1997 was a great year for music. It was also a great year for women in music—and, not unrelatedly, the year that Lilith Fair, the groundbreaking women-only music festival founded by Sarah McLachlan, was born.
For many older millennials, the festival remains a formative event—whether or not they attended it themselves. Yet as time has passed, Lilith Fair’s origin story and legacy have been slowly erased from the popular consciousness.
To correct that, a new documentary, Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery - The Untold Story, out now on Hulu, is connecting the dots for a new generation of music fans almost 30 years later. Directed by Ally Pankiw and based on Vanity Fair’s 2019 oral history of Lilith Fair, it is the second documentary about the festival, after 2001’s Lilith on Top detailed its third and final tour in 1999.
“To do another documentary was a surprise to me,” McLachlan tells me on a recent video call. “I was sold on it after realizing that there was this massive resurgence, this desire for it, but also a desire by the new generation to understand what it was.”
Building a Mystery opens with a montage of TikToks made by young women just discovering the festival, followed by an appearance from the 22-year-old singer-songwriter Olivia Rodrigo. “All of my favorite artists had played at this event—Sarah McLachlan, Sheryl Crow, Jewel,” she says. “I was in disbelief I’d never heard about it before.”
Pankiw—who was brought on to the project by one of its producers, Dan Levy (the producing team also includes Diane Sawyer)—goes on to provide some cultural context for the festival. In the 1990s, a time when radio stations would refuse to play songs by women back-to-back, sexism and misogyny were simply par for the course for female artists of any age. (A clip of Suzanne Vega on The Howard Stern Show will make you shudder.) “We’re in this moment of having to unlearn how that era taught us to look at ourselves,” Pankiw explains. “A big motivator in wanting to do the doc was I had this childish understanding of Lilith Fair existing, but as a young woman, I would hear it trivialized and reduced. It was the butt of the joke in pop culture, and then that became my understanding of it. And so a large part of this was wanting to correct the record and help Lilith be remembered for how cool it was, how diverse it was, and what a massive commercial success it was.”
Indeed, as the film’s focus shifts from scene-setting to the musicians that made Lilith Fair so groundbreaking—it grossed $16 million its first year, outperforming both Lollapalooza and the Warped Tour—one is completely submerged in the magic of the era. Mining video recordings made by McLachlan’s team and entries from the diary she was keeping at the time (in which McLachlan wrote daily letters to her best friend), Building a Mystery offers unprecedented access to that moment’s principal players. With the exception of Rodrigo, every person interviewed for the film was actually at Lilith Fair, whether as a performer or, in the case of Brandi Carlile, an attendee.
“Rereading my journal, which was a way of documenting my feelings and not meant for public consumption at all, I realized it was really overwhelming and there were a lot of intense feelings and a lot of exhaustion. I don’t remember that,” McLachlan says. “I’m really an optimistic, fun-loving person—which you might not think if you listen to my music—but it was all-encompassing. It’s like how you can’t physically remember pain. You remember that you were in it, but when you have space and time and distance, everything softens.”
She continues: “Even though there were these really joyful moments, like the music and being backstage and connecting with artists, there were also the fires to put out and the things to manage—whether it was artists not showing up, or bomb threats, or whatever. It reminded me of why I keep saying no to doing it again.”
Though Lilith Fair would only run from 1997 to 1999 (not including a less-than-successful revival in 2010), in a culture that was still so hostile toward women, its constellation of musical talents made fans feel like they could take over the world. “To me, the story had a perfect balance of both the exploration of how difficult it can be to be a young woman or a gay person in the world, and the really specific joy that can come out of the community that comes together to deal with that,” Pankiw says. “I think of these artists and I think of Lilith as these cool, older-sister types—a babysitter, a boyfriend’s big sister, a literal big sister, a teacher, whatever. It’s a woman who’s sending the elevator down, making it a little bit easier for everyone that comes after.”
