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"  It&amp;#039;s almost clich\u00E9 how much Sarah McLachlan&amp;#039;s house looks like Sarah McLachlan&amp;#039;s house. To call it a house is actually a bit of a misnomer. It&amp;#039;s really more of a bring-the-outdoors-in postmodern megacabin, hidden from a residential road by a forest of fragrant green pine trees still dewy from the on-again-off-again Vancouver drizzle. I&amp;#039;m being led down a mossy stone path by Taja, McLachlan&amp;#039;s three-year-old daughter, and her nanny, both trotting along in rubber galoshes. To our left, a babbling stream gently sloshes across the rock bed, and filaments of light beam down through the gaps in the leafy canopy overhead. It&amp;#039;s all so over-the-top idyllic that I&amp;#039;m half expecting a couple of fairies and their posse of furry woodland creatures to start flitting around my feet.  McLachlan, barefoot and dressed down in a pair of skinny black Hudson jeans and a blue-and-white-striped Splendid sailor top, gives me a hug upon entering her house, informing me that lattes are on the way.  &amp;quot;Let&amp;#039;s take a tour,&amp;quot; McLachlan says cheerfully, scooping Taja onto her hip. She leads me to a work space/romper room with a fireplace, a gleaming baby-grand piano, a statue of the Hindu god Ganesha the size of a small child, and an acoustic guitar lying haphazardly on a velvet sofa. This is the kind of cozy place made for rainy days, Lemon Zinger, and, well, Sarah McLachlan playing in the background. Pierre Marchand, her longtime producer on records including her 1993 breakthrough, Fumbling Towards Ecstasy and 1997&amp;#039;s Surfacing, pops in, lattes in hand, then heads for McLachlan&amp;#039;s home studio out back to get some work done on Laws of Illusion, her seventh studio album, due out in June. She asks me if it&amp;#039;s okay to sip from one of the cups to see if it&amp;#039;s hers (she prefers soy milk). &amp;quot;Sorry,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;This is yours.&amp;quot; We make our way into a more formal living room, where a tree is growing from the middle of the floor.  &amp;quot;Is this real?&amp;quot; I ask, shaking a branch.  &amp;quot;Oh yeah, it&amp;#039;s real.&amp;quot;  McLachlan kisses her daughter goodbye and then plops down on the white overstuffed sofa with me, tucking her feet underneath her like a teenager ready for some serious dish. She is, as country icon Emmylou Harris describes her, &amp;quot;a lovely, lovely person, completely feminine yet strong,&amp;quot; free from handlers poised to usher her back into the publicity machine almost seven years after her last full-length studio album, Afterglow. She&amp;#039;s managed to stay relatively out of sight\u2014save starring in those heartbreaking save-the-animals commercials, which raised an astounding $30 million for the ASPCA (&amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m like the Sally Struthers of my generation,&amp;quot; she says with a laugh).  McLachlan takes her time between records\u2014more than usual for this one, since she&amp;#039;s still wrestling with the split from her husband and former drummer, Ashwin Sood, the father of her two daughters. She tells me they&amp;#039;re not officially divorced, though they broke up in 2008, and that they&amp;#039;re still &amp;quot;just separated\u2014we&amp;#039;re massaging all that slowly,&amp;quot; but that the new record is an ode to what she calls &amp;quot;the loss of the fairy tale,&amp;quot; something she feels most people can relate to. &amp;quot;Like, oh God, did I really buy into that\u2014this is gonna last forever, and you&amp;#039;re my soul mate? We all want to believe that we&amp;#039;ve found the right person. And for me, there&amp;#039;s a lot of loss around that illusion.&amp;quot;  McLachlan, now 42, seems to have come out of the personal turmoil with a new sense of purpose. Today, hair pulled back, pink-cheeked and smiling, she&amp;#039;s eager answer questions about her latest and somewhat unexpected undertaking: reviving the all-woman bohemian love-in Lilith Fair, which McLachlan famously pioneered with her managers in the late &amp;#039;90s. At the time, Lilith Fair was widely regarded in the music industry as boundary pushing: Gather up a slew of female singer-songwriters, book them in stadiums, throw them onstage, and let their genteel, feminine freak flags fly. Turns out it was also a brilliant business plan. The first Lilith became 1997&amp;#039;s highest grossing touring festival, raising more than $10 million for various women&amp;#039;s charities. An unlikely suit, McLachlan looked like a genius, and The New York Times dubbed her &amp;quot;the new face of modern feminism.&amp;quot; Harris, who shared the stage with McLachlan in &amp;#039;97 and &amp;#039;98 and again last March on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, tells me that the story she heard about Lilith&amp;#039;s inception goes like this: McLachlan &amp;quot;wanted to tour with Paula Cole, and the promoters said it wouldn&amp;#039;t work because you couldn&amp;#039;t put two women on the same bill, and she sort of dug her heels in. Sarah said, `Not only will I have Paula, but I&amp;#039;m going to get just about every woman artist available that I like, you know? And forget about just having a woman opening act, let&amp;#039;s just get women acts, and they&amp;#039;ll all be together.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; That legend&amp;#039;s been circulating for years, but McLachlan says that though it bolsters Lilith&amp;#039;s romantic mythology as a victory for disenfranchised female artists over the Man, it&amp;#039;s not entirely accurate. &amp;quot;I had Paula Cole open up for me,&amp;quot; she recalls. &amp;quot;I actually had a number of women open for me, and the tours did just fine.&amp;quot; In the summer of 1996, she was thinking about hitting the road, but she didn&amp;#039;t want the pressure of headlining every night. So she enlisted Cole and Lisa Loeb to do some of the heavy lifting, a proto\u2013Lilith Fair, if you will, in four cities, and they had a great time\u2014so much so that she thought, Hell, let&amp;#039;s do this next year. The problem was, the promoters she approached, who&amp;#039;d never worked with her and &amp;quot;didn&amp;#039;t know my track record,&amp;quot; couldn&amp;#039;t muster the same enthusiasm.  &amp;quot;We had a lot of agents and promoters saying, `You can&amp;#039;t put two women on the same bill together. You certainly can&amp;#039;t put five or six or 11!&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;We got quite a bit of push-back. `Oh, I don&amp;#039;t want to support that. That&amp;#039;s risky.&amp;#039; I&amp;#039;m like, `Look at the artists. Okay, now look at me. Here&amp;#039;s how many seats I fill in your city. You add these artists, and it seems fairly sure you&amp;#039;ll at least break even. Can we just try this out?&amp;#039; And of course, that&amp;#039;s where that idiot line came from\u2014`You can&amp;#039;t put two women on the same bill together. People won&amp;#039;t come.&amp;#039; That just put a bee in my butt\u2014so, okay. We&amp;#039;re going to prove you wrong.&amp;quot; There&amp;#039;s an inherent problem with writing about Lilith Fair&amp;#039;s legacy, in that the tour is remembered as both groundbreaking and cringe-inducing. To those of us who spent our formative years donning hemp necklaces and trying to nail the two-part harmonies in various Indigo Girls ballads in the backseat of our friends&amp;#039; cars, Lilith&amp;#039;s stars\u2014Sheryl Crow, Shawn Colvin, Natalie Merchant, McLachlan\u2014were singing about tortured love and female angst, couching it all in atmospheric, piano-and-guitar-driven soft rock that was just alternative enough to be respectable. But to others\u2014say, your post\u2013Riot Grrls, who discovered their female counterculture heroes in punk-minded bands such as Bikini Kill and L7\u2014Lilith Fair was a punch line, a blowsy estro-fete of music you might hear in an elevator. Marisa Meltzer, author of Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution in Music, says, &amp;quot;I was a college hipster when Lilith was around and thought I was above it. The aesthetic just wasn&amp;#039;t for me. I was about rage and anger and seduction in music. I took one look at the bill and it felt like something for an older crowd.&amp;quot;  Critics cast all kinds of aspersions at \u00ADLilith Fair and at McLachlan as its architect, and three criticisms in particular don&amp;#039;t seem to be laid to rest, even 11 years after the tour&amp;#039;s last run, in 1999: (1) The message was &amp;quot;too feminist.&amp;quot; (2) The message wasn&amp;#039;t feminist enough. (3) The lineup was too monochromatic\u2014that is, lots of Caucasian guitar-slingers. (Though to be fair, Lauryn Hill, Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott, Queen Latifah, and Christina Aguilera all played Lilith at different points in the tour&amp;#039;s three-year run.) Still, McLachlan is fully aware that Lilith hasn&amp;#039;t aged well in the minds of fans and critics alike. Even those who donned their Lilith T-shirts and bought compilation CDs aren&amp;#039;t bragging about it in 2010. It&amp;#039;s a little embarrassing to admit you were there\u2014it&amp;#039;s laughed off as one of those humiliating things one does in one&amp;#039;s youth, like collecting neon-colored scrunchies.  Rebranding Lilith&amp;#039;s image seems to be a big part of why McLachlan has decided to reincarnate the tour, which kicks off in Calgary on June 27 and is scheduled to make 36 stops across North America throughout the \u00ADsummer. It&amp;#039;s also why the bill looks like a distant cousin of the original incarnation. McLachlan will headline, she says, &amp;quot;where it makes sense,&amp;quot; and Lilith mainstays like the Indigo Girls, Crow, and Harris will also appear. But the revolving lineup gets wildly diverse\u2014almost head-\u00ADscratchingly so\u2014from there. Radio heavyweights Kelly Clarkson, Ke$ha, and Rihanna have signed on, as have nostalgic acts such as Heart, the Go-Gos, and the Bangles; country acts Sugarland and \u00ADMiranda Lambert; and hipster cool kids \u00ADincluding Cat Power, garage rockers \u00ADGossip, and cyber-soul oddball Janelle Mon\u00E1e, among others. McLachlan tells me she really wanted fellow Canadian indie-pop phenom Feist, but &amp;quot;she wouldn&amp;#039;t do it.&amp;quot; Lady Gaga also got away, but they&amp;#039;re &amp;quot;still working&amp;quot; on Beyonc\u00E9. &amp;quot;Sure, within some camps, Lilith is still a white-chick camp \u00ADfestival,&amp;quot; she says about trying to enlist acts who were wary of the tour&amp;#039;s stigma. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m \u00ADreally hoping to con\u00ADtinue to change that.&amp;quot;  I ask her for an example of a current \u00ADmusician who might be able to help her shatter preconceived notions about Lilith.  &amp;quot;I guess saying it won&amp;#039;t jinx it,&amp;quot; she says, smiling, her saucer-size eyes almost looking backlit. &amp;quot;Miley Cyrus. My eight-year-old said, `Mom, if I&amp;#039;m coming on the road, I&amp;#039;ve got to have Miley Cyrus.&amp;#039; I \u00ADreally like her. There are some really well-crafted pop songs there. I don&amp;#039;t even know whether she&amp;#039;s written them or not.&amp;quot; But is someone who&amp;#039;s a Miley fan going to want to see, say, the Indigo Girls?  &amp;quot;They&amp;#039;re going to come away knowing who they are, at least, and maybe actually like them. Or be indifferent, or not like them. But the point is, they&amp;#039;re being introduced to them. And all of us, as artists, are being introduced to music we&amp;#039;re not familiar with, and that feeds us, and you learn something from it.&amp;quot; It almost feels like McLachlan is trying too hard to reshape Lilith&amp;#039;s DNA in 2010, at the cost of abandoning what made the festival kind of special in the first place: providing a platform for women who wrote their own material and played their own instruments. A generation of young women saw something empowering in McLachlan and Co.&amp;#039;s do-it-yourself ethos and looked to \u00ADLilith&amp;#039;s moody, slightly \u00ADembittered alt-folk as an introduction to pro-woman ideas. &amp;quot;There had been women out there on buses touring around making their own music, producing their own records, writing their own songs,&amp;quot; says Harris about Lilith Fair. &amp;quot;But to have them all together in one group\u2014it had never been done before.&amp;quot;  Still, Harris says it wouldn&amp;#039;t make sense for Lilith to be a carbon copy of itself in 2010. &amp;quot;Gone are the days when we were sort of second-class citizens. I think that&amp;#039;s been over for a long time.&amp;quot; In a postfeminist \u00ADculturescape, where Beyonc\u00E9 and Gaga are playing faux lovers in the video &amp;quot;Telephone&amp;quot; and getting five bazil\u00ADlion hits on YouTube, the girls-can-break-the-rules-too angle is pretty dated. Lilith 2010 has to alter its aim if it&amp;#039;s to become modern and relevant again. And if McLachlan sees its newfound purpose as introducing female artists, regardless of what genres they&amp;#039;re birthed from, to massive festival audiences, that isn&amp;#039;t exactly antifeminist, either.  Even though McLachlan is committed to repurposing Lilith&amp;#039;s legacy, she&amp;#039;s still willing to get nostalgic about the good old days\u2014as when she tells a story about Chrissie Hynde, whom she idolizes, and whom she met for the first time while touring.  &amp;quot;She&amp;#039;s so powerful. She scared the crap out of me,&amp;quot; McLachlan says with a laugh. &amp;quot;I was so intimidated. But we had a great chat, and she&amp;#039;s really tongue-in-cheek. And she&amp;#039;s like, `Oh yeah! A bunch of fucking girls,&amp;#039; and, `I didn&amp;#039;t know what I was going to think about all this,&amp;#039; and she&amp;#039;s teasing me about the whole feminist part of \u00ADLilith. I&amp;#039;m like, `Hey! I just want to put on a good show.&amp;#039; During one of the very last shows, I actually went out onstage. It was `Middle of the Road,&amp;#039; and she always had me come out and dance\u2014just ridiculous, stupid stuff. But I&amp;#039;d just do a silly dance for her &amp;#039;cause it made her laugh. And I came out\u2014&amp;quot; Like, during her performance? &amp;quot;Oh yeah. I had no shame. I basically came out in a red sequined tube top and flashed my boobs at her. Right in the \u00ADmiddle of the song. I brought Chrissie Hynde to her knees. She fell down to her knees, and she was just dying laughing.&amp;quot; Whether Lilith will be as financially successful as it once was remains to be seen. Tickets are selling\u2014but not selling out. McLachlan isn&amp;#039;t sweating it. &amp;quot;I think the shows are going to sell really well. I think, you put great artists on the bill \u00ADtogether, and interest is created around the fact that they are unusual and different. And people might be really disgusted by it. I kind of enjoy that, too.&amp;quot; Though McLachlan insists she&amp;#039;s not going to be headlining every night, despite having a new record to \u00ADpromote, you have to wonder if the original \u00ADLilith crew could be a big draw for \u00ADformer alt-folk fans who feel the Lilith reboot means it&amp;#039;s kosher now to celebrate that time and place. &amp;quot;I have \u00ADnoticed among my friends a weird enthusiasm for that kind of music,&amp;quot; confesses Meltzer when I pose the question to her. &amp;quot;Now all my girlfriends are into listening to early Tori Amos and the \u00ADIndigo Girls and Ani DiFranco and kind of channeling those teen-angst feelings that went with the capital-F feelings of some of that music. I think that the female singer-songwriter is having a bit of a retro-cool \u00ADmoment.&amp;quot; After all, isn&amp;#039;t American \u00ADApparel selling the hell out of neon-\u00ADcolored scrunchies? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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