Goodbye Lilith Fair, hello Sarah McLachlan and Friends tour
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]
Sarah’s time has passed and she should retire gracefully.
No one cares for her music any longer.
It’s quite unfortunate that these articles describe Butterfly Boucher and Melissa McClelland as “unimpressive”. If you see them on stage with McLachlan (or with McLachlan backing their sets) you can see that they are actually FRIENDS and therefore have fun and perform well together. Having McLachlan perform with some of those “star studded” Lilith artists makes no sense. By the way, you’d be hard pressed to find two voices as strong as McClelland and McLachlan together on one stage. I don’t disagree that McLachlan’s time has passed, but I’ll be filling up a seat at Massey.
I totally agree what a stupid comment.My wife and I just saw the shows in nashville and Cincinnati and both McClelland and Boucher were outstanding!!Did this critic actually see them perform or is this just a “cool with it” type of criticism?
“Chester” needs to speak for himself and himself only. I love Sarah’s music and always will. Sarah sings songs, which an intense soul appreciates. I will see her in Mpls on March 9th and cannot even imagine, that I will not love every part of her concert.
Just saw the ladies in Regina Mar 8 and it was outstanding!!!!
Actually the whole group of seven musicians was reaaly cool and talented.
I would urge music lovers to take in this performance.I am a baby boomer rock fan but appreciated the great musiv Sarah and friends shared with us.