Sarah McLachlan on Lilith Fair and Some Other Tough Questions

"We had so many men say to us, 'why do you hate men,' when nothing of the sort was ever discussed or even thought. What did celebrating women's music have to do with hating men? Not a damn thing, as far as I could tell."
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These questions originally appeared on Quora.

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Answers by Sarah McLachlan, Singer/Songwriter

Lilith was born out of the simple desire to play some shows and not do it by myself. I looked around at all the other multi artist bills and they were very male dominated even though there was a lot of great music being made by women who were achieving a lot of success and I thought we can just go out ourselves together. This was in a time where the unspoken rule was you cannot play two women back to back on the radio and therefore you certainly shouldn't put a bunch of women together on the same bill, and when we started pushing up against that, it only fueled the fire to prove them wrong.

One of the most important things I learned early on with Lilith was that you can't please everybody all the time; we had a lot of people saying Lilith was too white, not diverse enough etc., but we asked everyone, from all genres, and we got who said yes and we always strove to put on a unique diverse line up that would cover of lot of ground but at the same time not be so wildly all over the place that it would turn people off.

On a more positive note, I learned the value of being part of something larger than myself and how important sticking to your beliefs are. We had so many men say to us, "why do you hate men," when nothing of the sort was ever discussed or even thought. What did celebrating women's music have to do with hating men? Not a damn thing, as far as I could tell.

Onto the tough (or not so tough) questions....

Generally my own as I tend to work in the morning when I'm awake and calm. But on school mornings I typically wake up the girls to Brian Enos' "Thursday Afternoon."

Fun. I like the opportunity to have someone else take my music an add their own spin on it.

My favorite is salted caramel or chocolate peanut butter.

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