Is It Really Goodbye, Fair Maiden?

In a recent hit song, Alanis Morissette thanked India for helping her to get her head back on straight after her rise to fame. Next year, don’t be surprised if Sarah McLachlan expresses similar sentiments.

As she kicks off the third and final year of the Lilith Fair tour she created as a showcase for women in music, she’s very much looking ahead to getting away from it all.

“Travel, that’s what I want to do,” says the singer-songwriter. “India. And I want to go to Tibet. Just want to go someplace where nobody knows where I am.”

It’s not just the demands of leading Lilith--a role that elevated McLachlan from cult figure to cultural figurehead--that she’s looking forward to leaving behind, but also the escalating career path she’s been on for most of the past decade, a time she’s summarized with “Mirrorball,” her recently released live album. Her last studio album, “Surfacing,” remains in the Top 100 two years after its release, with a total of 4.6 million sold in the U.S.

Looking back, she’s a bit wistful about her life before she began that ascent.

“Nine years ago, I went to Thailand and Cambodia with a girlfriend shooting a documentary on AIDS and related issues for World Vision,” she says. “It was a really amazing trip. . . . You can go up and talk to anybody, everyone’s so friendly. You can hang out with people for a week and then go off your own way.”

Much of that description would also work for Lilith--an effort involving a loose-knit, mutually supportive community of women who share their music and experiences, many coming on board for just a few shows of the trek and then going their own ways. Indeed, it comes from similar ideals, and McLachlan has certainly found the first two years of the endeavor just as rewarding.

“Some of the conversations I’ve had while we were on the road were amazing,” she says. “Especially with Bonnie Raitt and Emmylou Harris about helping each other and making things change, and them reaffirming what I wanted to do--the sense of pride that they were feeling for me and the event and of them being part of it.”

She expects more of the same this year, looking forward especially to having Chrissie Hynde and her Pretenders on board--they’re on the bill at the Rose Bowl on Saturday, but not today at the Coors Amphitheatre in Chula Vista.

She Didn’t Expect to Lead a Revolution

“I’m very excited about meeting her and talking with her,” McLachlan says. “I hardly ever get to meet anybody. Living in Vancouver, I’m not in the hub. And I talked with Sheryl [Crow] a couple times, and she can’t wait for the tour. She said, ‘We’ll whip your butt in softball’--we’re trying to line up dates for our band and crew to play against hers. It’s like summer camp.”

What McLachlan still grapples with, though, is the position she’s assumed as the point person for women in music, and the backlash accompanying it.

“I was naive enough to not realize that was where it was going,” she says. “I just wanted to put on a music festival that had some of my girlfriends on it that would be fun, and all of a sudden I was spokeswoman for the revolution. It was a strange place for me to be, to be upholding my views on feminism and women in the music business. I hadn’t thought of it much.”

McLachlan says there was never any strident manifesto behind the tour.

“I’d come in contact with sexism a bit, but I’ve been lucky with my own organization,” she says. “It’s always been an even playing field.”

As she put Lilith together, she was shocked at the negative criticism that came her way--knocks at the lineup favoring singer-songwriters at the expense of challenging, rock-edged acts, and even some harsh swipes about the tour’s success, as if making a profit negates any progress.

Criticisms Answered With Varied Lineup

Some of those criticisms are answered in this year’s shows, with the Rose Bowl lineup a particularly varied bunch running from rock icon Hynde to country belles the Dixie Chicks to arty New York dance-music band Luscious Jackson to R&B; singer Mya--as well as star singer-songwriter Crow. But McLachlan says the array has more to do with who was available than with meeting any external perceptions of what the tour should include.

“If I learned anything from all this, it’s made me focus on something I believe in and stick with it,” she says. “People have said [about Lilith], ‘Why isn’t it more like this or that--more rock or more hip-hop’ or whatever. Figure out what you believe in, and stick with it.”

McLachlan, though, fears people are reading too much into the fact that she’s ending Lilith.

“I’ve been announcing it would be only three years since the first one,” she says. “But no one’s been listening.”

BE THERE

* Lilith Fair, Friday at Coors Amphitheatre, 2050 Otay Valley Road, Chula Vista, 3:30 p.m. $32 to $82. (619) 671-3600. Also Saturday at the Rose Bowl, 1001 Rose Bowl Drive, Pasadena, 2 p.m. $25 to $75. (818) 577-3100.