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Chris Willman
Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic
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Getty Images All mysteries aside, you could say that, this summer, together, Sarah McLachlan and Allison Russell are building a sister-y road show. McLachlan is touring behind her 2025 “Better Broken” album, as a followup to her successful “Fumbling Towards Ecstasy” 30th Anniversary Tour, with plenty of the commemorative aspects of that show staying intact alongside her new material. This time around, she has a particularly potent opener in the form of the acclaimed Allison Russell, who has become more widely known over the past couple of years through opening for Hozier and appearing in a lead role on Broadway in “Hadestown.” Between them, there’ll be a lot of joint Canadian pride but, more significantly, a shared sense of music as a healing force, where, in amphitheaters from coast to coast, audiences can “forget madness,” as McLachlan promises, and remember the joy of melting into connection.
Variety spoke with the two singer-songwriters on a Zoom as they geared up for their mutual outing — McLachlan at home in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Russell in New York, where she was taking a momentary retreat away from her Nashville home to finish up work on a memoir. (Scroll down for a full itinerary of their dates together, which just began and continue through Aug. 9.)
Allison Russell: Because I’ve been just running all the time, Sarah, I just finally, finally watched the Lilith Fair documentary (“Lilith Fair: Building a Mystery,” available on Hulu). Oh my God.
Sarah McLachlan: Isn’t it so good?
Russell: I was like a puddle, crying. My daughter called me in the middle of it, because we FaceTime every day, and she was like, “What is wrong with you?” I was like, “You have to go watch Sarah’s documentary right now.” I’m sure it’s the same with your daughter, but our babies are so wrapped up in the ’90s right now — with good reason. They’re so tired of the psychological assault of AI and constant surveillance and weird digital spaces that can be manipulated. It’s just so cool the way they’re going back to zines and physical things. Last night my kid cut the call short because she was like, “I’m going to play D&D with my friends at Bongo Java” (a Nashville coffeehouse). I was like, “What year is it? It’s 1995 again.”
McLachlan: I think “Stranger Things,” too, really kind of hugely brought a lot of that culture back.
Lilith Fair awareness is heightened again because of the documentary. It’s difficult to compare a two-woman tour with an entire festival. But for people who are coming to the tour being excited about both of you, maybe they will be thinking, “We don’t have to have a whole festival. Where two or more of us are gathered, we can have that feeling, again.”
McLachlan: We’re just carrying on the work — what we were doing before Lilith and what we continued to do at Lilith and after Lilith.
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