Ada Lea – when i paint my masterpiece
Ada Lea—the moniker of Montreal-based musician Alexandra Levy— announces her new album, when i paint my masterpiece, out August 8th via Saddle Creek and shares its lead single, “baby blue frigidaire mini fridge.”
when i paint my masterpiece, the third LP from Ada Lea, and follow-up album to one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden, is an epic, 16-track opus from Montreal renaissance woman Levy. It’s a kaleidoscopic exploration of the transformations art can bring: the vision of an uncompromising artist dancing bravely and freely between registers and across mediums.
On the album’s cover, Levy holds her guitar against the backdrop of a sea of her paintings tempting us to ask: is painting a metaphor here, for music or life? No! As ever, she resists tidy metaphors. Levy is a master of thorny lowercase titles that germinate and grow 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.
This is on full display on today’s single, a mid-tempo, lilting song, “baby blue frigidaire mini fridge.” Of the inspiration behind the song, Levy reflects impressionistically: “The Chantal Akerman film where the camera moves in slow circular pans around her apartment. Then what if the frame quickly zooms out as far as it could possibly go? And in that wide pull back, what we recognize as universal is still ‘this chair, this window, this mountain view.’ Then, move out again, even further. What we are left with—three things: ‘our old time souls, this old time moon.’ Two things, I mean.”
The album marks a reset—a 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.”
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 band—Tasy Hudson on drums, Chris Hauer on lead guitar, Summer Kodama on bass—recorded 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 was produced alongside Here We Go Magic’s Luke Temple, who has lent his gently psychedelic sensibility to albums by artists like Adrianne Lenker and Hand Habits.
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