Sarah McLachlan often isn’t considered one of the pivotal cultural figures of the 1990s, a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer along the lines of Kurt Cobain, Trent Reznor, and Tupac Shakur. Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery—The Untold Story, a CBC documentary that premiered on Hulu in late September, suggests that’s where the singer/songwriter belongs.
Although it takes part of its title from her 1997 hit, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery isn’t strictly a McLachlan biography. The spotlight is squarely upon Lilith Fair, the traveling festival she conceived in 1996 after being told one too many times by music business insiders that punters would never attend a concert boasting more than one woman on the bill. A successful tour with Paula Cole convinced McLachlan there was a large audience being unserved in North America, prompting her to launch Lilith Fair in 1997.
Lilith Fair’s success blazed brightly but briefly. Between 1997 and 1999, the festival eclipsed Lollapalooza, the granddaddy of ’90s traveling rock’n’roll carnivals. The women of Lilith Fair—and director Ally Pankiw underscores there were plenty of women on the crew, a rarity in the late ’90s—simply outworked all the festivals anchored by men: in 1997, they played 40 dates, increasing that number to a whopping 57 in 1998. Despite this fact, pop culture commentators of the time took their cue from a parade of comedians and stereotyped the Lilith artists as wan, crunchy hippies. It’s a caricature that perhaps fit a handful of the acts on the festival’s first year, when folkies dominated the lineup, but it certainly didn’t apply to McLachlan, whose gentle blend of keening melodies and artful atmosphere camouflaged tenacious strength.
That toughness comes into sharp relief in Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery. Combing through over 600 hours of archival footage, Pankiw does an expert job at documenting the rampant rancid misogyny that coursed through pop culture in the 1990s. A quick opening montage of shock jocks, late-night comics, and the Anita Hill congressional hearings establishes the toxic tone of the mainstream in the ’90s. McLachlan believed Lilith Fair would be the antidote to this venom, a support system for musicians who shared similar outlooks if not musical sensibilities.
McLachlan and her cohorts took inclusivity seriously. When their initial 1997 lineup was mocked as “Lilywhite Fair,” the festival expanded and diversified their lineup, finding space for an ascendent Missy Elliott and Meshell Ndegeocello. They also brought aboard the Pretenders, an unrepentant rock’n’roll band whose leader Chrissie Hynde is seen in vintage footage sneering, “It was just a good tour to get on. I don’t care that it’s women.”
Plenty of people did care that Lilith Fair was all women, of course. That included the jesters on network TV who cracked tasteless, unfunny jokes about Paula Cole’s underarm hair, but also tour’s attendees. Brandi Carlile speaks of how witnessing the first-ever Lilith Fair at the Gorge in 1997 as a “baby dyke” changed her life. Dan Levy—the Emmy-winning creator and star of Schitt’s Creek who also serves as a producer on this film—remembers the concert he attended fondly, saying “being there was one of the earliest memories I’ve had of safety” as a closeted gay teenager.
That sense of warmth permeates Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, conveying the festival’s ideals of inclusivity. At its peak, Lilith Fair did find equal room for a variety of voices, cultivating a space that was welcoming and sincere, its earnestness refuting the conventional Gen X: there’s no ironic distance here, no emotional detachment. The real world does come crashing forth, of course. The festival’s support of Planned Parenthood earned them protests and threats that they largely kept hidden from the attendees. The last Lilith Fair tour arrived the same year as Woodstock ’99. Sheryl Crow, a staple of Lilith lineups since the beginning, played Woodstock 99, withstanding taunts of “show us your tits” from the drunken crowd; there’s a palpable sense of relief when she returns to Lilith afterward.
Lilith Fair wrapped up in 1999, allowing nu-metal and teen-pop to steamroll any sense of progress during the early years of Y2K. The remarkable thing about Panikw’s film is how it makes this festival, so clearly the product of a time when progress wasn’t a verboten notion, seem relevant and necessary. In its closing moments, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery argues that the contemporary center of popular music is all downstream from the festival: the barbed guitar-pop of Olivia Rodrigo, the indie introspection of Boygenius, and the phenomenon that is Taylor Swift are all the daughters of Lilith Fair. That’s a deep, pervasive influence and none of it would’ve been possible without the vision and drive of Sarah McLachlan, who emerges from this film as a figure of great and lasting importance. If that doesn’t make her a serious contender for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, who knows what would.
Stephen Thomas Erlewine is a veteran music journalist and a founding editor of Allmusic.com, where he wrote thousands of artist biographies and record reviews that are licensed throughout the net, including Spotify and Apple Music. He’s a regular contributor to Pitchfork and Rolling Stone whose work has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Guardian, Billboard, Washington Post, and New York Magazine’s Vulture.