McLachlan’s former manager Marty Diamond tells filmmakers how the team asked a water company if they’d like to come on as sponsor, only to be told, “No, we’re kinda really focusing on a male audience.” Diamond remembers replying, “It’s water.”
The Indigo Girls made Lilith Fair feel more collaborative among its headliners
When Amy Ray and Emily Saliers of Indigo Girls got to Lilith Fair, Jewel tells filmmakers how the folk-rock duo brought a greater sense of ease backstage, calling them “the greeters of the tour.” When Ray and Saliers arrived, they invited the rest of the musicians to collaborate onstage, which inspired Jewel, Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Meredith Brooks, and other headliners to get onstage with them.
“Early on, Amy and Emily were like, ‘Ok, who’s going to sing with us?’” McLachlan remembers, noting how the rest of the Lilith headliners were pleasantly taken aback. Ray and Saliers’ nudging resulted in Lilith Fair closing out the night with a group performance of the duo’s 1989 anthem “Closer to Fine.”
“I had a sense that people were a little scared, ’cause we were, like, so gay, and so puppy dog-like, fanning out on everybody,” Ray laughs in the doc. “The representation for women in rock music wasn’t there, and then particularly for queers,” Saliers adds. “We really had to find a lot of our own way. We wanted a broader audience, and we thought, ‘This is a great opportunity, [to collaborate].”
Sarah McLachlan, Paula Cole, and Shawn Colvin almost boycotted the 1998 Grammys’ ‘Lilith Medley‘
The 1998 Grammy Awards reflected Lilith Fair’s immense success, with McLachlan, Cole, Jewel, Crow, Brooks, and Shawn Colvin being nominated for multiple trophies. Colvin won Record of the Year and Song of the Year for “Sunny Came Home,” and Cole won Best New Artist.
But the women ultimately felt tokenized by producers deciding to group McLachlan, Cole, and Colvin together for one medley Grammys performance. “Every single song that was nominated for Record of the Year should have had their own spot,” Colvin tells filmmakers.
“At the beginning of it, we were like, ‘This is bullshit. The other nominees — Hanson and R. Kelly — got to perform on their own. So why lump us all together?” McLachlan adds, remembering how the group nearly boycotted. “Ultimately, the decision was, ‘We’ll do it. We’re not happy about it, but this is not the hill we’re going to die on today.’”
Even more unsettling was the press reaction to Cole, who lifted her hand during the set to reveal unshaven armpits, prompting cruel headlines and late-night bits mocking her appearance. “I was so angry for Paula, to be diminished like that, after such a huge night. Who cares? But that’s what it became about,” McLachlan recalls.
Missy Elliott literally hitched a ride to Lilith ‘98 when her tour bus broke down
As overwhelmingly popular as Lilith Fair was, it also met with understandable criticism around its lack of racial diversity. In the doc, Diamond remembers how the press would sometimes refer to the festival as “Lily-white Fair.”
However, McLachlan made a point to diversify the festival’s lineup, adding artists like neo-soul luminary Erykah Badu and hip-hop greats Queen Latifah and Missy Elliott, the latter of whom had never actually toured prior to Lilith. In fact, Elliott nearly missed her performance slot because her tour bus broke down on the highway. Festival organizers remember Elliott pulling up last minute in a red convertible — she’d managed to hitch a ride.
By expanding its lineup past folk-rock or folk-adjacent genres, Lilith Fair increased its commercial viability and introduced listeners to artists with whom they might not have otherwise been familiar. “I know that being part of Lilith Fair expanded my audience greatly,” Badu tells filmmakers. “People who would not get to hear of an Erykah Badu or listen to even my type of genre of music were exposed to it.”
Many of Lilith’s critics were women
“Early on, there were a lot of female critics who kind of ripped the crap out of us,” McLachlan says in the doc. One of those detractors was comedian Sandra Bernhard, who is shown joking about how she can’t take any more “waifish, alternative singers” in her 1998 standup special, I’m Still Here… Damn It!
Again, McLachlan met the moment by inviting Bernhard to perform at Lilith Fair and witness what the festival was all about for herself. “Before I knew that much about it, I just assumed it was [a] Ladies of the Canyon vibe,” Bernhard says in the doc. “The earnestness of it made it so that it was not to be taken as seriously as it should have been. I was poking at it. Why was I poking at it? Because I would really like to be hanging out with all of these people.”
Similarly, Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders “was not a big advocate” of Lilith Fair, as organizers recall. “She came on with a bit of an attitude, [saying], ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here with you bitches,’” McLachlan adds. “And as shows went on, she warmed up and went, ‘Oh, actually this is really fun.’”
Sinead O’Connor and Natalie Merchant found a safe space at Lilith Fair
After the Irish singer-songwriter infamously ended her 1992 performance on Saturday Night Live by tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II, her protest drew significant criticism from mainstream audiences, fellow performers such as Frank Sinatra and Madonna, and the press. In 1998, O’Connor came on for a guest performance at Lilith Fair, prompting a flurry of excitement from its headliners, who provided something of a safe space for O’Connor at a time when she needed one.
“To find that I was so respected by those women was a major boost to my confidence and self-esteem,” O’Connor says in archival footage, calling Lilith “a very healing experience.”
“Sinead was really important for me to have on because I was so in awe of her and her immense power,” McLachlan says.
Similarly, year two headliner Natalie Merchant says she felt revitalized by surrounding herself with women at Lilith Fair 1998. “When I left 10,000 Maniacs after 12 years of feeling like I was the last woman on earth, I had made a concerted effort to distance myself from what was going on in the business of music,” she says in the doc. “But Lilith was gentle and friendly, and I loved that.”
Lilith Fair also provided a safe and welcome environment for new moms
Not only did audiences bring their young children and infants to the festival, headlining artists who happened to be new mothers at the time felt comfortable bringing their babies on tour. Lilith was singular in how it let women’s musicianship mingle with their motherhood, where most touring environments would be the precise opposite.
“I was a new mom,” Badu tells filmmakers. “I was going through the changes that we go through as women. And they really catered to my feminine emotions and sensibilities and needs.”
Merchant adds: “What I value was the tangibility that I saw of mothering and being an artist coexisting.”
The festival hosting Planned Parenthood “really flipped people out”
“We were like a gentle threat for some people,” Diamond says in the doc, recalling how the festival including Planned Parenthood as a sponsor created controversy, with pro-life protesters tending to crowd the audience entrance and, in more extreme cases, call in bomb threats. Headliner Joan Osborne was particularly outspoken about the festival’s firm pro-choice stance, remembering how Lilith Fair’s Texas venue tried to exclude the local Planned Parenthood affiliate from the event. “I have a long history working with Planned Parenthood, so it just incensed me,” Osborne tells filmmakers.
In the end, Planned Parenthood was permitted to stay at its location in The Village, which hosted a number of charitable outlets within Lilith, but artists were asked not to talk about the org. “I did not make that compromise,” Osborne says. “I put my whole band in ‘I Am The Face Of Pro-Choice Texas’ T-shirts.”
“I was enthralled and envious of her strength and ‘fuck you-ness,’” McLachlan also recalls of the moment.
Lilith Fair forever altered the way its performers viewed their place in the music industry
Even though Lilith Fair ceased to run after 1999, its presence inspired massive change in the music industry. For starters, radio promoters and DJs did start playing female artists back to back, and Erykah Badu, Queen Latifah, and Jill Scott went on to found the R&B and hip-hop touring festival Sugar Water, which ran from 2005 to 2006.
“I had talked to Sarah a few times, and I remember her saying, ‘We proved our point,’” Crow says in the doc. “‘This can exist, now it’s time for women to go out and create their own small Liliths.’”
