You know an inaugural festival has been a success when, after the temperature reached 95 degrees, humidity topped 80%… perspiration stains were so pervasive that it was the odd dry spots that looked like stains… constant 12-minute trudges back and forth between two action-packed stages threatened to sap what few excess pounds hadn’t been sweated off… and you realized that, amid those conditions, you had not sat down in more than 10 hours… and, sitting in a gridlocked lot waiting to get out, all you could think was:
The answer to that, at the end of the Daisy Chain Fields festival Saturday in Irvine, Calif., was some time around this year in 2027. Festival creator and headliner Olivia Rodrigo told the 45,000-strong crowd the words they wanted to hear: that this was not a one-off, and that we’d reconvene next year for another thrillingly curated, expertly executed and altogether spirit-rewarding all-female-led bill. (Flowery adjectives ours, not hers.)
Now if they could just find a way to schedule future editions of the festival at a more meteorologically reasonable time, some period of the year where it is reliably warm in SoCal yet not prone to insanely long heat waves, because climate change has abated and… well, never mind, fine … August probably is as good a time as any.
What a distraction from all that the 14-act bill (plus three guest stars) managed to provide over a 10-and-a-half-hour day of music, with one killer act after another representing a wide gamut of styles and eras, bearing a sold amount of diversity except for the very un-diverse main criterion for booking.
Of course it ended with Sarah McLachlan, the instigator of the obvious inspiration, Lilith Fair, taking the stage to implicitly give her blessing for carrying on the tradition, as she joined Rodrigo’s stage for duets of “Building a Mystery” and “Angel” (the latter dedicated to Dolly Parton, with permission given to cry, because McLachlan knows she’s good at that). Or not literally quite the end, actually, because it was inevitable when Stevie Nicks was announced as one of Rodrigo’s guests that you don’t follow that.
As an ambassador from the 1970s, Nicks was an outlier in this company, where nearly all of the acts were either fairly newly minted stars or heroines of the Lilith era. There was a case being made here, without stating it quite so bluntly, that the two greatest decades for women in pop music were the ’90s and the 2020s. History isn’t quite that simple, but for 10-plus hours Saturday, I was ready to jump in and readily make the case that the respective eras of Alanis Morissette (who also showed up as a surprise guest) and Rodrigo really were and are the greatest generations, whether it can be empirically backed up or not.
At the very least, the two climactic main stage sets, by Rodrigo and Chappell Roan, set out a pretty indisputable case that we are living in a golden era. Between the two of them, they are responsible for four of the dozen greatest albums of the decade (i.e., Roan’s lone effort so far and all three of Rodrigo’s, peaking with her best achievement to date, “You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love”). It would have been lovely to see them share a moment on stage together, and we didn’t get that. But it was enough to have them performing superb sets back to back in an effective coronation and celebration of these two as the greatest pop figures currently in their 20s.
But if you were looking for the secret heart of the festival, it might have been over on the second stage, where some of the artists who inspired Rodrigo as a nascent rocker got their moment to shine. It would be hard to imagine a more heartwarming moment than when Bikini Kill revved through some vintage punk and the entire crowd of young ‘uns in front was singing along. Kathleen Hanna was at least as agog as any of the rest of us at the realization the band was playing to a pretty full and definitely engaged field of (primarily) women, something that would have seemed like science-fiction in their heyday. Hanna said that when they played Orange County in the ’90s, they were lucky if three women showed up to one of their gigs (and then she brought out three Irvine-ites who did form their own band after getting into Bikini Kill). Not all good things come to those who wait, but occasionally poetic justice prevails.
The Breeders and Garbage kept the ’90s magic happening on the Marigold Stage, where, in the afternoon and late evening heat, everyone would have been very happy if Shirley Manson had actually been able to summon rain. Kim Deal and company were confident enough to put “Cannonball” right in the middle of their set and not save it for the end; they also provided the day’s sole quotient of country music, with vintage C&W homage “Drivin’ on 9.” Manson was as un-shy as ever when it came to passionate monologs between songs, speaking about how the band wrote songs about LGBTQ+ themes before they or the culture had discovered the language that now exists. But those songs hardly suffered for not yet having a common terminology to reference.
A danger in doing a festival like this is that 90% of the crowd may claim their spots in the main field — for the Dandelion Stage, as it was known here — and never budge for fear of losing their spots. So it was a pleasure to see (if not always so much to participate in) the mass migration that occurred between those two spaces every 30 or 40 minutes, and to see how many twentysomethings and even teens wanted to see the legends of ’90s women in rock. That stage was not strictly themed, though; the final act of the night over yonder was Not for Radio, the band formed by Marias singer Maria Zardoya, whose very chill style for this side project was perfectly timed for a post-dusk time slot, whereas it might’ve been too ambient for comfort in the heat of the day.
Back at the larger field, there could hardly have been a greater study in contrasts than seeing Mitski followed by Doechii, even if their mononym names feel phonetically compatible, and even if there was a shared excellence uniting them. Mitski was one of those acts who really would be better suited for a nighttime slot, but she was in her most energetic, stage-traversing mode, and ending on the greatest cat-lady anthem of all time, “That White Cat,” allowed for a ferocious finale. There were a lot of passionate female-forward statements made during the day, as is natural, but Mitski is the kind of artist who really represents women (and people) in all their complications; some of the songs she performed were about pure, unabated need, bordering on self-abasement at times… yet her stage persona is so powerful that you feel quite confident you’d come out on the wrong end if you ever really crossed her.
Doechii had the strongest and most delightfully outrageous look of the day (rivaled only by Roan’s attention-getting makeover). She and her four dancers appeared with body makeup that put them in various shades of red and pink — kind of like a flow chart as to how some in the audience might have been changing color as the day went on. Doechii was of a different ilk than most everyone else on the bill in terms of being the kind of artist who brings tracks, not a band. That said, she was very much in competition for the title of greatest show-woman of the day, on top of offering flavors that otherwise might’ve been severely missed in a more purely pop-rock-driven lineup. (Complaining about the heat, she asked “Irvine” if it was always like this, then noted that she’s from Florida, which might have helped explain why she didn’t sweat off all that crimson.)
Roan was all about the purple, shocking the audience with a head-to-toe different look that had her dressed in an outfit that looked like someone’s fever dream of what a TWA stewardess uniform should have looked like in the ’60s. Her hair is still red, but now straightened and shortened into a bob; the curly and queenly aura is now history in favor of something that is even h-o-t-t-e-r-t-o-go. Whether it had to do with the outfit or just where she’s at in between tours, Roan seemed more energized and physically on-point than she ever has on stage — including some high kicks that could make a Rockette jealous — while also effortlessly mastering the demands of a “Good Luck, Babe” and other vocally challenging numbers. There were no surprises in her 40-minute set; “Only the hits today. It’s only the hits,” she warned the audience. But a new stylistic outlook did as much work as a new song might’ve, in helping keep an audience transfixed as she steamed through highlights of the greatest single-album catalog anyone has managed lately.
At an hour and 20 minutes, Rodrigo’s closing set was 40 minutes longer than anyone else’s, having less to do with the generous amounts of “You Seem Pretty Sad…” appearing in a set of hers for the first time than space built in for three guests stars. It was a nice touch that her guests were announced from the outset, rather than being held back as a surprise, allowing for their inclusion on the T-shirts, etc. That turned out to be a premature move, after all, when Karen O had to cancel her cameo because of an emergency, Rodrigo told the crowd. There was still a third guest, though, as the day’s one true surprise, Morissette, came aboard for an “Ironic” duet. Rodrigo-as-natural-pro came to the forefront here as her voice proved an easy and flawless harmonic complement to Alanis on that number, and to McLachlan on “Mystery” and “Angel,” and to Nicks on the closing “Landslide.”
Rodrigo’s set was preceded by the star bringing out Melinda Gates Newman to announce that the philanthropist was matching the $10 million already announced by Rodrigo as going toward the 10 charity beneficiaries with a dollar-for-dollar additional $10 million. Rodrigo does not require much to put an additional spring in her step, but her giddiness was at its peak, maybe not least of all because of having a successful and (most importantly of all) non-catastrophic first festival outing being extra wind beneath her rocker-girl wings. It’s hard to tell just how much of a preview this was or wasn’t of the tour that kicks off in Hartford next month, but getting in seven of the 12 tracks from “You Seem Pretty Sad…” — basically, all but the saddest ones — plus the newly released non-album song “Serena Joy” felt more than justified. If anything, you might’ve had mixed feelings about hearing singles as tried and true as “Good 4 U,” only because of knowing still another “Pretty Sad” song could have gotten its live premiere in that slot. All of which is beating around the bush on the way to say that the set was pretty unassailable for an abridgement of what is about to come on tour.
With the show over, Nicks didn’t want to leave the stage, even after Rodrigo did, not because she had a second song to sing, but because she had the same instinct almost every performer did Saturday — to speak the younger artist’s praises for pulling this off. These were merited accolades.
Truth be told, there’ve been other all-female lineups since Lilith Fair went out with a whimper instead of a bang in its early 21st century revival: Brandi Carlile has long put on an all-female-headliner festival in Mexico every year, though the travel factor makes the bar to entry high. More subtly and slyly, the All Things Go festival that takes place each year in three eastern cities has become an almost all-female thing; you jave to love how the D.C. edition coming up next month has dozens of fantastic women on the bill… along with Father John Misty and Ryan Beatty as hilariously token dudes.
But it takes a chart-topping superstar instigator to personally make phone calls for an annual event that will be an instant sellout, of the true FOMO variety, and — it feels like — an instant cultural touchstone. Even as Rodrigo’s and Nicks’ closing “Landslide” gave way to the landslide of 45,000 people trying to exit the gates, there was a communal bliss that not even one last Bataan march could spoil. Everyone seemed pretty elated for coming out of a festival that hadn’t toppled the patriarchy, but had proven again that, in 2026, women rule music in virtually every qualifiable way.