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Event
Ada Lea at Reactor Coffee
Bonehead Booking Presents
Ada Lea w/ support TBA at Reactor Coffee
Canadian folk songwriter Ada Lea is releasing her lovely new record this August via Saddle Creek Records. Her tour this fall includes a stop at Reactor Coffee in Lincoln.
Tuesday, November 4
Reactor Coffee
$10 ADV | $12 DOS
6:30 p.m. doors, 7:30 p.m. show
All ages
Ada Lea bio: The hand knows best, the painter Margaux Williamson says. A shape produces itself, where I go toward what is intuitive, rather than logical. The shapely, intuitive songs that comprise Ada Lea's third album, when i paint my masterpiece, are surprising, imagistic, tactile. They stand before us and we feel their brushstrokes. Alexandra Levy holds her guitar against the backdrop of a sea of her paintings on the album cover and its tempting to ask: is painting a metaphor here, for music or life? No! As ever, she resists tidy metaphors. Shes a master of this kind of thorny lowercase title that germinates and grows with time. In a real, profound way, music and painting go hand-in-hand as she unveils a new style of subversion and surrealism inspired by her transdisciplinarity.
Levy is a Renaissance woman, and Ada Leas albums have been swelling in scope alongside the evolution of her artistic life. Her recent turn toward pedagogyteaching a songwriting course at Concordia University and co-facilitating a community-based group called The Songwriting Methodweaves another vivid thread into her multifaceted practice. Her debut LP, what we say in private, blurred the lines between interior and performative worlds. Her sophomore record, one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden, featured vignettes centered on Montreal. On this sprawling and ambitious album, written over three years and whittled down from over 200 songs, she asks: what happens when you pause? How can a life be held suspended in song? The album is a kaleidoscopic exploration of the transformations art can bring: the vision of an uncompromising artist dancing bravely and freely between registers and across mediums.
The album marks a reseta quiet revolution. After years of relentless international touring, Levy felt an urgent need for community and renewal. Gruelling road schedules with very little support left her wondering: who am I really doing all this for? The system was uncaring and broken, and so it was that she came to envision a new healthy and healing mode of musical genesis. For me, that looked like resting, extending my creative reach, going back to school, studying painting and poetry, she explains. Taking a step away from music as guided by industry expectations. Simplifying things. Getting a job, starting to teach. Engaging with the process rather than the product. This need for a more deliberate creative renewal was rejected by her existing systems of support, so she began the search for an alternative.
when i paint my masterpiece was largely recorded in rural Ontario in the waning weeks of 2023, and its warm harmonies and lush arrangements link back to a golden era of Canadian folk music. The core Ada Lea bandTasy Hudson on drums, Chris Hauer on lead guitar, Summer Kodama on bassrecorded the album largely live-off-the-floor and acoustic in one room, off the grid in both senses, in the pocket, loose but in control and without a click in sight. Relinquishing the process to the whims of chance allowed for the sanctity of human error to rear its head. The album lives and breathes, produced with Here We Go Magics Luke Temple, who has lent his gently psychedelic sensibility to albums by artists like Adrianne Lenker and Hand Habits.
The album views the world through an unstable prism of imagination. midnight magic is set firmly in a shimmering dreamworld that could have been summoned by Judee Sill. snowglobe refracts a dinner scene later glimpsed through glass by a child. In there is only one thing on my mind, a series of magical transformations send the speaker soaring like a Chagall figure. These transformations also draw inspiration from mythical novelist Olga Tokarczuks honoring of otherness and inexplicability, and the surrealist painter-novelist Leonora Carringtons engagement with mysterious forces of nature, and the self as an observed observer. Just like in the museum/ We keep a little distance Levy sings.
And by the end of these sixteen songs, its clear: when i paint my masterpiece isnt chasing perfection, its comfortable in the magic of being. These songs are alive with poetic specificity and a wide-open heartdeeply felt, often strange, and always reaching. Theres an optimistic and plainspoken wisdom in the lyricswhich builds on Ada Leas singular songwriting style of surprising harmonic and melodic turnsnow with a newly rich, organic sound that rewards slow listening. Lets look more closely at the title. At first, the most charged words seemed to be paint and masterpiece. But look again at when. Its becoming more and more unstable. And we now know its predicting something thats already here. The masterpiece, not a product, is the process.
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LocationReactor Coffee (View)
2124 Y Street
Lincoln, NE 68503
United States
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