when i paint my masterpiece

the 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 alexandra levy featuring “baby blue frigidaire mini fridge”

ada lea when i paint my masterpiece

“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 it’s tempting to ask: is painting a metaphor here, for music or life? No! As ever, she resists tidy metaphors. She’s 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 Lea’s albums have been swelling in scope alongside the evolution of her artistic life. Her recent turn toward pedagogy—teaching a songwriting course at Concordia University and co-facilitating a community-based group called The Songwriting Method—weaves 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 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.” 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 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 lives and breathes, produced with Here We Go Magic’s 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 Tokarczuk’s honoring of otherness and inexplicability, and the surrealist painter-novelist Leonora Carrington’s 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, it’s clear: when i paint my masterpiece isn’t chasing perfection, it’s comfortable in the magic of being. These songs are alive with poetic specificity and a wide-open heart—deeply felt, often strange, and always reaching. There’s an optimistic and plainspoken wisdom in the lyrics—which builds on Ada Lea’s singular songwriting style of surprising harmonic and melodic turns—now with a newly rich, organic sound that rewards slow listening.  Let’s look more closely at the title. At first, the most charged words seemed to be “paint” and “masterpiece.” But look again at “when.” It’s becoming more and more unstable. And we now know it’s predicting something that’s already here. The masterpiece, not a product, is the process.