Olivia Rodrigo’s Daisy Chain Fields Showed the Power of a Girls-to-the-Front Festival

When I saw a flower crown being held aloft in the circle pit during Die Spitz’ set, I knew that there was something special happening at Daisy Chain Fields. It was a fitting image for the inaugural one-day event, as 45,000 people braved Saturday’s extreme heat in order to experience Olivia Rodrigo’s first ever music festival. With radical sets from an all-women lineup, the fest cultivated a perfect mix of loving communal energy, fundraising, and pure female rage, and let a stacked slate of performers shine.Last year, Rodrigo appeared as a talking head in Lilith Fair: Building A Mystery, the documentary about Sarah McLachlan’s touring festival. The fest, which ran from 1997 to 1999, was a genuinely revolutionary event at a time when concert promoters often refused to book two women on the same bill and radio promoters shied away from playing songs by women back-to-back. You could perhaps see a teeny gleam in Rodrigo’s eye in that Lilith Fair doc, and less than a year later, she curated a girls-to-the-front festival of her very own: Daisy Chain Fields, a one-day event in Irvine, California with a lineup comprising both elder stateswomen (Bikini Kill, The Breeders) and fresh talent (D...