There isn’t a lot of piano on the new Ada Lea album, when i paint my masterpiece, but that is the instrument that Alexandra Levy wants to talk about as she gets ready to put out her third album under her stage moniker.
Like her 2021 Polaris long-listed sophomore album one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden, her latest long-player is lushly textured, warm, and intimate. The 16-track collection is simultaneously just a little grand in scope while also feeling deeply grounded by its hand-hewn production and Levy’s gentle voice. Buoyed by Levy’s creative reset, which was driven by a disenchantment with industry expectations, when i paint my masterpiece is vibrant with the self-assured energy of someone who’s managed to rediscover what they love about making music. Part of the process was a turn to teaching, which, along with studying painting and poetry, further purified her songwriting approach.
During the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic, Levy was renting a cabin in the woods, and found an organ at a garage sale down the street.
“I liked playing it—it was better than nothing,” she says over the phone from her home in Montreal. “But I really just wanted to have a piano.”
When she moved into her apartment, she asked her landlord whether he’d mind if she had a piano, and he said it was fine as long as she didn’t play it before 10 am or after 10 pm, and when she moves out, she has to take it with her. She started asking around, and found a company called Moventune in town.
“They’re ex-boxers,” she says. “I went to the warehouse, and they have framed press clippings of their wins and stuff. And they have the boxer ears too. He wanted to show me his cauliflower ears. They have hundreds of pianos there and most of them are free. You just have to pay for the move.”
She really wanted to find one she loved for free, but the champion turned out to be a Henry Herbert spinet in the $100 section with bass notes that sounded especially full. It also came with an old piano bench. But when they moved the piano in, she opted against getting coasters which, at $25 a pop, sounded just a little like a scam to her. But right after they left, she noticed the piano was hanging over the door frame a little too much, and as she attempted to move it sans coasters, a leg broke.
The day before she went in to record when i paint my masterpiece, there was a big snowstorm. Unable to leave the apartment, she wound up changing most of the lyrics to “i want it all,” fine-tuning the song on the piano. Despite her best attempts at repair, it’s still a little wonky.
“I love this piano,” she says. “It’s the reason I can write songs here at the apartment. I repaired the leg a little bit. I put some books under the leg and propped it up. You’re supposed to unscrew the leg and put a clamp on with some wood glue, and wrap it with a bicycle tire. I did all of that, but I was scared to remove the leg from the piano. Someone came to tune the piano, and they said I could take the leg off, but I was sure it would just fall through the floor and crush the landlord or something.”
“I think the next album will be pretty much fully piano,” she adds. “I just do all my writing on the piano now.”
How were you first introduced to piano?
I had a piano growing up at my family’s place. It was really out of tune and the middle C was broken. So I didn’t really play it too much. I would just play around. But I only started really playing music in CEGEP right after high school. I went to Vanier, and we had a mandatory piano class, and we would all have headphones. We all had our electronic pianos with the headphones plugged in, and we were all hammering away. That’s how I was introduced to it. I hated that class. We had to basically only play scales. I think I almost failed. But I’d always been curious about it. And then when I moved into my new apartment in Montreal in 2021, my dream was to have a piano in the apartment, so that was phase two.
What drew you to it originally and what draws you to it now?
I started on bass, that was my first instrument. And I was drawn to the piano because everything is just right there in front of you. You don’t need an amp, you don’t need very much. You just kind of need the big piano. Yeah, so I like that aspect, and I had found a Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier book on the sidewalk. And my goal was to learn one piece from that. And yeah—I don’t know why, but it just feels like this magical thing. You can do so much with the piano. I’ve never had a good practice routine or work ethic with it, it has to happen in a more organic way. Like, I didn’t do well with the scales class, and even learning the Bach piece was really difficult. So I’ve just come at it on my own terms.
Do you notice a difference in your songwriting when you’re using piano versus guitar?
With piano, it’s all there in front of me and I can just follow the melodies more easily. I can go slowly and just kind of figure it out in my right hand. I would say the reason I haven’t had many piano songs is because I’m kind of tied to the guitar, and never thought that I could record piano, even on an album. For my last album, I had that song “partner,” and we got someone else to play that, and it took so long to teach them the piano part. There was just a block in my head where I was like, “I can’t play piano—even though I’m writing these songs on piano, I think I need someone else to play it.” I think now having access to a piano for 12 hours of the day, I can allow myself—even if I’m not an expert, I can still play a little bit, and I’m slowly getting better. So that’s been the journey of the songwriting, slowly being like, “well, I can figure something out.” With “midnight magic,” I was studying Judee Sill’s songwriting, and slowly going through the chorus and her melodies, and that’s how I wrote “midnight magic.” And it’s almost like I don’t even know how I wrote it, because I was trying to learn inversions at the same time as I was playing the song. As you learn a new aspect of harmony, or as I learn a new aspect of playing piano, I can put it to a song right away. So it’s just an easy translation that I can do from one thing to another that I can’t do with guitar. I love playing guitar, and I love single lines—solos, little hooks and stuff. And I love finger-picking things too. But there’s something that I can do on the piano that I can’t do on the guitar. Maybe it’s just splitting right and left hand.
That song “midnight magic” vividly reminded me of Judee Sill’s music earlier today, and also a favourite song of mine on Dylan’s New Morning called “Sign On the Window.” They share something intimate and light in their sound and movements.
I do this thing called the songwriting method. Me and some friends, we write a song every three days in one month. And my partner and I come up with the prompts together. The prompt for that song was to write a song “in the style of.” I’ve always been curious about Judee Sill. I love Joanna Sternberg. I went to school with them, too. We were both in school for bass, and Jo was just someone who was so talented at pretty much every instrument. I remember a few years ago watching a video of them playing “Jesus Was a Crossmaker,” I think, on the piano. Just a random video they took in their basement. And I just felt so inspired or in awe of their piano abilities, and I wanted to do that same level, maybe, of research that they were doing. But I can’t play the same way they can, obviously. So Judee was kind of this big question mark in my mind: “What is she doing? Why are the melodies so weird? What’s going on harmonically?” So I spent the three days checking her out, transcribing small moments, almost making a lexicon, too, of her vocabulary. And it started off as this exercise, but then I loved the song that came out of it. I just kept working on it and I felt like that song didn’t really have a place, either. It was the only piano song, but I needed to go with the gut and trust that it would find its place.
