Lilith Fair

May You Find Some Comfort Here

    So, It's official, Lilith Fair is back! After a ten year hiatus the Sarah McLachlan helmed, all Female lead performer, celebration of women in Music is ready to tour again! Being a huge fan of many great female bands and singers, the Nineties was a good time for me; all you had to do was turn on your radio to just about any station at any time to hear a bevy of beautiful voices belting out beats. From The angsty pain of Alanis Morristte to the Ska/Pop fusion that was No Doubt to the earthy poetical folk music of Jewel, women ruled the airwaves.
   To a young man growing up an outsider, the soulful voices of these women was a clarion call. While most of the second string bands faded into obscurity and everyone else defected to the Bubble-gum Pop backlash, this boy went out and sought more. The Pretenders, Emmylou Harris, The Indigo Girls, Jefferson Airplane, Tina Turner, The Shangra-Las- anything with a female lead was sacred, everything that spoke to the challenges of the marginalized and the outsider was gospel. When I found out that Liltith Fair, in probably its last year, was going to be nearby, in a not too distant fairground right in Connecticut, I couldn't resist. I had no car? I had no money? Not a problem! I was going to be there.
    Convincing two "cool" friends was not as easy or as hard as I thought. All I had to do was promise them they would have fun and admit that no woman could "rock out" like a man could. I was willing enough on the first point, even going so far as to offer a reimbursement of the ticket price, but on the second one I was less clear, only asking that they wait until after the festival to make me give in.
    And what a festival! The free swag from culturally aware groups bulged in two bags in my parents' home for years; posters, stickers, banners, condoms (my friends took the opportunity to stock up, I took one to be polite), pamphlets and bracelets. It was all somehow special and all somewhat magical. The shops, the people, the feeling of love! This young man had never felt so comfortable or so alive as he did there.
    And the music! Aimee Mann, Lisa Loeb, Letters To Cleo front-woman Kay Hanley (who was super-nice!), the now defunct band Splashdown, headed by Mellisa Kaplan (who let me sit with them and talk while they signed), K's Choice, The Wild Strawberries and Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders (during whose set my friend leaned over and said, "I guess girls can rock out" and turned away to stare at the stage before I could answer) not to mention all sorts of "village stage" bands, no-ones and nothings I had never heard of, such as: Bree Sharp, Teagan and Sara and Lori McKenna.
     Watching Sarah McLachlan perform at the end of the show my eyes almost filled with tears. As all the artists who were still there got up on stage to sing "The Water is Wide" they did fill. And as the song was sung in rounds, soulfully and meaningfully, I felt a warmth cascade down my eyes; tears coming not from pain or anger, or loneliness or awkwardness, but tears of joy, of freedom. Tears that washed away everything that was "wrong" or "different" about me. I left that concert hall a new man.
    I have been to many shows and festivals since (some actually with male singers in them!) but I don't think any have moved me the same way. The energy was one not of peace, but of wholeness. Not a happiness of elitism or coolness but of just being together with people who love what you love. so Lilith Fair is back despite the odds and the change in popular music, despite the flagging sales of any female singer over the age of 23, despite the world being a much scarier and terrified place than it was in 1999.
    But somewhere in a small development village nestled in a small valley of a highway a young boy is listening to music, to Heart on an oldies station or Ani Difranco on an indie one. A boy is trying to make others understand him and understand the music he loves. Trying to makes sense of who he is and what he wants to be, that much hasn't changed and I, for one, am glad he'll have a Lilith Fair to go to.

Principle: Courage