Brandi Carlile’s ‘Girls Just Wanna Weekend’ Has Sisters Doing It for Themselves — and Doing a Mindful, Immersive Festival Better Than Anybody

As complaints stack up every year about the atmosphere at many high-profile music festivals, If anyone ever wants to go to one that is nearly 100% free from toxic masculinity, one candidate comes closest to being able to meet that guarantee, and it’s Brandi Carlile’s annual Girls Just Wanna Weekend gathering in Mexico. It’s also a little lighter even on non-toxic masculinity. The bill consists entirely of women or femme-fronted acts, with an audience that runs more than 90% female or nonbinary. With Carlile’s strong hand for curation at play, Girls Just Wanna Weekend is a kind of a festival utopia for women, or for anyone who likes women. (Which, as the climate back in the States would attest, is not a universal common denominator.)

Comedian Kristen Key spoke to the festival’s skewed demographics on the final night this past weekend when she quipped, “No offense to guys — I know there’s, like, three and a half guys here.” If two of those were inevitably going to be Phil and Tim Hanseroth, Carlile’s eternal right-hand guys, that didn’t leave much room for dudes to fill the remaining 1.5 slots. It wasn’t quite as imbalanced as all that. But Girls Just Wanna did provide a chance for female music-lovers to spend four days in the sun, in a microcosmic reflection of how women artists are currently dominating the popular music landscape in historically unprecedented ways. The 2025 bill included stars Shania Twain, Maren Morris and Muna along with perennial favorites Brandy Clark and Lucius and the rising talents Brittney Spencer, Jensen McRae, Allison Ponthier, Tish Melton and SistaStrings.

The male gaze? Out. The female gays? Very much in. Lots of straight women, too, and a small seasoning of men. (“Welcome to my world,” said Spencer, backstage, to a male visitor, pleased to not be in the minority in multiple ways, for once.) All that was required was an eagerness to shout along with “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!,” and mean it.

“When I was 16 or 17 years old, the first thing I was like allowed to go and do as a young adult was Lilith Fair at the Gorge,” said Carlile, talking with Twain backstage. “There is something to be said for a group of people coming together to support music with a common feeling of unity. I thought a focus group or a small way to do that would be to come here” —to a resort outside of Cancun — “and see if we could make that happen on a small level. It’s grown, and I’d love to see that happen back over at home again.”

“I believed you entirely, because you’re such a sincere person,” Twain told Carlile, about taking in her first GJWW. “But you do have to experience it to really understand. You really meant it when you said it’s like a family. Everybody is united here and it’s very peaceful.” (Read Variety‘s full conversation with Twain and Carlile here.)

Come the end of the festival, which saw outgoing flights coinciding with the incoming of a new administration back home, many attendees were singing a different tune… something along the lines of “Man, I feel like… not getting on the return flight.” Even in a normal year for Girls Just Wanna, there are constant references to spending a few days inside “the Brandi bubble.” That was especially ripe to be pricked at a moment that is seeing the swearing-in of a new administration that has not exactly placed the protection of women’s rights or LGBTQ+ freedoms at the forefront of its agenda. This was an audience that likes its tequila but also likes its social activism, and underlying the partying was some sense that shit is about to get serious — again — and that a weekend of pop-based empowerment was not just a luxury but a necessary recharging station.

“I’m still kind of forming my thoughts around it,” said Carlile, in a phone call on Wednesday, just after returning from Cancun to her home in Washington. (It was the day before picking up an Oscar nomination for best original song for her Elton John collab, “Never Too Late.”) “I think it did feel really different this year. The night before the festival, I sat up in bed and had this thought of how, these past few years, I keep finding myself in moments of facilitating a party when really hard things are going on. It’s not just the festival. Like, I played the Greek the night that Roe v. Wade was overturned, and then a year later, I played the Hollywood Bowl in October right when all of that unrest started to unfold in the Middle East. These things are so heart- and soul-consuming for people, and they should be. So you don’t want to get out there and say, ‘OK, everybody forget about what’s going on for a night.’ It shouldn’t be an escape. It should be a galvanizing moment, even if it’s just happening spiritually or emotionally, because thousands of people are choosing to be together at one time and make a decision to be joyful together, and that creates this ripple effect…

“So you always find yourself in this juxtaposition between something really tense happening in the world and me having to do my job, which is to help people feel things,” Carlile continued. “Not even necessarily feel good — you know, we do a little bit of crying at my concerts and festivals, and this year felt like a really supercharged version of that. So I had this feeling this year that it just felt a little more important, and I think actually my job description has to shift, to making everything I do feel that way — feel emotionally permissive, but anti-apathy.

“What’s happening in the world is being affected when we do something like this together. Glennon Doyle was talking to me about this concept of resistance. Did you see when we did the podcast?” (On the final afternoon of the festival, about a thousand attendees headed indoors to watch Carlile and her wife and manager Catherine Carlile join Doyle and Abby Wambach to tape an episode of their popular “We Can Do Hard Things” podcast.) “Glennon says that resistance is a hard word to continue to lean into, because it makes the other thing more important. It makes the thing you’re resisting the point of the act. And I thought that that was really profound, and she’s been shifting her thinking, and I’ve been shifting mine lately, to making the resistance irresistible. I think that that’s what our concerts need to be from now on: an irresistible act of resistance. You cannot be there and not experience the best of of humanity. And if that starts to look better than what the other side is offering us, I think that’s where we’re gonna start to pull ahead.”

Irresistibility took many forms at Girls Just Wanna Weekend, which took place over four days at the Barcelo Maya Resort. During the day, there were talks and seminars, like Brandy Clark teaching a songwriting class in which she and a volunteer wrote a new song about reaching across the sociopolitical divide, or Jensen McRae co-leading a discussion on journaling with “radical vulnerability,” plus a screening of a new documentary, “ALOK,” about challenging binary divisions. At the opposite end of the spectrum from this sober afternoon fare was the closing Hot Tub Time Machine party, which lasted until 3 a.m. Sunday night as Carlile, the Hanseroth Twins and Lucius walked around the edge of a giant pool pouring tequila and champagne into the waiting mouths of festival attendees while a DJ spun club-style music.

“I know, it’s so bad,” said Carlile, of the closing bacchanalia, where she could be spotted pouring tequila into her own mouth as well as those of the fans. “That is my once-a-year fuck-off moment. Like, I don’t do that any other time. Just that one time, and it is so much fun. … You gotta do it. No regrets, Coyote,” she added, quoting her friend Joni Mitchell.

The weekend began more mindfully, if also with some sipping, as Carlile and the Twins raised glasses of champagne to toast the start of the festival on the main stage Thursday night. It was here that Carlile acknowledged the strife and foreboding that attendees had momentarily left behind, across the border.

“Guys, I don’t want to be a downer on day one of Girls Just Wanna Weekend, but I just want to acknowledge that, as a community, we’ve witnessed a decade’s worth of turmoil in just these last couple of years, really intensifying in the year meeting us here. And I was laying in bed last night and I felt compelled to assure you that this is not a check-your-feelings-at-the-door kind of place. … This is a place where you get to come and be your whole entire self with all of your feelings, all of your anxiety, all of your fear, and all of your sadness, and that you can take the heaviness of the things that we have witnessed in this last year into this place and break it apart in tiny pieces and hand a little bit of it to each and every one of us to help you bear that burden. And you can bear ours, too. If you lost your home in the fires in California, or if you’re just deeply saddened because you know someone who did, we can handle that for you. If you battled literal storms all last year, and hurricanes in the southern states, especially North Carolina, we can help you with that. If you’re feeling really hopeful about the ceasefire and just terrified that something could go wrong, but you really are praying for humanity on this one, we can be there with you on that. If you’re freaking out about climate change, so are we. If you are genuinely terrified about the state of our country back at home and the incoming changes and the balance-of-power shift that’s gonna happen while we’re here this weekend, you are not alone in that. … You’re gonna fill up. You’re gonna fill up like those giant planes in Los Angeles, scooping up water in the ocean and dropping it on the fires. You’re gonna fill up and then you’re gonna go home and do whatever the hell you can do for your community to make sure that next year doesn’t look like the one that just came.”

And then, “with that, we give you permission to party,” Carlile added. “You guys, we need this. Bottoms up, bitches.”

On the first night, only Brandy Clark got through her set before lightning approached from off-shore, forcing an evacuation of the main stage area and finally, after two and a half hours, word that Carlile’s main headlining set would not take place at all that night. It was the only force-majeure moment of the weekend. The festival host did subsequently squeeze in two previously unscheduled performances, one being an acoustic show by the poolside the following afternoon, and then a late-night re-do of her planned headlining show, squeezed in after Muna on Saturday night. It was there that Carlile got to start her principal performance with the song she chose to pay tribute to those affected by the devastating wildfires that took place the previous week in the L.A. area: a pitch-perfect cover of Led Zeppelin’s “Goin’ to California.”

These were far from Carlile’s only singing appearances of the weekend. As noted in Variety’s previously published joint interview with Twain and Carlile, she came out during the country-pop superstar’s set on Friday to sing duets of “From This Moment On,” “Party for Two,” the Elvis classic “Can’t Help Falling in Love” and Dolly Parton’s “I Will Always Love You.” (The latter was completely spontaneous, as Shania asked Brandi if she’d ever sung it before. Carlile affirmed yes, not mentioning that she’d performed it with Parton herself at the Newport Folk Festival in 2019.)

A few days after the fact, Carlile said, “When Shania went off-script and pulled me into that amazing rollercoaster of trying to hang on for dear life while she threw me curveballs musically, that was really fun, because it kept me on my toes. I really respect her and I didn’t want to let her down, so I had to pull from the very best of myself and what I know to get through that, and I loved it. … She’s just like so supportive. She texts me right back all the time and we text each other songs and she’s just a really fucking cool person, man. Like, one of the coolest people I’ve ever met in this job.”

The lovefest was mutual. Twain stuck around the following night, and in the backstage Q&A with Variety, she talked about her love for Carlile’s song “Right on Time,” and how it made good on Twain’s desire, privately expressed, that Brandi should stay in touch with her Roy Orbison-esque side. Later, Twain was out in the stands to watch the headlining set, and after — as a result of the preceding conversation — the singer dedicated “Right on Time” to Twain, Shania exulted and sang along before catching my eye and shouting, “Isn’t that so fucking great?”

Twain’s perhaps surprising love of spontaneity extended to asking Maren Morris to join her on stage, too, for a nearly impromptu “That Don’t Impress Me Much.” Caught backstage before the set, Morris was just about to sneak in a last listen to the pop classic. “She invited me last second, and that’s the beauty of these festivals — there doesn’t need to be this big, month-long correspondence,” Morris said. “It’s like, ‘Hey, are you available? Do you know this song? Let’s do it.’ I know the song like the back of my hand, but when you don’t know you’re doing something until the night-of, you’re like, ‘Oh shit, I should probably go listen again to this.’” (Morris ultimately stuck with the “Brad Pitt” line, but Twain gender-modified and celebrity-modified her own verse to: “OK, so you’re Maren Morris.”)

Few of the sets during the festival proceeded without at least one collab. Morris had two guests out for hers — Brittney Spencer for “My Church,” and then Muna’s Katie Galvin to recreate their recent recorded collaboration, “Push Me Over.” The song playfully addresses bi-curiosity. “It was fun to do that for this audience, knowing that it means something to them and they’re gonna get it,” said Morris. “It’s a fun song and lighthearted and liberating — just about self-acceptance and exploring new things about yourself, no matter the age you are, and this is definitely the crowd to feel safe doing that… along with being the perfect time to finally be able to collaborate with Katie live on it.”

Morris also went candid in her set, in a far less lighthearted way, with another song from her recent EP, “This Is How a Woman Leaves,” a dramatic ballad addressing her marital split. She has a new album completed and soon to be announced, and when asked about it backstage, Morris indicated it won’t all be in that vein.

“It’s certainly a sonic exploration of everything that’s transpired over the last few years in my life, my career,” Morris said. “I address all of it. But it’s also not a heavy divorce record., just because I didn’t want to do that. I just wanted to capture the year of aftermath. And there’s of course a grieving period, but there’s also a lot of spots of light and just remembering that you are a whole person. Sometimes your friends help you realize that, and sometimes you have to find it in the depths of the pit of hell. And this album definitely explores the spectrum of that finding yourself again, from the lowest point to the spots you didn’t realize you still had in you that could feel joyful. And so it touches on all that. And then, I worked with so many people on it, like Muna, obviously. The production is all over the place, and I guess my albums always sort of are, but it’s not bridled in any way of genre or concept. I love how it’s not a concept record” musically, she said.

Another artist playing the festival that has a new record in the offing (some of which they premiered at the festival) is Lucius, who plan to release a couple of new tracks in a couple weeks followed by a full album in the spring. It’ll be self-titled, with frontwomen Jess Wolfe and Holly Laessig explaining their decision to self-produce as a band, after Carlile produced their previous effort. “We’ve kind of come back together as a band to make this record, just the four of us, and we’re all feeling really good about it. We haven’t really done that since ‘Wildewoman’ (their official 2013 album debut), because we love collaborating and working with other people, and obviously it’s a big part of who we are. But how we started working was collaborating with ourselves.”

Still, Lucius might be considered the most dedicated stalwarts of the Bramily, having been the one artist besides Carlile herself to have been on the bill at every Girls Just Wanna Weekend since the inaugural edition in 2019. They provided another singular highlight when Laessig and Wolfe walked offstage and into the middle of the crowd to close the set with one of their most moving signature songs, “Two of Us on the Run” — somehow achieve harmonic perfection while turning to looking at the close-by crowd more than each other.

It was inevitable that Carlile would turn up for a guest vocal during her friends Lucius’ performance, but the surprise was that she emerged holding Wolfe’s 9-week-old son, Leo. The introduction of Leo led to an even bigger story that Wolfe told the crowd, revealing that she had suffered a miscarriage while they were on-site at last year’s festival.

“It was really important” to attend this year, Wolfe said in their dressing room after the show, “because last year I had a really very challenging experience here at the festival. I had a miscarriage and had to fly home early, between this festival and our ‘Wildewoman’ tour, to have my procedure, and it was just a really horrific way to leave this beautifully joyful experience. And so it is a full 180, coming back here with my son after having been through that. I didn’t want that to be the last mark on this joyful experience. Now I get to share it with him, and that’s brought me a lot of peace of mind — more than I anticipated, even.”

That’s not a story the singer probably would have told at any other festival. ”I think this is the audience that you feel comfortable sharing personal things with,” Wolfe said. “So many women experience this, and there’s a lot of shame associated with losing a child, or your potential baby. I was surprised at how many people talked about it after it happened to me, and how few people talked about it before. Very close people in my life, obviously I knew about their experiences, but I didn’t know so many of my other friends and so many of my family members had experienced this thing until after it happened to me. I wish I knew before because I think it would’ve made me feel more less alone in that experience. And so I think by sharing it, hopefully it opens a door for conversation amongst each other, and to feel less alone. A lot of people came up to me today in the breakfast buffet and shared their stories and thanked me for saying that, and that made me feel really good.”

(Carlile concurred about what this meant: “Walking out with Baby Leo after what Jess went through last year was definitely a highlight for me.”)

Other artists shared what makes the festival special to them. Wolfe mentions the “hugely lesbian” audience, even though there is a significant contingent of straight women such as themselves. Brandy Clark is one of those that thinks there is room for more men to come than presently do, although she hardly has any complaints about the chemistry that currently allows gay women to feel a comfort they might not at home.

“I think the word will get out that Girls Just Wanna Weekend is more than just for women,” Clark said. “I love that it’s all women on the bill, though, because you don’t see that… For me, I’ve never felt oppressed because of being gay. I never have felt that. But the first year that I was here, I was playing at the pool stage, and I looked out and I saw a sea of mes. And I got really overwhelmed, because it’s the first time in my adult life that I had felt like I was in the majority. That was really huge. And so I think of what that must feel like for someone who teaches at a school somewhere where they can’t be out of the closet to come here and be themselves. I get messages on Instagram from people that say it’s the one place where they can go and really be themselves.

“That’s pretty special, that Brandi’s created that,” continued Clark. The feeling of safety doesn’t just extend to sexual or gender identity. “I remember Brandi saying the first year that I was here that it’s the festival where, if you lose your child, you don’t have to worry. They’ll come back with sunscreen and a snack.”

Allison Ponthier was one of the younger artists playing, a singer-songwriter that Elton John initially championed on his Rocket Hour radio show (she has a cameo in his new “Never Too Late” documentary) and then recommended to Carlile, who eagerly invited her to GJWW to play at the pool stage for the first time this year. Ponthier had just lost her major-label deal when Carlile called, an experience that made her tear up as she recounted it from the stage.

“Her lyrics are so clever,” said Carlile, post-festival. “I was just sitting there feeling, for lack of a better word, affectionately jealous, you know?” Citing Ponthier’s sense of wit, Carlile noted, “Somebody said, ‘Brandi, you found the country Sabrina Carpenter.’ Well, technically Elton found her, but I am happy to be of any part of her trajectory. God, that girl is outstanding.”

Ponthier was thrilled by the company she was keeping, in the pool as well as her new celebrity booster. “I’ve never been to a festival where I was surrounded by so many queer people, queer women,” she said after leaving the stage. “I do feel like I know what kind of people like my music. It is (A) gay people, (B) people that love storytelling, and (C) people who really, really appreciate like the ‘60s/’70s era of country music, folk music and rock music. So it’s a mixed bag a lot of the time,” she said, but having so much of the audience at GJWW represent an intersection of those three things was a new experience.

Another of the youngest generation of performers, Jensen McRae, who played the main stage as a solo artist on Sunday night, saw the demographic as this: “Everyone who’s here really, really loves music and is very, very into feeling their feelings.” Though McRae references relationships with boys, she’s a very gay-friendly artist — as evidenced by the fact that she was called out by Muna as a guest vocalist on the climactic performance of that band’s biggest song, the lesbian pop anthem “Pink Chiffon.” That recreated her nightly cameo in their set from when she opened for the band on tour… an association that goes back to when they were all USC students.

“The first time I met (Muna) was toward the end of my freshman year when I was starting out,” McRae recalled. “I was in the very first daytime slot at the on-campus feminist music festival, and they were the headliners and I was very starstruck even then. It was called Femme Fest. … I think other than Femme Fest there at USC, which was almost 10 years ago now, I think this might be the only time” she’d been part of an all-female bill. “I’m so happy to be a part of it. It’s a thing that I wish was less rare.”

Ruby Amanfu has been to all six Girls Just Wanna Weekends, even when she was not officially listed on the bill, and she was back again this time with her co-writer/husband, Sam Ashworth. Even without having an extended slot of her own, the Nashville-based artist turned in one of the festival’s most powerful single performances when she sang the Cranberries’ “Zombie” as the penultimate number for “Night of the Living ‘90s,” an all-star set that closed GJWW. (The closing ‘90s blowout has replaced the ‘80s night that was the final attraction the previous five years.) Other performers were able to camp it up, in costume to cover ‘90s hits by Cher or the Spice Girls, but rocking it out with Carlile and the Hanseroth Twins headbanging behind her, Amanfu sounded as serious as a heart attack. Or zombie attack.

Amanfu said her association with the hosts goes back to opening for Carlile on tour nearly 10 years ago, then being asked to play the inaugural festival in 2019. “I’ll never forget Brandi whispering in my ear on the last night of that first festival, ‘I don’t ever wanna do this without you.’ I’ve never forgotten what she said, and neither has she,” Amanfu said. “Brandi, Catherine, Tim and Phil have always made space for me. I not only have a seat at the table, but I always get to bring a dish to the potluck, too.”

It’s Amanfu who teases out the possible multiple connotations of name of the festival, which would seem to have “…fun” as its unspoken completion — but actually doesn’t, necessarily. “The term ‘Girls Just Wanna’ has taken on a deeper meaning for me since its inception in 2019,” Amanfu said. “It’s more than just having fun, even though it is fun. Now, to me the phrase means that girls just wanna be real… and vulnerable… and inclusive… and compassionate and on and on. The festival is a place that proclaims, ‘If you wanna, then let’s make room to ensure that you’re gonna.’”

Amanfu’s “Zombie” had strong competition as the highlight of ‘90s night — and maybe of the entire festival — from Carlile’s opening 10-minute-plus rendition of Celine Dion and Jim Steinman’s “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now.” “Singing Celine Dion, I felt, was like coming to terms with my true self in some really important ways,” Carlile said after the festival. “That was just so amazing, and it should have been funny to reach that level of drama, but actually it felt really right.” Told that it was a peak moment, she responded, “Well, I’m glad you enjoyed it. You’ll only ever see it once.”

An example for the family-friendly tone of the festival was set by how much Carlile’s own immediate and extended family took part in the proceedings. On ‘90s night, her wife (and now manager) Catherine was in full demonstrative flair as one of the wanna-be Spice Girls, alongside some of her visiting friends from Britain. Her sister, Tiffany, sang “Strawberry Wine.” Her brother, Jay, took an even bigger role, and not just as a member of the ersatz boy band that provided some of the few male lead vocals of the festival. Jay Carlile, who recently toured as a member of Wynonna Judd’s band (at Brandi’s suggestion), is the main driver (literally) of the Carlile Family Band, a folk-bluegrass outfit which has his 17-year-old daughter Caroline as lead singer and son Jay-J, 15, as primary multi-instrumentalist. The family group released a debut EP this month, and won over the pool crowd with an impressive afternoon set. Meanwhile, Phil Hanseroth’s daughter Jo broke out as one of the winning guest performers at the “Brandi-oke” afternoon that is a festival highlight each year.

For many returning attendees, attending GJWW is not so much about attending summer camp in the winter — although there is undeniably that — as it is a family reunion.

Jessie Funes-Macdonald and her wife have attended each year since the first, in tandem with another lesbian couple. She counts on it, annually, as a break from an emotionally taxing job working with the homeless as a social services worker in the L.A. area. “We keep going because it’s Brandi, and to support her in supporting women’s music, and to be able to have a good time with community and recharge at the beginning of the year. It can be expensive, and we do the monthly payments, but it’s the only time we take a vacation, and it’s just such a unique experience, honestly.” With her asthma, Funes-Macdonald felt it was literally the first time she could take a clean breath away from the fires burning near where she lives. “Everything changes — my mental health, my physical health, everything. All four of us are in service of some kind, where we always constantly give, give, give, and it’s just nice to go somewhere and have it be about taking care of yourself. And it’s just nice to be in a space where you can be yourself and no one is judged. Even though we’re from California, it’s still sometimes hard to have that space, and then we hear about the people who come here who are a blue dot in Mississippi… It’s just a very unique experience, and we don’t want to leave.”

Leanne Clark-Shirley is the CEO of a gerontology research organization who was headed to Stanford to give a talk after leaving GJWW. She and another straight friend have come for five out of the last six years; just once did they bring their husbands, who had a good enough time, but decided it was better off as a girls’ retreat. It’s one of about four music festivals they attend every year, and their favorite. As a geronologist in middle age, Clark-Shirley is impressed that “it’s the only festival you can go to and make friends with someone 30 years younger than you and someone 30 years older… at least up to a certain point.” And the only one she’s attended that has “the thoughtful (daytime) programming where I was actually learning something that felt that impactful in the world. It feels like the whole experience is designed to happen with the attendees, instead of just for the attendees, as a performance.”

Carlile is mindful of fan feedback as she looks toward the next year’s festival. She is happy to be partnered with 100x, which is in its second year of producing the festival. “They met us, they heard us, they understood who we were,” she told the crowd in the opening toast, “and, actually of their own accord, they went and they took an LGBTQIA sensitivity class to learn how to speak and be around people that are different from them.” It was 100x’s own initiative, she said, to have all the restrooms at the resort labeled as gender-inclusive (even if that was realistically going to happen anyway).

The host is sensitive to the idea that a weekend in Mexico may seem classist for someone who speaks to and for the disenfranchised.

“Most of any money I would make from the festival goes into rooms for all of my friends and past artists and the family of past artists that want to keep coming back,” Carlile says, in saying it’s not a big profit-maker for her or the performing artists. As for the audience, “I would like to see it get to a place where there are elements of it that are more affordable. If I have one reserve and one regret about Girls Just Wanna Weekend being where it is, is that it’s not everybody can do it financially. The Bramily have always been so conscientious about class division and supportive of each other. They ride-share, they couch-share, they room-share with strangers if they have to. The ones that have money sometimes will pay for the ones that don’t have money. I think that that kind of community, intimacy and equitability is probably almost unheard of in terms of a community or fan base. So I would like to see Girls Just Wanna Weekend become even more inclusive in terms of finance. If there’s a way for us to make a less expensive thing happen parallel to it, or for more of us to get involved with maybe fundraising and getting people that would otherwise never be able to afford to come to Girls Just Wanna Weekend out there…” But, she says, “I’ve seen some pretty heartening and inspiring things happen to get people to Girls Just Wanna Weekend. It’s cool to watch them do it.”

As for gender demographics, “we joke about it being (all) gay” — Carlile did, after all, praise Twain from the stage as the newly crowned “queen of the lesbians!” — “but it’s really for everyone,” she says.

One thing that won’t shift, obviously, is the fact that you will only hear women singing at the festival, barring a cameo fluke here and there. If it takes marginalizing the presence of men just a little to arrive to arrive at what may already be the world’s most holistically immersive and impressive music festival, then so be it.

Carlile’s commitment to inclusivity also includes looking out for the other kind of straight people — the ones who are walking the line on their sobriety. That oft-expressed care for the non-drinkers in the crowd has to be, if not a major music festival first, then something close to it.

During her main headlining set, Carlile noted that she loves tequila, but that she is mindful of those who cannot touch it, and that they should feel welcomed and supported, whether it’s through the mocktails available at all the bar stations or the AA-style “Friends of Bill” daily meetings for sober attendees. Then she sang “That Wasn’t Me,” a touching ballad she wrote after her father gave up drinking for good.

Post-festival, Carlile said, “I think a lot of people that love my music and the music of the artists that I associate with are a little nervous to come to Girls Just Wanna because they think it’s a throw-down and it’s a party. Well, it is, but it’s such an open place of acceptance and support. Not only is nobody gonna judge you for not drinking, people are going to actively support you for not drinking. People are gonna make sure you have your lemon soda. People are gonna make sure you get to the Friends of Bill meeting. You’re gonna get a song (about sobriety). You’re gonna get a lot of respect and attention for that.” She says the attention to meeting non-drinkers’ needs is one more example of respecting “bodily autonomy”: “It is not a place where anybody comes and wonders if they’re acceptable.”

But on the final night, as the Hot Tub Time Machine pool party started after midnight, most of the Friends of Bill retreated to their rooms as the stars came out to ply the partying crowd till 3. The tradition started the first year of the festival, when the two women of Lucius wanted to keep the party going in the early a.m. and invited a few dozen people to what was then an indoor hot tub inside the former venue, the Hard Rock. Now, hundreds of swimsuit-clad passholders show up for an event that begins with Lucius and Carlile entering one side of the pool on a float and being led to the hot tub at the other end, before they spend two-plus hours dancing and pouring alcohol into the mouths of the partying contingent as if they were debauched baby birds.

Even Lucius’ Jess Wolfe, as a new mother, participated in all that poolside pouring again this year. “It’s pretty epic. But I mean, it’s pretty disgusting,” she admits. It’s maybe a sign of GJJW’s pervasive sense of conscience that she can laugh about harboring some slight reservations. “I’m pouring tequila into people’s mouths, going, ‘Don’t do this to yourself!’”

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