Sheryl Crow, Avril Lavigne and Fiona Apple to Headline Girl-Centric Girlfrenzy Fest

Eight years after the third and final Lilith Fair came to a close comes Girlfrenzy, an all-day all-girl concert featuring Sheryl Crow, Avril Lavigne and Fiona Apple. The first annual Girlfrenzy will take place on Saturday, October 27th at the Verizon Wireless Amphitheatre in Irvine, California, with a portion of ticket profits going to the Breast Cancer Research Foundation and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. The event was created by Right Arm Entertainment, the same company that presented the first annual Rock on the Range featuring Evanescence, ZZ Top and Velvet Revolver in Columbus, Ohio, earlier this year. Girlfrenzy will also feature performances by newcomers Colbie Caillat and Sara Bareilles, plus Antigone Rising, with promoters expected to announce more femme-centric acts in the coming weeks.

Sarah McLachlan's Lilith Fair ran from 1997 to 1999 and had a similarly charitable bent, donating a portion of ticket profits to local charities in the cities the event hit. Although that fest became known for folkier acts like the Indigo Girls and Suzanne Vega, the tour also featured Liz Phair, Missy Elliott, the Pretenders, Christina Aguilera and Luscious Jackson. Crow and Apple are both Lilith Fair alumni, too.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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