Ada Lea’s when i paint my masterpiece Is a Ramshackle Opus
The Montreal singer-songwriter’s third album is an eclectic, homespun reappraisal of what it means to be an artist.

The first time I ever heard Ada Lea’s sophomore album, 2021’s one hand on the steering wheel, the other sewing a garden, I was on an Amtrak train from Pittsburgh to Cleveland in the dead of night. Somewhere around 2 AM, I drifted in and out of a weak sleep, my body crumpled against the window of a train car crawling slowly across Ohio, the air freezing with air conditioning. Barely dreaming, I absorbed bits and pieces of each song in florid, dizzying bursts. When I went back to it the next morning, as rested as one can be in such a state, I found it still had the same hypnagogic charms. Since then, the album has become one I bring up whenever friends and I are going to bat for our personal undersung favorites, championing the lush production, clear vision, and inimitable vocal delivery.
In the intervening years, I have wondered how and when Alexandra Levy, the Montreal-based singer-songwriter behind Ada Lea, might follow up such a record. It would seem Levy was wondering the same. Levy fought some internal battles about what it means to be an artist in the years since. Extensive touring led to burnout, and the music industry’s relentless pace left her in need of a new direction. Nevertheless, Levy has returned with an opus as idiosyncratic as she is. On her third album, when i paint my masterpiece, she is unencumbered by any rigid structure, musical or otherwise. While the seamless sequencing and glossy production are no longer factors, something more admirably ramshackle has replaced them. In a way that calls to mind Mitski’s Be The Cowboy, to listen to when i paint my masterpiece from front to back is to be left guessing what will happen next. Songs vary greatly in length, instrumentation, fidelity, and stakes. It makes for a bumpy, but thrilling ride.
Levy is also a visual artist, and since she is already implicitly comparing her songwriting to her other medium of choice with the album’s title, so too shall I. If I saw one hand on the steering wheel… as a massive oil painting hung on the wall of a small museum, I see when i paint my masterpiece as a peek into an artist’s sketchbook. Flipping through, some moments feel endearingly slight, rough outlines somehow underlining the other songs by existing in their understated forms. The opener “death phase of 2024 (rainlight),” is a 49-second-long instrumental passage of strumming guitar that seems to grasp out for something like a morning glory vine does a trellis. On “moon blossom,” a comparatively lo-fi number, Levy’s singular voice runs free and unaffected. Over faint finger picking, she sounds occasionally like Regina Spektor, her voice cracking slightly. The rawness of it all distracts from how funny it is, with Levy singing about losing her hat to the wind.