Lisa B finds women waiting to speak inside familiar ’60s songs

Several of the women who populate classic 1960s songs are remembered primarily as objects of fascination. They arrive and disappear, resist explanation, change the mood of a room, and remain defined by the person singing about them. On ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse, Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) returns to some of those figures and asks what happens when they are granted greater interiority.

The Oakland singer, poet, and spoken-word artist has built her eighth album around well-known songs including “Ruby Tuesday,” “Windy,” and “Spooky.” The record arrives digitally August 21 and physically September 25. While the selections carry the melodic familiarity of oldies radio, Lisa’s versions are concerned with questions of agency, voice, freedom, and interpretation.

“Ruby Tuesday” becomes a character study rather than a distant farewell to an unknowable woman. “Spooky” retains the original song’s address to a mysterious female figure, then allows that figure to speak. “Windy” draws on Oya, the Yoruba goddess of wind, change, and powerful movement. Each decision shifts the balance between observer and observed.

That concern with perspective also informs the album’s new single, “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” featuring Lyrics Born. Here, the central figure is male, but Lisa remains interested in the expectations placed upon him. Traffic’s original asks the artist to soothe everyone else’s sadness. Lisa interprets him as a wounded healer, someone being asked to perform relief while carrying wounds of his own.



Lyrics Born steps into the role with an original verse that adds confidence, humor, and a language of repair. Lisa contributes a rap that distinguishes liberating imagination from political illusion. The guest appearance feels integral to the song’s dramatic structure, giving Mr. Fantasy an opportunity to answer the people calling for him.

The album began with a lighter conceptual device. Each covered title contains the letter Y, leading Lisa to call the record The Y-Verse. The letter became a way to invoke “why,” the shape of a peace symbol, and an alternate universe where familiar stories might unfold differently. That alternate universe is especially useful when revisiting songs that contain compelling characters with limited space to define themselves.

Lisa is well suited to this kind of reconstruction. Her foundation in poetry gives her an instinct for point of view, metaphor, and the pressure placed on individual words. Her years as a jazz and groove singer give her the ability to reshape meaning through phrasing. She can change a song’s emotional argument through language, rhythm, or the placement of a breath.

The production, led by engineers D-Wiz and James Gardiner with arrangements from Lisa and Ben Flint, moves across soul-jazz, funk, Latin percussion, hip-hop, folk, rock, and spoken word. The diversity of the arrangements helps each character occupy a distinct musical space instead of turning the album into a uniform set of covers.

Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein)’s treatment of these songs is respectful, but respect does not require passivity. ’60s Magic Now! listens for the voices that earlier versions left at the edges and invites them toward the center. In doing so, the record shows how familiar songs can change when the people inside them are finally allowed to respond.