Olivia Rodrigo performs on the Dandelion Stage during the Daisy Chain Fields Festival 2026 at Great Park Sports Complex on Saturday in Irvine, California.Monica Schipper/Getty Images
There was a lot of love for Canadians down in California on Saturday; a reprieve of sorts from how things have been going of late south of the border. Both Sarah McLachlan and Alanis Morissette took turns on stage being celebrated by and performing with Olivia Rodrigo at Daisy Chain Fields, a healing and electrifying music festival in Irvine attended by approximately 45,000 fans.
The festival, which also featured soul-shaking performances from Doechii and Chappell Roan and a monumental finale with Stevie Nicks, was organized by Rodrigo. She’s the brash American pop star behind megahits like deja vu and good 4 u, who is constantly testing the boundaries of what a Gen Z pop star could be.
Rodrigo took a page from McLachlan, who launched Lilith Fair in the late 1990s, the legendary tour featuring Sheryl Crow, Bonnie Raitt and Missy Elliott among its all-women lineup. It was McLachlan’s response to a misogynist system that at the time refused to play female artists back-to-back on the radio.
Much of this is covered in Ally Pankiw’s recent documentary Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery, which features Rodrigo, and makes the case that the tour paved the way for a music industry today dominated by women.
“Without Lilith Fair, there would be no Daisy Chain,” Rodrigo said onstage, introducing McLachlan before the two delivered a rousing rendition of the latter’s 1997 hit Building a Mystery. They then brought the house to its knees with Angel, dedicating the sentimental duet to the beloved Dolly Parton.
That’s a hard act to follow, but Morissette had the element of surprise. The Lilith Fair alumni wasn’t scheduled to appear as part of the stacked lineup, which had more than a dozen artists on deck across two stages in Irvine’s Great Park. But a previously announced guest, Karen O, couldn’t make it. The crowd erupted when they found out the Jagged Little Pill artist was filling in.
Rodrigo seemed genuinely excited to be joining Morissette for an iconic performance of Ironic, with a bit of a twist. Morissette swapped out some lyrics for a festival celebrating women, diversity and the LGBTQ2IA community: “It’s meeting the man of my dreams and then meeting his beautiful husband.”
These soaring duets were layered with meaning: politically, musically and personally, for me, a girl-dad, with family in tow.
McLachlan and Morissette joining Rodrigo onstage to get their flowers felt like an antidote to the current tension between Canada and the U.S., which Donald Trump decided to ratchet up more than a week ago. Entering Daisy Chain Fields didn’t so much feel like I was crossing the enemy line that is the Canada-U.S. border but finding sanctuary.
Rodrigo and Sarah McLachlan perform during the festival.Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
Rodrigo, the festival’s matriarch, has always been a vocal opponent to the U.S. President, putting his administration on blast for defunding Planned Parenthood supports, or for using her music in social-media videos celebrating Trump’s re-election and ICE raids.
She was in good company with likewise vocal artists like rap princess Doechii, glam rock queen Chappell Roan and Garbage lead singer Shirley Manson, artists who have repeatedly spoken out against Trump and issues like transphobia, while also speaking up for migrants under attack from ICE and Palestinians under attack in Gaza and the West Bank.
Daisy Chain Fields kept most of those issues front and centre. The artists were performing for free to raise money for Planned Parenthood, domestic workers’ rights, Black and Indigenous health, LGBTQIA supports, among others.
Rodrigo announced onstage that the US$10-million raised was matched by Melinda French Gates, for a total of US$20-million. Even as a charity, and a political movement, Daisy Chain Fields echoes Lilith Fair, which made similar philanthropic efforts.
Rodrigo, left, introduces philanthropist Melinda Gates to the stage, where the pop star announced that Gates was doubling the US$10-million raised by the festival in support of nonprofit organizations benefitting women and girls.Chris Pizzello/The Associated Press
As a more narrow-minded teenager, I missed Lilith Fair the first time out, which is why I relished the opportunity to attend its second coming with my family.
Daisy Chain Fields seemed the apotheosis for this moment we’re in. This is a euphoric time to be a girl-dad, feeling welcomed to dress in pink in a field full of marigolds, and find in Doechii, Roan and Rodrigo, along with Sabrina Carpenter and jazz pop sensation Laufey, transcendent singer-songwriters who have captured Gen Z’s hearts while demanding Gen X pay attention.
Rodrigo, who just released her third album, You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love, and is about to go on tour with stops in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, is perhaps the best example. At 17, she came out swinging in her post-Disney child-star career with her 2021 debut album Sour, the hard-hitting lead track brutal capturing a rebelliousness rooted in self-care.
And since then, she’s grown, invoking influences as varied as Sheryl Crow, Fiona Apple and, on her latest album, The Cure, part of her narratives about falling in and out of love.
Take Rodrigo’s duet with The Cure’s Robert Smith, what’s wrong with me. The song opens with Rodrigo singing she’s just “staring at the cei-ling,” riffing on an old Smith line, “staring at the sea,” containing its romanticism and feeling in her bedroom.
Rodrigo doesn’t just nod to her generational influences, McLachlan and Morissette among them, to score points. She negotiates with them. She brings their immensity into her world in the same way that she makes her world feel immense on a song like drop dead, where a guy she spies at a bar, in line for the toilet, appears like “an angel on the walls of Versailles.”
That generational interplay was present among her fellow headliners who are just as adept at hotwiring the classics. Doechii, a rapper with combative flows and inclusive lyrics, got the crowds, who were withering from an extreme California heatwave, roaring to life.
Rapper Doechii during a performance at the festival.Mario Anzuoni/Reuters
Slathered in hot pink paint from head-to-toe, Doechii was showing off incredible core and vocal strength, unloading her verses over samples and riffs from Beyoncé, Queen Latifah and more, while performing splits, backbends and duckwalks.
After Doechii, I didn’t skip across the field to the opposite stage to catch ’90s rock band Garbage because we needed to stay seated for Chappell Roan. She came out in a stunning lavender stewardess costume inspired by The Fifth Element and immediately wrapped the masses around her pinky finger performing her ’80s and ’90s inflected pop hits.
Femininomenon, Hot to Go, My Kink is Karma, Good Luck, Babe! and the all-embracing Pink Pony Club take us on a Wizard of Oz like journey from the singer’s Midwest roots to California, a celebration of finding one’s place with a pang of melancholy that you could dance to.
Finally, Rodrigo took the stage in a white dress, hopping along with the audience, inviting them to scream at everything that’s wrong with the world and letting them carry verses to songs they knew by heart.
Along the way, she rolled out her inspos: McLachlan, Morissette and Stevie Nicks. The Fleetwood Mac lead joined Rodrigo for a much anticipated and achingly beautiful duet of the 1975 ballad Landslide to close the night. The two sang together, with Rodrigo pausing briefly for Nicks’s solo and deliberate delivery of the line, “and I’m getting older, too.”
It hit hard, especially for all of us watching this new generation with pride.