Take it from Olivia Rodrigo: “All of my favorite artists played.” Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery (Hulu), directed by Ally Pankiw, takes us back to the mid-1990s and the advent of a fest formed to feature music made exclusively by women artists. And despite pushback from the music industry boys’ club, over three years, Lilith Fair became exactly what its founder, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Sarah McLachlan, had always envisioned: a safe space for everyone to enjoy music and community, without all the toxic shit that permeated the culture. Lilith features interviews with many of the participating artists, including McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Liz Phair, Erykah Badu, Paula Cole, Indigo Girls, Lisa Loeb, Suzanne Vega, Jewel, and Emmylou Harris.
The Gist: When Canadian singer and songwriter Sarah McLachlan got the idea for Lilith Fair, it was the direct result of what she experienced after signing with an American record label for the larger distribution of 1993’s Fumbling Toward Ecstasy. She describes being stunned, of being reduced to her looks or body type, and feeling alone and disenfranchised because of it. “I realized I was missing that sense of community,” Mclachlan says in Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, the supportive environment she enjoyed within her own band and management structure, and set out to create it on a larger scale, nearly out of whole cloth.
And get this: tour promotors, radio guys, they wouldn’t even book or program two women artists together. But when McLachlan played an early test-run of dates with Paula Cole on the bill, people came out to the shows. They supported, Cole says, “because they knew it was fucked up,” these manufactured reasons not to center female musicians. By 1997, the industry was still skeptical. But McLachlan and her team pressed on, despite low guarantees and no sponsorships. Despite all those haters, Lilith Fair not only was born. It thrived.
Lilith brings in a lot of voices from the traveling fest’s three years on the road. Interviews with McLachlan, Cole, Sheryl Crow – “Feminine energy,” Crow says of the festival, “usurped the ego” – and other performers. But the doc also highlights how Lilith Fair became an incubator for industry change. It hired women sound engineers and lighting technicians. It provided health care for its support staff. And with the tour’s runaway success in 1997 and 1998, it sought sponsors who would match large donations with local charities. The festival wasn’t just an all-woman traveling rock show. It became a progressive cause in itself.
“If you stand up for something, there’s gonna be an equal, opposite reaction.” McLachlan tracked this effect through the daily press conferences held at each Lilith tour stop, where ridiculous, insulting questions from male journalists were the norm. And while many of the artists on the Lilith bill were enjoying huge record sales and chart activity, by the time the 1997 Grammy Awards rolled around, all the culture could talk about were these “granola” ladies and Paula Cole’s underarm hair.
Through all of this commentary, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery also manages an important aspect of a doc like this: bringing a contemporary audience back to the sounds and experience of the moment. From Missy Elliott’s electrifying sets in 1998 (her first tour ever!), to the show-ending, collaborative singalong jams that became a standard feature, one of the big takeaways from the doc is a question. Why isn’t something like Lilith Fair still happening now?
What Movies Will It Remind You Of? Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery establishes a ‘90s culture counterpoint by contrasting the immaculate vibes of McLachlan’s festival with the mostly all-dude Woodstock ‘99, where everything was set on fire. (Lilith performer Shawn Colvin playing a fest like Woodstock while nine months’ pregnant challenge: impossible.) Other Lilith Fair artists are featured in some great recent docs, including It’s Only Life After All, about Indigo Girls, and Sheryl “This ain’t no disco; it ain’t no country club either” Crow. And while Alanis Morissette was huge in the Lilith Fair era, at that time she was committed to touring with Tori Amos. Even though Morissette blasted filmmaker Alison Klayman’s 2021 documentary about her life and career, we thought Jagged was pretty great, and like Lilith it examines some of the same music industry and larger cultural touchpoints of that era.
Performance Worth Watching: There is a ton of wonderful look-in footage in Lilith, of various stops on the tour across all three of its summertime runs. But we wanted to stay forever in the doc’s excerpt of a particularly luminous take on “In the Arms of an Angel,” with Sarah McLachlan on piano sharing vocals with Lilith artist Sinéad O’Connor.
Memorable Dialogue: In interviews, Liz Phair credits the environment of Lilith Fair with revitalizing her creative drive to make music. “I was devalued,” Phair says of working in the male-dominated 90s music industry. “Everything that I was good at, that I was skilled at, that I’d worked my entire life for, boiled down to ‘Do her tits look good?’”
Sex and Skin: None.
Our Take: Even though we lived through the era, it’s startling to see the receipts Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery brings of a ’90s American culture steeped in casual sexism, and the dismissal of women as a relevant group with valid interests and buying power. “Somehow we’d developed the idea that the teenage girl is this frivolous person,” the writer and critic Ann Powers, who covered the fest, says in the doc. “And forget adult women – the idea that a mom would wanna go to a music festival?” It wasn’t just that these concepts were unheard of. They didn’t even exist. And Lilith does well to illustrate how much the entire music industry – label A&R, radio promotion, music videos – was an expression of what Jewel calls “the straight-up toxic” nature of the larger culture.
But hey, there’s great music to hang out with here, too. We may or may not have stood up and pumped a fist during Meredith Brooks’ 1997 performance of “Bitch.” People have been singing in unison to Indigo Girls’ “Closer to Fine” forever, onstage and off, as Lilith shows. And don’t get us started on Queen Latifah absolutely destroying in 1998. As the doc drifts toward now and drops a cut of TikTokers lamenting they never got to attend an all-woman outdoor Summer music fest, we’re wondering if it will inspire someone to bring back that sense of community and comingling of genres it represented. You can just do things, you know.
Our Call: Stream It. Through extensive interviews with many of the festival’s performers, Building a Mystery effectively channels the emotions and positive energy that defined it, and reveals a lot about how far – and not far – our culture’s come since.
Lilith Fair: Building A Mystery is currently available to stream for Hulu subscribers.
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Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.