Girls Just Wanna Be Safe and Listen to Music

On Brandi Carlile's festival in Mexico, my next book and making women's stories and experiences the norm

Credit: Angie Ricciotti

It was somewhere in the middle of our second day in Mexico when my friend and travel companion turned to me and brought up our bodies.  We were standing on the dock watching Brandy Clark play a brilliant daytime set in front of a lagoon filled with concertgoers bobbing on fluorescent beach floats – a heavenly situation, as it turns out, if you’re ever able to find yourself in similar. I was in a swimsuit, my hair in braids and not enough sunscreen, but I don’t think my shoulders were burning.

“I just realized I haven’t thought about how I look in a bathing suit since I got here,” she said. “Here” was Brandi Carlile’s Girls Just Wanna Weekend festival in Playa Del Carmen, a trip we’d been planning in our heads for an entire year. This was my first time away from my kids on a vacation since my oldest was born, over nine years ago, and I was still floating in a strange, unfamiliar state. “Isn’t it great?”

I was quiet for a moment, not knowing what to say, because I was shocked at how true that was. It seems a small gesture, but I had gotten dressed that day for the beach in a bathing suit I hadn’t worn since summer without looking once in the mirror, and taken it off to swim in the pool without once looking down or around or up to see if there was someone staring, either with the glare of criticism or unwelcome desire. I had not pinched or tucked or hidden behind anything, I had not held a hand to secure my top when I bent over to pick up my water bottle, not tied a towel around my waist when I walked to the bathroom. I had been looking at myself in the mirror – dissecting myself, if we’re being honest – every time I stepped into a swimsuit since I was a child. Why hadn’t I done it that morning?

Later that night, in the middle of the evening’s performance – Brandi and friends, which meant Maren Morris and Natalie Hemby and Yola and Brittney Spencer and Brandy Clark among them – someone passed out. I don’t know what happened: dehydrated or overheated or just overserved. But someone passed out close to the stage, which we watched from a balcony overlooking the crowd, and the first thing I noticed was some hands waving, which Brandi saw too and stopped the show, asking for help. Then the crowd parted – not just people moving aside, but a true human-led highway to safety formed in what felt like seconds, wide enough to be able to take the person aside in a wheelchair (so many festivals aren’t even accessible to begin with, another conversation we should be having). Bottles of water were immediately dispersed among the crowd. Everything’s gonna be OK, baby.

As I start to write my next book (more about that in a minute), I have been thinking a lot about safe spaces, especially safe spaces to experience music. And I have been thinking a lot about what kind of work we have to do to make certain experiences a norm, not an aberration or tokenization, be it festivals led or dominated by women or gender non-conforming folks, or headliner slots held by Black roots musicians or trans artists or queer people. Part of the magic of Girls Just Wanna Weekend, as I imagine it was at Lilith Fair as well, is taking something that should feel like a niche, curated, specialized thing and seeing what happens when it becomes the norm, when we make it the baseline. When an all-women lineup just exists, plain and simple. When queer voices and queer leadership are centered. Nothing is perfect or a utopia, but it can mean you walk outside feeling safe, feeling secure and confident in your body. It also means the music is fucking amazing.

And what happens is you create a different but parallel normal. As with Lilith Fair, you show you can sell tickets, and shitloads of them (GJWW sells out instantly). You create a space where folks do not feel as though their body has to be on display as a fashion accessory for Instagram likes or the male gaze, or where women have to dress strategically to have a safe experience (I recall many shows in my life, especially my younger life, where I have thought about the best attire or positioning to keep myself and my body protected at a show, I used to always wear a swimsuit under my clothes if I knew there was going to be a mosh pit, to keep hands out). You can create an environment where everyone feels safe to experience music, and then you can change lives.

The next day in Mexico I scrolled through my email, and saw the lineup for a major festival had just been announced. Sheryl Crow was listed in small font, not in the headliner spot, or anywhere near. I was enraged, until I saw a woman walk by with a shirt on from a Girls Just Wanna Weekend past – which included Sheryl as a headliner, in her rightful spot. It matters who is curating. It matters who is making decisions. It all matters.

I read a quote recently in the research process, from Sarah McLachlan, about gender inequality in music and the pay gap (cue Margo Price’s “Pay Gap” now and forever). “This is not because women haven’t done anything noteworthy but because our history books are written by men who write their own history,” she said. I’d rarely read anything more motivational: my small part of this whole picture is helping to flip the norm so women aren’t written out of history, because men are the ones telling the stories, about other men. That was a main motivation for HER COUNTRY, and will drive my next book, WHAT SHE NEEDS IS A GOOD DEFENSE, coming sometime in 2024 from Hachette Books. It’s a personal reclamation of the nineties through the underappreciated and chart-topping women rock stars of the era, as part of my mission to keep writing and rewriting music history by women and including women (this one will be first-person, too, to validate and give space to how women writers feel and live with music, something we have come to expect from male authors as norm. Plus, I lived this stuff – not as a critic, but as a teenage girl and fan). And maybe if we do it enough, the norm will change. If we put on enough festivals led and driven by women and Black and queer folks, the norm will change. It’s worth the effort. We should all be able to put on a swimsuit without looking in the mirror first.

Side Note: a brief note of gratitude for some of the wonderful end-of-year press HER COUNTRY received. A massive thanks to Pitchfork for naming it a top music book, to Rolling Stone for the same, and the other outlets who added it to your year end lists. It means a whole lot.