Ada Lea
when i paint my masterpiece
SADDLE CREEK
Canadian songwriter Ada Lea isn’t searching for an answer on her third album when i paint my masterpiece, but rather embracing ambiguity. “I was looking for a clue / A sign pointing to you / Singing life is for living not death in conclusion,” she sings brightly over winding guitar and subtle percussive pattering on “everything under the sun.” That openness might seem anxiety-inducing in a world driven by reward systems—social media likes, performance reviews, influencer status—but Lea transforms that uncertainty into something liberating. She invites us to linger in the moment where nothing is owed.
The album’s meandering folk songs greet us like old friends. They’re open-hearted and tend to color outside the lines led by a sense of pure curiosity. It’s the sound of a lovingly overgrown backyard garden—wild, lush, alive—aided by the sense that the record doesn’t feel overly curated or produced. Some mixes sound softer than others, but it all adds to the sense of imperfection as perfection. From afar, it’s a rich ecosystem of arty folk-rock, where playfully stumbling vocal lines are like tendrils of ivy and the harmonica flits in and out like a squirrel darting through trees.
when i paint my masterpiece is an antidote to hopelessness. These songs are raftered by the comforting feeling that no matter what happens, everything is going to be OK. “Because I am no more or no less than you / You are no more and no less than me,” Lea sings with a haloed tone on the aforementioned mid-album cut “everything under the sun” with a disarmingly sincere delivery. The lyrics shift between bold observations and casual musings, celebrating the quiet wonder of simply being alive.
Elsewhere, her humor shines through on “bob dylan’s 115th haircut,” where she boldly claims that even the legendary songwriter couldn’t match her own genius. “Bob Dylan couldn’t have written this song / Not even if he wanted to / Not even just for fun,” she sings. It’s tongue-in-cheek, but Lea’s point lands: each person's creative journey is valid and incomparable. “I feel kind of bad, kind of lucky, too / With only one of me, one of you,” she sings at the end of the song.
In a recent interview, Lea makes clear the importance of protecting her creative joy amid the relentless churn of the music industry. “I do love to play music, and I love to perform, and I love to write songs, and I love to be creative. And I don’t need much in return,” she said. That awareness of impermanence and the gratitude it breeds is baked into her music, and it’s precisely what gives when i paint my masterpiece its lasting resonance.
