“The hand knows best,” the painter Margaux Williamson says. “A shape produces itself, where I go toward what is intuitive, rather than logical.” The shapely, intuitive songs that comprise Ada Lea's third album, when i paint my masterpiece, are surprising, imagistic, tactile. Alexandra Levy holds her guitar against the backdrop of a sea of her paintings on the album cover and it’s tempting to ask: is painting a metaphor here, for music or life? No! She resists tidy metaphors. She’s a master of this kind of thorny lowercase title that germinates and grows with time. In a real, profound way, music and painting go hand-in-hand as she unveils a new style of subversion and surrealism inspired by her transdisciplinarity.

After years of touring, Alexandra Levy (Ada Lea) felt a need for community and renewal. when i paint my masterpiece was largely recorded in rural Ontario in the waning weeks of 2023, and its harmonies and arrangements link back to a golden era of Canadian folk music. The band recorded the album largely live and acoustic in one room, off the grid in both senses, loose but in control and without a click in sight.

The album lives and breathes, produced with Here We Go Magic’s Luke Temple, who has lent his gently psychedelic sensibility to albums by artists like Adrianne Lenker and Hand Habits.

By the end of these sixteen songs, it’s clear: when i paint my masterpiece isn’t chasing perfection, it’s comfortable in the magic of being. These songs are alive with poetic specificity and a wide-open heart—deeply felt, often strange, and always reaching. There’s an optimistic and plainspoken wisdom in the lyrics—which builds on Ada Lea’s singular songwriting style of surprising harmonic and melodic turns—now with a newly rich, organic sound that rewards slow listening.