Olivia Rodrigo has spent the past few weeks doing the full press circuit for her third studio album,
_You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love_. Alongside it, Rodrigo has also announced something that has taken on a life entirely of its own: Daisy Chain Fields, a one-day, all-female music festival landing on 29 August at the Great Park in Irvine, California, with net proceeds funnelled towards women- and girls-focused charities including the Black Mamas Matter Alliance, the Center for Reproductive Rights, Planned Parenthood, and the Johns Hopkins Center for Indigenous Health.
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It is hard to read the announcement as anything other than a political statement dressed up as a festival poster, a reminder that putting women’s reproductive and maternal health front and centre is still, depressingly, treated as a radical act in this industry.
Rodrigo dropped the kind of tease that sends a fandom into immediate meltdown, hinting in a recent interview that she might perform “Landslide” alongside Stevie Nicks herself, the sort of pairing that could turn a single song into a full-blown generational changing-of-the-guard moment.
The lineup is essentially a fever dream assembled by everyone who has ever made a “women in music” Spotify playlist: Chappell Roan, Doechii, Mitski, Katseye, Santigold, Die Spitz, the Breeders, Bikini Kill, Garbage, and Rachel Chinouriri are all confirmed, with Nicks, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and McLachlan turning up as special guests.
Rodrigo has said that McLachlan was the very first phone call she made once she had decided to actually go through with the festival, which is the kind of detail that tells you exactly where this whole idea came from, and exactly whose feminist legacy it is borrowing.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW THIS ADWhat was Lilith Fair?
To get the full story, you have to rewind almost thirty years, back to a touring festival McLachlan dreamt up after getting thoroughly fed up with an industry that treated two women on the same bill as some kind of scheduling impossibility, as though female musicians were a finite resource that could only be rationed out one per stage.
Lilith Fair launched on 5 July 1997 and barrelled through 37 dates that summer with 69 acts in tow, the Cardigans, Fiona Apple, and the Indigo Girls among them. The following year it ballooned to more than 100 acts, scooping up Erykah Badu, Bonnie Raitt, Missy Elliott, and Sinéad O’Connor along the way, before its third and final outing topped 120 performances and welcomed Christina Aguilera, the Pretenders, and the band now known as the Chicks.
In the foreword to Buffy Childerhose’s 1998 book on the festival, McLachlan described the whole project as her attempt to build a sense of community and solidarity she felt was sorely missing from a business built almost entirely around men deciding which women got to be heard.
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Lilith Fair has since been credited with launching or supercharging a string of careers, Nelly Furtado’s included, who has called it one of the first genuine safe spaces she found in the industry, a phrase that says a great deal about how rare that kind of space still was, and arguably still is.
From a flop revival to a brand new torchbearer
A 2010 attempt to bring Lilith Fair back from the dead flopped, and McLachlan later admitted to Billboard that the revival had failed because the intentions behind it simply were not as pure as they had been the first time around. But she also left the door wide open, suggesting that the whole format could still work in someone else’s hands, so long as that someone was a fresh artist willing to pick up the torch and carry the same feminist conviction forward, Lilith name optional.
Daisy Chain Fields, then, looks suspiciously like the answer to that prophecy.
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Rodrigo has talked before about feeling a real sense of duty towards the young women who flock to her shows, framing the festival as a chance to give them something joyful and properly community-minded, a corrective to growing up watching festival posters where women’s names were squeezed into the smallest font on the bill.
In an earlier Rolling Stone cover story, she confessed to picturing Nicks belting “Landslide” out to a packed stadium and wondering what it might feel like to sing about heartbreak decades into her own career, which makes that recent tease about a possible duet feel like the long-awaited payoff to a daydream she has clearly been nursing for years, one woman handing the microphone to another across a thirty-year gap.
The two festivals mirror one another, politically as well as musically. Both built their entire lineups around women, both treated genre as an afterthought next to gender solidarity, throwing rock, pop, folk, and hip hop acts onto the same stage without a second thought, and both tied ticket sales directly to causes that protect women’s rights and bodily autonomy rather than bolting philanthropy on as a marketing afterthought.
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Every artist on the Daisy Chain Fields bill is reportedly performing entirely for free, so every cent of net proceeds can go straight to the festival’s chosen nonprofits, echoing the same charitable, unapologetically feminist spirit that ran through Lilith Fair’s original tours.
Whether or not “Landslide” actually makes the setlist, Daisy Chain Fields has already crowned itself heir to McLachlan’s original vision, built for a fandom decades younger but still asking the same blunt question the original festival asked back in 1997: why should women have to fight this hard just to share a stage.