Ada Lea Finds Freedom in the Framework

I also have to ask—what did you think of the Bob Dylan biopic?

I really liked it. I could imagine Timothée [Chalamet] put so much work in that I would say they should keep doing them.

Yeah, just go through his whole career.

Let’s see it. It seems like Timmy is committed to the task. So I think there should be. I would go see all of them, if that existed. I think they should work towards that and it should be a series like that.

Like the four Beatles ones.

That’s just too long. Too much.

I wanted to talk a little about your place in, I guess academia, but more just education. You’ve been a student in one way, and a teacher in another. Did that change your perspectives on any of your creative processes?

With teaching, I feel like I’m facilitating more than anything. I don’t adhere to “The professor knows all,” and that the students must sit there and receive the information. All of the students have very valid experiences and explorations with their own practices and songwriting that they’ve done in the past. So I’m creating a space where they can share that information and that experience, to the class and to each other. It feels like learning and sharing all together. I was also thinking about what I would want if I were taking a songwriting class, if I were at an earlier stage in creation and development. I’m just constantly learning new things. And I will be starting an MA in Art Education in the fall.

Oh, wow. That’s awesome!

Yeah, I’m just fascinated by how people create and also why people don’t make things. It feels like it can be the most natural thing. I’d like to do more research on how to incorporate it into our daily lives.

You’ve been talking a lot in other interviews about engaging more with the process of songwriting, and even holding yourself to a pretty rigid writing schedule. Did you go to formal music school at some point?

Yeah, not classical music, but I got a full scholarship to study at the New School for jazz.

So then do you feel like the discipline and rigor of a college music program instilled that sort of creative structure in you?

Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe it’s something in my chart too, where I do feel creative within boundaries, and I think a lot of people do. So experimenting with games and taking the heaviness out of the making, not putting so much pressure on yourself. What if you have to write a song every third day? What if the song is just a throwaway song? What are you doing the song for? What are you writing the song for? It becomes about something else. You’re not writing a song for it to sound a certain way. You’re writing it to connect to what’s happening around you or to your friends and other community members that are participating in that process. So it becomes art as art for art’s sake. And that’s not interesting to the industry, because you can’t sell that. I think that’s also why I’m most interested in it: what can we be doing? How can we refocus the attention to the things that maybe are counterculture? As my friend Valerie says, “Making art is counterculture.” There’s nobody saying, “This is what you should be doing and this is the best way to spend your time.” So it’s an act of small rebellion, I think.

Yeah, absolutely. I did also want to get into your thoughts on the industry in general. It’s refreshing to hear you be very, like, “This is a rebellion against that.” The state of it today, especially being an independent musician, the expectation of self-promotion and things like that—I know there were some management changes between your last two albums, so I wanted to hear about that reset and, not that it was ever centered, but decentering the business of it all.

Yeah, I could talk about this, and I do talk about it to anybody who will listen to me, but yeah, I’m not the best salesperson. An astrologer told me this. My Mars is not the strongest essence of me, and it makes it so that I’m not a good salesperson. And if we’re thinking about my personal strengths, it is to create random things and to experience the joy in that. I think the system is so messed up, and it’s not one person’s fault. It really is just the whole system that is so backwards, and things are moving so quickly that we don’t really have time to catch up. Anyone who’s creating the art has the short end of the stick and their jobs are the most unstable. As you move further and further away from the musicians doing the labor, you’re going to see more stability in jobs. Touring is really difficult. It’s really expensive. The costs land on the musician, and the organizational aspects land on the musician. Even when you do have a manager, that’s been my experience at least. I’m the one booking everything and having to front the cost. And it is really scary to have a credit card bill that you know you can’t really pay. And you’re like, “How does this make sense?”

Yeah. “Why is it me doing this?”

Yeah, I didn’t sign up for it. I’m not good at this. But the thing I did sign up for, which I love to do, is being with my friends, meeting new people, going to shows, playing shows, listening to other bands, listening to other songwriters perform their songs. That is so special. People are just kind of banking on the fact that they know that that’s hard to give up, and I don’t want to turn my back on all of that. So I’m just trying to find a way for it to make more sense for me, where I will have these shows coming up in the fall and some happening in the UK next week, but I’ve known about them for a really long time, so I’ve been able to prepare, been able to apply for grants, slowly save up from other shows, make a plan, and not have it feel so chaotic. I think there’s that level of chaos that’s just unsettling for me.

And it’s kind of fueled by that. It’s what keeps it going. I wanted to talk about some of the other singles that we haven’t gotten to yet. For “something in the wind,” obviously you learned to figure skate for the video. Tell me about the Nathan Fielder of it all, using him as a point of inspiration.

First of all, I think he’s so tapped into some sort of weirdness that I really admire—and going through with an idea to the very end. The execution of it is just, I find it really inspiring. He’s also extremely entertaining. So I will come clean about this, because I had figure skated as a kid. I’d tried to put this emotional weight that I wasn’t feeling at that very moment at that time [onto the video]. I think there’s a natural desire for an artwork or a project to carry this heavy emotional weight for it to be valid and worthwhile. But I really don’t think that that’s true. The work that’s connected with me in the past hasn’t been like that. And in fact, I usually don’t want to know about the behind-the-scenes story. I think Nathan Fielder inspired that in me, where he’s not trying to make things feel heavier than they are.

And then with “midnight magic,” obviously when you released the song, you shared a very personal experience from while you were recording. And in the video you kind of take that and spin it around in a way. Do you feel like that was healing in any way?

I do think that the first step in processing something is having it be a literal interpretation. And then as you’re deeper into the grief and the processing and integrating it into your life, then you do need to detach yourself from—well, personally, I needed to detach myself from how emotionally difficult it was to have a second trimester [pregnancy] loss last year. So that was my way of dealing with it, where it could be a whimsical, surreal-feeling video that would be after my paintings. And yeah, I felt so energized in that process. It didn’t feel heavy whatsoever. I was working with my friend Valerie that I mentioned, her artist name is Clarice Hana. The whole thing just went so quickly. It was intuition, creating, going. We didn’t have much time either. You can do a lot with not very much. I’ve always thought that, and it’s still true.

Do you feel like that intuition has always been there, or do you think you’ve gotten more in touch with it as you keep creating?

I think I’m learning to trust my intuition more. Having a good creative practice means that you’re so connected to what the work or the song needs. You never know how you’re integrating things. And any conversation you have with someone, any image you see, as you’re working on a new piece, you are immersed in it, you’re away from the screen, you’re away from your thoughts. It’s a meditative practice that is really special.

Looking at your lyrics as they’re written out, a lot of them do kind of read like a poem. Like “something in the wind,” the repetition of “love is.” I know some people feel like poetry and songwriting are two separate things. Do you feel like that, or do you feel like it’s a little bit more fluid?

I think it was Sarah Burgoyne, a poet in Montréal, who said song lyrics could make a really bad poem, but in the song, they’re perfect. And I think when you’re pairing music with words, you have so much more flexibility. I would like to maybe explore that a little bit more in the future.

Do you feel like you’re accessing different versions of yourself when you’re switching between mediums? How do you feel like they relate to each other?

I don’t feel like I’m a different person. I think I’m the same person, but it’s different parts of myself. When I’m painting, I’m in the materials. I’m not thinking too much. I rarely plan. Maybe I’ll plan out a painting with a very quick sketch, but then it really is in actually moving the page around that new ideas come. And I think that’s the same with music. I can have an idea of what I want to write, and then as I’m writing it, that idea is slowly becoming clearer. Usually the times I would say that I’m most excited about something is when I didn’t think it would go in a certain direction, and then it just surprises me.

You get pretty narrative in the lyrics, like on “diner”—recounting scenes, telling a full story set to song. What’s your process in looking back at your own life and creating stories and narratives out of moments or memories?

The nice thing about painting and songwriting is that there’s the temporal difference, which is when you’re looking at a painting, you’re taking the whole thing in at once. With a song, as it goes on you, you’re learning about it. So I love that kind of difference. Also playing with those two things: how can songs be more paintings and more these small flashes of images that maybe narratively don’t make sense? I think stories are so natural, they come naturally to us. For me, I find it difficult verbally to communicate stories. My mom is a really bad storyteller, and you’ve probably seen those videos of a guy impersonating his mom telling him a story, and it’s like all the information that you would not need. I feel like I’ve inherited that gene, but I do think with songs and also paintings that I feel more comfortable in a storytelling capacity.

Your use of synth on this record is very deliberate and kind of restrained, and when it comes in, it makes it hit harder or feel otherworldly because of the lived-in studio feel. How do you feel like your use of synth has changed throughout your albums?

Compared to the first album and second album, which was so—I think what happens is because it isn’t part of the rhythm section, it’s going to naturally be an overdub. So for my first and second album, it was really overdub-heavy. For this album, it was recorded as a four-piece with me, Tasy [Hudson] on drums, Summer [Kodama] on bass, and Chris [Hauer] on guitar, and I was also on guitar and singing. Anything synths that you hear are overdubs. And I think why it’s so sparse on the album is because I really wanted to be mindful of not having too many overdubs and not losing the live thread. I think having a four-piece, we did synth as a nice addition, but it’s not the glue, necessarily.

“everything under the sun” is a personal favorite of mine. I love the bright acoustics in the chorus. The tone reminds me of “Here Comes the Sun.” How did that one come together?

Lyrically, before I met my current and forever partner, Thomas, I was seeing someone who was also courting someone else in the community. We didn’t know about each other at the time. That song was inspired by that secrecy and confusion, mixed with how I held her to a high regard, which made it very conflicting and confusing for me. It took me a while to process it and not feel less than. Finally, her and I were able to speak, and it really felt like, I don’t know if you’ve read My Brilliant Friend or the Neapolitan Quartet, but it’s a big Lela and Nu moment for me where it felt like we could acknowledge what had happened, and it really wasn’t about either of us at all.

Watch Ada Lea’s Paste Session from 2019 below.