08/31/2026
Anyone else in need of a little inspirational pick me up today? ✨️💕💚🐝
Nearly thirty years ago, a music festival called Lilith Fair proved that audiences would come out in the tens of thousands for a lineup of women only -- something the music industry had long insisted was impossible. On Saturday, a 23-year-old who wasn't yet born when it started brought the idea back. Olivia Rodrigo's Daisy Chain Fields, in Irvine, California, gathered an all-women, multi-generational lineup across two stages, where every artist performed for free, and turned every dollar of profit over to organizations that support girls and women. By the end of the night, Rodrigo's festival raised $20 million for causes ranging from reproductive rights to domestic workers' rights to maternal health care.
Rodrigo, who is 23, is one of the most successful musicians of her generation -- a singer-songwriter who broke through at 18 with "Drivers License," won three Grammy Awards the next year, and built a devoted following among young women on songs that say the quiet, furious things out loud. Daisy Chain Fields, she wrote, was a dream years in the making, built "on the belief that joy, community, and creativity can inspire meaningful change."
The festival would "celebrate the voices, artistry, and contributions of women in music," and it promised something rarer than a concert: beyond the stages were resources and information, meant to reach "girls and young people" who might "not otherwise know how to find" them -- and to turn a day at a concert into something lasting, connecting fans directly to the organizations doing the work and giving them ways to stay involved long after the music stopped.
The lineup read like a family tree of women in music. Rodrigo shared the two stages with fellow young stars like Chappell Roan, Doechii, and Mitski and veterans like the riot-grrrl band Bikini Kill, Garbage, and The Breeders -- and welcomed three more legends as special guests: Stevie Nicks, Karen O of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, and Sarah McLachlan.
McLachlan was key to the whole thing. The festival was modeled on Lilith Fair, the women-led tour she co-founded in the late 1990s, which drew those enormous crowds and buried the industry's standing excuse that no one would turn out for a lineup of women. When Rodrigo set out to build her own version, McLachlan was the first person she called.
The money the festival raised is being split among ten nonprofits. It will pay for diapers and formula for families who can't afford them, care for Black mothers before and after they give birth, support for survivors of domestic violence, and reproductive and maternal health care in the United States and around the world. Every performer had waived her fee to make it possible. "The organizations we've partnered with are doing incredibly important work every single day," Rodrigo said, "in the U.S. and globally."
Late on Saturday night, the initial $10 million the festival raised was doubled. As Rodrigo took the stage to headline, she brought out a surprise guest -- the philanthropist Melinda French Gates, who told the crowd she would match it, dollar for dollar, through her organization Pivotal Ventures, bringing the total to $20 million.
Gates called the 23-year-old "a force," and praised her for "showing a new generation how much their voices matter." Rodrigo, for her part, looked stunned. "Melinda is one of the most inspiring women I've ever met," she told the crowd. "She's devoted her life to empowering women and girls that might have otherwise been forgotten... I'm totally floored."
She closed the night the way the whole day had pointed: surrounded by the women who came before her. Rodrigo brought Stevie Nicks and Alanis Morissette out to the stage, and then Sarah McLachlan, who sang "Angel" and "Building a Mystery" -- the Lilith Fair anthems written before many of the young women in the crowd were born.
It was the picture the festival had been building toward all day. Some of the most celebrated women in music, decades apart in age, on one stage, and one young woman at the center of it who had decided the surest thing to do with an enormous platform was to give it away.
