The title of Ada Lea’s new album, when i paint my masterpiece, is not exactly aspirational. It’s hardly allegorical – on the album cover, Alexandra Levy is literally holding her guitar while being surrounded by her paintings. But it’s hard to listen to the sprawling, otherworldly little album and not, at any point, feel like she’s offering a glimpse into the practice and magic of mastering. (Not the post-production stage, which the prolific Heba Kadry artfully handled here, but the artistic process.) Following 2021’s kaleidoscopic one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden, relentless touring forced Levy to restructure her life and priorities as a musician, which is not to say she stopped writing songs – in fact, she taught a songwriting course at Concordia University. She wrote over 200 songs over a period of three years, 16 of which made it onto the new album, and most of which originated in the Songwriting Method, a community-based group she kept up that required submitting songs with a deadline. On songs like ‘it isn’t enough’, you can almost hear her rushing to get a song down before midnight, singing, “Today I lost/ Today is gone/ Today I really fought.” Far from impatient or forced, however, it sounds unhurried and precious, glad not to have slipped into past tense.
We caught up with Ada Lea to talk about painting, the Songwriting Method, Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet, and other inspirations behind when i paint my masterpiece.
Drawing and painting
For you, is there a linear kind of relationship between drawing, painting, and songwriting?
It’s funny that you use the word linear because I think that one big difference between music and paintings is the temporal difference that dawned on me while I was working on the songs and spending more time with painting. It’s kind of silly, but you do take in a painting all at once. There can be motion within the painting, and you can maybe try and gather what came before or, if there’s a figure, where the figure’s going, but you really are taking it in all at once. With a song, it’s evolving over time, and it’s the same with reading. I think attempting to bring that experience to a song, almost it becoming impressionistic or having small flashes of images over making it logically and narrativelly make sense – that took priority. We’re doing this interview now, but I’m not comfortable speaking compared to how free it feels to paint or draw or play something on the piano or play a little melody. It’s really difficult for me to speak, and I know it’s not the case for everyone. Like, my partner, he thinks in entire sentences and sees the sentence before he’s even speaking. I think it was just coming into the right brain aspect of it and letting my intuition guide me instead of having my hands gripped around the neck of the song.
I know that one part of stepping away from the music industry, for you, was studying painting. I’m curious if that way of appreciating art also affected how you approached songwriting.
I was really lucky to be in contact with a mentor that was really inspiring to me, and allowed conversations to happen in a way that didn’t feel oppressively academic. I really don’t come from an academic background. My parents didn’t go to school. My brother has a bachelor’s, and we’re the first ones to go to school. The academic world is not one that I’m comfortable in, so I think I do school in my own way. I also gravitate towards professors and mentors who maybe think in a similar way. Having someone that was more about the doing and less about the talking of the doing was really important to me. You can only really learn through trying and doing: moving the paint around, seeing what happens. You can look at other people’s paintings and study that, in a way, but I’m just not attracted to the purely academic route.
Was that also your goal as a teacher, to focus on the doing?
I think the academic setting can be so helpful to so many people, but it can also be so damaging, especially when we’re thinking about art in universities and academic settings. It’s almost like they cancel each other out. I’ve been really inspired by Lynda Barry’s approach, and I read her book The Syllabus, where she calls herself the accidental professor. The one positive thing about academia is that you have a group of artists in your cohort, and you have critiques, and you are in contact with people regularly. And I think what happens is when people leave the school setting, it’s hard to recreate that environment even though that environment can be really oppressive as well. So the takeaway for me is how can we create an environment like school without it being in school, just taking the positive aspects of school, which for me are community and mentorship and friendship – this secondary education that you’re getting, the hallway education.
You can get that through organizing it yourself with your friends too. I try and show that to the students in the songwriting class, where I was like, “I don’t know who is who chose this class, who really wants to learn about songwriting, but when you are out of school, you’re going to want to have a strong group of friends that are like-minded that also want to create. So how can you create this world and also continue to write?” Because another thing that the school gives you is deadlines. How can we have that kind of experience and not be in an academic setting? I’ve kind of found my own way that works for me, which is creating low-stake deadlines, creating work in community, and creating your own learning environment with friends.
Sheila Heti’s friendship with Margaux Williamson
I read a bit about how their work has intersected as a result of their friendship. How have they inspired you personally?
I love Sheila’s writing. I’ve read, I think, all of her work. Margo came to Concordia to give an artist talk just this past year. Someone asked about her routines and her studio practice, and she was like, “I start off my day, I read something and then I start to paint at midday. I meditate for forty-five minutes. And if I don’t meditate, then I might as well go home.” And she mentioned that twice a week, two friends come by, and that the only rule that they have is no talking, which I really loved.
This happened after the album, but in 2022, when I had just come off of so much touring and was exhausted from being on the road, I felt a deep longing for a routine and friendships and feeling grounded in creativity. I think that was the basis for wanting to step away from the touring life, to feel grounded and have a routine and close friends that can come by the studio. I have an art studio, and often I have get-togethers with friends. It’s either silent working or talking through ideas, and I really feel so grounded and inspired by those conversations. It was great to hear that Margo creates that same environment. The rule of no talking – I really laughed, and my friend was there with me, someone that I meet with weekly. We just looked at each other, and we were like, “That’s what we do too.”
The ‘midnight magic’ video was created by Group of Two, which is also a project of friendship.
The Group of Two started in 2016 or so. It was with my friend Valerie Lacombe, her visual art identity is Clarice Han. We used to put on shows at my apartment as the Group of Two. I’m just remembering one where we had filmed each other, drawing each other, and it was this idea that as women friends, we’re not comfortable being nude or being topless in the way that maybe we would like to be, so the video was us drawing ourselves topless. We had to fill out a whole pad of paper, and we weren’t allowed to look down at what we were drawing, so we were just looking at each other. We projected the video on my wall, and we put up the pictures that we had drawn. One person came by and sat watching the video, and I think maybe a second or third person came by. But that was an amazing project, and it really is important to do the things that you want to do. It can be really small, and that’s okay if one person sees it.
The Songwriting Method
Another way of building community after that period of touring was the Songwriting Method, this group that you co-facilitated. How did it develop over time?
It started unofficially when I went to a residency in 2017, and it felt like an incredible opportunity to just write as much music as I could. I set some of these little restrictions or games for myself where I was like, “Today I’m going to write a song.” I tried to write a song every day for those three weeks and came up with little constraints. Pretty much my first album came out from that time frame. In 2019, I went back to the same residency, and I wrote a song every other day where I was like, “Day one, I write the song, and day two, I’m recording it.” I think seven or eight songs came from that residency that I ended up using for my second album. So it was kind of a revelation that if I sit down, something will come, and it’s in the doing that something comes.
My friend, Johanna Samuels, invited me – this is over COVID, after the second album – to a School of Song workshop, and I went to one meeting and then dropped out. The structure didn’t feel good to me. Also, I was renting a cabin in the woods, and the reception was really bad, so I couldn’t really log in for the video calls. There were these technical difficulties, but what I took away from the School of Song was that you can have this process done in a group. Something that I had that was really familiar to me: Let’s write a song, and meet in two or three days and talk about it. I hadn’t really considered that I could do that with other people until the School of Song.
After that, I tried to get other people to join me in my song challenges, but no one wanted to commit, or they would say yes, and then when it came time to submit the songs, they would drop out. That happened until I met my partner, Thomas, and he was like, “I’m down. Let’s do it.” It was the first time someone else was interested in trying it together. We tried the residency method of a song every other day. We got together, we wrote the prompts, and he talked about it with some of his friends. And then before we knew it, there were five or six of us that were doing it. We made a Bandcamp, and we shared the password, and we all uploaded our songs. It was just for one month, more and more people dropped out, and at the end, it was just me and him again.
Over the years, we refined the ideas. Maybe over COVID, things were slower, and it was easier to write a song every other day. If you’re not in a residency environment, and you’re working and you have your daily responsibilities, it’s kind of difficult to set that time aside. So then we tried to do something every three days. That’s what we’ve landed on now as being something that can work even if you’re working full-time and you have other commitments. The Method runs for one month, three or four times a year. And it’s my favorite thing in the world. [laughs] My favorite part is really listening to everyone’s songs and how they’ve interpreted the prompts. Sometimes it’s just one verse and a chorus, and it just has so much life and rawness. The recorded music that you hear on streaming platforms is so different from what is coming out of people directly. I find that so inspiring because there’s nothing like it. You never get to hear people’s songs that are so rough.
The deadline is the most important thing. You have to submit the song at 11:59PM, and if you don’t you’re out; sometimes that means you’re recording a voice memo. We’ve kind of become more relaxed with the deadlines, and when I was going through a really busy time, I was appreciative of the relaxed constraint of the deadline. But I think the deadline really does something to people. It can’t be too high-stakes either. I would love someone to do a bit of research on creative methods and deadlines, because it is fascinating what it can do for you when you feel like someone or your community is waiting for something from you. The pressure can’t be too high that it is creating anxiety; it just needs to be this gentle push.
Would you say there was not just a communal but conversational aspect to it, especially when it was just you and your partner?
It’s hard to say, but there are specific examples I can think of where I really didn’t feel like writing, and I had accepted that I would miss the deadline. And then I would hear someone who had already submitted their song for that prompt, and it would get me out of my head and writing. I guess the songs become, whether or not it’s intentional, kind of responses to each other, because you can hear other people’s songs.
I feel like the whole album wants to preserve that rawness, but ‘i want it all’ stands out in that regard.
There are parts of that song where I still wince of I listen back to specific vocal moments. I’m like, “Couldn’t I have recorded that a little bit better? But it was a big challenge of the record for me to just decide I would like the album to have imperfections built in, and that’s okay. It’s just a different mode of operating where you’re not aiming to achieve a kind of robot machine perfection. And I think that, weirdly, music has gone in this direction where everything is disconnected because that seems to be the biggeset time saver. So you make a decision to record things individually, you’re copy and pasting, you’re quantizing drums – you know, you move the snare hit so that it’s more on the grid. All of these decisions that we make and think that it is making the music better – we’re just erasing our humanness.
Harvest by Neil Young
That album, Harvest, is one of my favorites. Maybe because of how it sounds, but also the songs themselves are so good. I thought the whole album was recorded in Neil’s ranch, and it turns out that only two of the songs are recorded that way. He got these Nashville session musicians, and to record the drum part, the drummer was playing too busy, so somebody was like, “Put your hand under your butt and only play with one hand.” I remember in rehearsal as we were preparing for the recording, because I really wanted to record the album all of us together in the room, I asked Tasy, who plays drums, if she could try that one-handed style where you’re playing a little bit more simply, and you’re letting the song breathe a little bit. It was a reference point for sure. I love the idea that it could be recorded in a barn even though the songs that I connect most to aren’t the ones that are recorded in the barn.
The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington
You note that it encouraged you to finish recording the album. How so?
I loved the story, the imagination, the odd, eccentric old ladies and their big plans. I loved Carrington’s drawings. And, honestly, I lived for the afterword as well. It really gave a new perspective on what I had just read and an interpretation of the story that I hadn’t considered, so it really touched me. I have the book in front of me – I could read the passage in the afterword or part of it, or I could maybe take a screenshot and send it to you.
I’d love for you to read it.
So, she mentions a different writer saying the best criterion for the quality of a book is that women don’t like it. She’s like:
All right. So be it. Kitsch is our ocean. All those cyclical processes, menstruations, and recurrent migraines. Mumbo jumbo, healing herbs, and infantile trust in the power of nature. An unhealthy love of animals, sentimentality, the feeding of stray cats. Being overprotective, poking one’s nose into everything. All those flowers in little pots, all those little gardens, the hollyhocks, the rags, the lace, the stitching, the knitting, the romance novels, the soap operas, “women’s literature,” “emotionality,” the accusation of mental weakness that has been pressed on us for centuries. The reservoir of misogynist scripts is immense and seemingly bottomless. In modern times, in a thoroughly patriarchal world, we can only talk about the Goddess ironically, winking like the Abbess in the painting that hangs in the Gambits’ dining room, and with a hidden smirk, half serious, half mocking. Having been actively displaced and ridiculed for thousands of years she can only express herself in this covert way. It’s worth pondering how many subjects related to women’s experience have been marginalized, derided, ridiculed, or altogether displaced. For hundreds of years women have been raised within misogynist, patriarchal religions that openly discriminate against them to some degree. They take part in cultures that are never fully theirs, or that are even in outright opposition to them.
It continues on, but for me that part “They take part in cultures that are never fully theirs or even in outright opposition to them” is the music industry as I’ve experienced it myself. There was a short time when it was really brought to everyone’s attention that, how can a band have no women in it or a bill have no women in it completely? That means that you have three bands, maybe, that are all guys. How is it that everybody at each venue is a guy? We’re thinking, we can just live on the music itself. If the music is good enough, it will connect to many people, and it will disseminate. And then you’re slowly realizing that the space is occupied by men. She talks about being out of the center and that things that are eccentric are by definition outside the center, so it helped me come into myself as a woman and how my music will not fit these norms or expectations, and that I can just create my own path of what feels important to me.
If you’re making music because you’re trying to achieve or reach something, then you will be disappointed time and time again, and it’s not a system that’s set up for you. If you still want to do music at that point, then you definitely should, and you should do it the only way that feels really good to you. That was my motivation in finishing the album. I had just experienced a second trimester loss, and I still had more than half the album to record vocally. I was just completely exhausted and felt like the 92-year-old woman who has no place in society in the book. [laughs] What she says here – “in the patriarchal order, on reaching old age, a woman becomes an even greater bother than she was when she was young.” I felt like I’m moving into social nonexistence. Now that I’ve become pregnant, I’m no longer this young, alluring woman that seems to get a lot of attention in music. So what am I, if not that? It was a rebuilding and coming into the odd eccentric nature of being a woman and having my own experiences. It was letting go of the expectations of what the album could do, a reminder of why I love music.
I’m thinking about the poem that introduces the liner notes, where you write, “toward the end, I had no choice but to take a cloth to my reflection and erase myself from myself.” In a similar way to that afterword, it frames your experience of the album.
That’s exactly what I was intending with that line of the poem.
Did it come after all the songs were written?
I can’t exactly remember. I might have had fragments of it that were already written, and I worked on the finishing of the poem after the album had been recorded. As I was reflecting on the process of the album itself and what led to it, it did feel like needing to restart. Like the system that I’ve been working with hasn’t been working for me, so where do I go now?
Burnout/Rest
You mentioned feeling exhausted after touring, but I wanted to focus on the other side of it. What does a good day of rest look like for you? How did you come to define it after this period of burnout?
The definition of rest for me is that I can feel good in my body and feel like I have energy for things. That I’m able to speak with a kind of calmness and clarity to people, and give them patience. It’s really hard to explain, but rest brings this side of me on. And then I noticed that in situations where I am burnt out, I don’t have patience, I can’t think clearly, I’m kind of in survival mode. My ideal day would probably be coffee and journaling, reading, walking to the studio, painting, conversations with studio mates or showing each other projects, just working away, maybe hanging out with somebody. For me, that feels restful.
Where do you see music fitting into that ideal?
I think there’s a place for all kinds of songs. Ideally, I would want everyone to feel good while songwriting. But I do think that if you’re angry and you’re not feeling aligned and maybe you’re burnt out, and you’re writing a song about that, then there’s room for that. If you’re approaching creating in a way that is a response to what’s going on in your environment, then you likely won’t always be rested, and the therapeutic benefits of art will apply. They always apply. But you can still approach it even if you’re not aligned spiritually. I don’t know, what do you think?
I think grinding and being burnt out is oddly romanticized, but restfulness can actually help you process anger and other negative emotions. Of course you can write from a non-rested place, but it’s kind of a non-negotiable .
Yeah. There’s nothing that can really come from being burnt out. You’re in a survival state. It’s difficult to make meals and to sleep and to eat.
Art education
It’s part of a larger philosophy that’s maybe in line with Lynda Barry’s teachings, too. I do believe that everybody is so creative at their core, and that people that aren’t creating, that want to create – it’s because of some damaging force from their youth that they would need to repair. But that creative act is so natural. I’m starting this program in the fall, and they’re allowing me to go on tour as well. It’s a Masters of Art in Art Education, and I’m doing a studio-based thesis. As kids, we love scribbling. We love drawing. It’s the most natural thing that we do. And then, eventually our scribbles turn into figures. As we age, we’re learning about ourselves and the world and the world around us, and the pictures start to mirror reality. I don’t know exactly the time frame – perhaps I’ll learn about this when I start the program – but around the age of nine or so, we become frustrated that the pictures don’t look realistic. And those who continue to draw are the ones that find a way around them looking realistic.
From the Songwriting Method and other personal discoveries I’ve made over the years, like watching how I create best or how others create or don’t – and also from an astrology appointment that I had in November – I really feel like it’s my life mission to create things and to inspire others to create. So I applied to this program at Concordia, and they gave me a scholarship to do it. I don’t know exactly what the project will be, but I would like to create a lesson plan for high school students. That would hopefully bridge that gap of, “I’m not an artist anymore,” or “I can’t draw,” and just build confidence through art-making and having it be low stakes in the way that the Songwriting Method is.
In terms of sustainability in the arts, I think that for me, that means having many avenues of exploration and not having a focus only on album cycles and songwriting. It can be so much more, and there isn’t really a blueprint for that either. There’s no one modeling what a sustainable arts career can look like, for me. So I’m kind of figuring it out as I go, but that feels inspiring to me, where I can be touring for a few months of the year and then also teaching and also doing some research.
Judging from how many songs you wrote for when i paint my masterpiece, it sounds like that low-stakes method can actually be more productive, in a good, deep sense.
Yeah. The idea that to be touring and on all the time is the goal can be reframed as, how can we have our artists feeling the best that they can? For everyone, that’s going to look a little bit different. For some people, that means touring. For others, it means songwriting a lot. And for others, it’s maybe spending more time in the studio and crafting things that way. There just isn’t that variety in models and what is possible.
When did you start feeling this disillusionment with the music industry?
I guess it started in 2019 when I was releasing my first album, and I was going on tour. I was really excited, at first, to have these opportunities and to have people helping me realize these plans. It kind of got away from me somehow, where I wanted to tour in a way that felt sustainable and was feasible for me, which meant probably doing solo shows, because the fees were so low. Even with the Canadian grant system, it was still very difficult to not be in such debt at the end of a tour. There was this European tour where I went as a three-piece and we had someone driving that there was no funding lined up for – it was all on me, and I was young, and I didn’t have any income, I was living at my parents’ place. I was fortunate enough to be able to go on this trip and also somehow now a bandleader with a small business mentality, which I felt like I didn’t sign up for. I just wanted to tour with friends.
It was just a bad energy overall that I look back on, and I don’t even know if there was a solution. I think the solution was just asking for help when you can’t do it. I always thought that I was the problem, that I couldn’t figure things out myself, that I just didn’t have the kind of intelligence to make it work. And now I see it as: that was an impossible situation. I didn’t have the tools. I wasn’t equipped, and that’s totally normal that I didn’t have those tools. I didn’t go to business school. I don’t know how to make a budget with four people. There’s so many things that I didn’t know how to do that I was figuring it out on the spot, and I was really doing the best that I could. I think it’s okay to say, “This is too big a project, and I need support. I need someone to help me rent a car in a country that I’ve never been to. I need someone to help me with the backline in a country where I don’t know how to communicate, and I need resources to be able to pay for all of these things.”
So then I kind of retreated, and then it was COVID. After a while, you forget about that, and you just want to be out on the road again with your friends, having those experiences.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity and length.
Ada Lea’s when i paint my masterpiece is out now via Saddle Creek.
