The most revealing moments on Lisa B’s ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse often occur when a familiar song encounters a voice that its original version did not contain. Lisa uses spoken interjections, new poetic passages, and an original guest rap to create exchanges across time. Her eighth album, digitally available today, is consequently less concerned with faithful replication than with response.
That responsive quality suits an artist whose career has moved among singing, poetry, spoken word, jazz, funk, electronica, hip-hop, and literary performance. Lisa does not separate those disciplines when approaching the material. They become tools for listening closely to what a song says, whose perspective dominates it, and where another point of view might enter.
“Spooky” offers a particularly direct example. The song retains its address to an enigmatic woman, then allows that woman to speak. “Ruby Tuesday” receives a similarly character-driven treatment. Rather than leaving its title figure at a romantic distance, Lisa considers her interiority and the autonomy suggested by her refusal to be pinned down.
The album’s latest focus track, “Windy”, expands that process further. Lisa introduces The Association’s 1967 character through Oya, the Yoruba goddess and orisha connected with wind. The association lends Windy a sense of transformation, volatility, and feminine power that was latent rather than explicit in the original hit.
Once the prelude ends, the arrangement shifts into a bright Latin pop-soul-jazz groove. Background vocalist Sandy Cressman, keyboardist Ben Flint, bassist Aaron Germain, drummer Jeff Marrs, and percussionist Brent Sunderland support a version designed around rhythm and motion. Lisa produced and arranged the recording, which was tracked at 2200 Studios in Sausalito with overdubs completed at Santo Recording in Oakland. The official video is also available now.
“Dear Mr. Fantasy” builds its dialogue through a guest. Lyrics Born takes on the title role in an original rap, complicating the demand that an entertainer relieve everyone else’s sadness. His presence shifts the song from a plea directed at a distant figure into an exchange about creativity, emotional labor, and recovery.
The collaboration carries a second conversation beneath the first. Lyrics Born recorded his appearance at Pajama Studios in Oakland, where much of Latyrx’s debut was created. Engineer Jim Gardiner, who contributed to that earlier record, is part of Lisa’s own recording history as well. The session places the revisin of a 1967 song inside several overlapping chapters of Bay Area music.
The track list moves between those individual figures and broader collective appeals. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” and “Everybody Get Together” address social participation in markedly different ways, while Lisa’s original “’60s Magic Now!” brings the record into the present through a voice-and-drums format with Jeff Marrs.
Its Y-Verse title is both organizing principle and invitation. Every cover has a Y in its name, but the letter also raises the question “why?” and resembles the branching shape of a peace sign. Lisa uses the idea to construct a neighboring musical universe where songs can speak differently without losing contact with their origins.
’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse receives its physical release on September 25, one month after today’s digital arrival. Lisa will perform at The Back Room in Berkeley on October 3. Those dates give the album a path forward, but its most interesting movement happens internally, whenever an old lyric makes space for a new reply.