Goodbye Lilith Fair, hello Sarah McLachlan and Friends tour

Goodbye Lilith Fair, hello Sarah McLachlan and Friends tour

Ten Lilith Fair tour stops were cancelled in 2010 (Image: JupiterSSJ4)

It’s been an eye-opening year for Sarah McLachlan. Yesterday the singer announced her Sarah and Friends tour will kick off this March and will reportedly offer “an intimate evening with Sarah McLachlan.” The singer has said she’ll take questions from the audience on the tour, and chances are one of them will be “Why was Lilith Fair 2010 such a bust?”

The femme festival was McLachlan’s baby in the late ’90s, and it was with much fanfare that McLachlan announced she would revive Lilith Fair for the summer of 2010, but poor ticket sales forced the cancellation of 10 tour stops. Critics and fans have blamed the festival’s failure on everything from the economic downturn to an aging fan base no longer interested in outdoor stadium venues. McLachlan says she’s learned her lesson and has her own theories about what went wrong: “There were a lot of acts that went out there with a cocky self-assuredness that this would work again, and it didn’t. We all got a real dose of reality. It needed to happen. We need to adjust,” she told the Dallas News.

And though the new tour is called Sarah and Friends (it stops at Massey Hall on March 21), so far the “Friends” part is pretty unimpressive: backup musicians Butterfly Boucher and Melissa McClelland are the only accompanying acts that have been confirmed. It would seem that for McLachlan, adjusting means giving the people what she thinks they want: more Sarah McLachlan.

McLachlan set to tour Canada [Toronto Sun]
• Sarah McLachlan comes to Verizon Theatre Monday [Dallas News]