Ada Lea sends her postscript from the bush
Ada Lea has a band with her friends. It’s not a ‘real’ band because they don’t record or tour, and only one song has a name: “Big Boy Train” or something like that, she can’t quite remember. On the other hand, the band is very real.
“It’s honestly the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” says Lea, the arty indie can-do-it-all musician whose career has been affiliated with the Montréal scene since she debuted in 2019. “It’s just so nice. We’re six people, we go in, we have nothing prepared. We have no instruments that we’re married to, so we switch around, and for two or three hours we just improvise songs.”
Even the group’s name is fluid: sometimes it’s Fun Jam Band. “Recently it was Quebec Country, New Road – QCNR – because I think it has the same essence,” Lea explains.
She started QCNR (or FJB) with Brigitte Naggar, aka Common Holly, her most rock-solid industry ally. “We’ve both been burnt out around the same time,” Lea tells me. “Brigitte ended up going to become a therapist. I think being more intentional with her relationship to music, being really aware of the expectations of the industry and when they don’t align with her values – I’ve just learned so much from her over the years.”
Naggar was looped in to sing on “i’ve never been in love,” a track from Lea’s new EP, the end is a wave, which continues her masterful ability to consolidate all-caps emotions into lowercase capsules that are equal parts dancey, dreamy, and echoic of canonical folk legends. One year ago, she released her opus, or I guess her masterpiece: when i paint my masterpiece was 16 tracks whittled down from 200. But don’t mistake this EP for the offcuts. It’s more like a postscript or appendix, pieced together from multiple locations that have played starring roles in her songwriting journey.
“i’ve never been in love” comes from the church. We’re all the way back in the era music journos and songwriters try to avoid discussing: the pandemic. Lea’s friend decided to purchase and convert a church, then invited her to come hangout and maybe play around with some songs. “I didn’t think that any of the songs would be chosen,” Lea says. “I really had no expectations for the recording. It was just a fun thing to do. And ideally, that’s what all recording sessions would be like.”
The song is almost wincingly confessional, Naggar’s innocuous, floaty coo trailing after Lea’s heavy-lidded admission – namely, that she’s tried and tried but she’s never been in love. It’s quite a liberating thing to hear from a ‘grown up’, rather than a late-teens sad-boi emo project. Her voice sounds clogged – as though she’s been crying for hours – but in the best way.
“Only with you did it ever really stick,” she sings on the all-important chorus turnaround. In the context of recent life events, the “i’ve never been in love” admission is far less tragic. The EP’s other formative location was a cabin she moved into with her partner, three hours out into rural Quebec. Theirs is the sort of love where you buy each other field guides on eastern trees, study twigs, and trade notes on teaching: English for him, songwriting for her.
Out in the bush, as they worked debarking trees, they started using the phrase ‘cabby style’, which Lea drops several times with me. It’s become a whole genre, she says. “Doing something cabby style is like, you just go for it,” she elaborates. “Things are not going to be square, plumb, and true. They’re going to be a little bit off, and you just use the materials that you have.”
It’s a nice divergence from the rigidity of teaching, which has become increasingly challenging for Lea. “It just took up all of my psychic energy and physical energy. I couldn’t have fun with music,” she says. Cabby-styling several tracks on the EP, though, she sounds free and at ease, most acutely on “the evergreen, the birch,” which really feels like the EP’s beating heart, its mulchy highlight.
A well-loved acoustic slumps between a handful of open, suspended chords, every scrape of the strings audible like the zip of a tent. Eyes shut, you’re out in the sticks with her, as field recordings of waves teasing the lake shore and birds happily sparring percolate atop the soft, sunny rhythmic pulse below.
Another of Lea’s Quebec Country, New Road pals is involved on this one: MEGGO, aka Megan Ennenberg of the band FLEECE. Lea was endeared after hearing her solo work: “It was just so lush, all these harmonies, kind of Feist-y, watery, so watery. And I just thought it would be perfect for ‘the evergreen, the birch,’ so I asked her to sing.” The resulting harmonies coalesce with the rest of the reposed scene, and the sum is one of her most perfect songs, period.
Collaging recordings from multiple locations – the church, the cabin, a house in Ontario – for this EP might raise questions around cohesion. But Lea treats songs as sentient, conversing with the world and each other long after their recording. The whole idea behind the EP was: what are these songs going to say about each other, to each other?
She also believes that it’s unchanging environments that produce fatigue – tracking 16 songs in the same studio, for instance – and if something feels right to her then it will naturally fall into place for the listener too.
She tells me how she felt after masterpiece’s recording process. “I came back feeling like my ears were tired, and I couldn’t imagine how they would all fit on the same album because my ears were just getting tired of the same sound.” Indeed – no two songs are the same, so why should we demand identical birthing conditions?
Lea continues, explaining, “I needed to record some stuff for myself, do a DIY thing, go to a different studio for a day. And also I find that the moments we’re most excited by are the moments of surprise – the elements of surprise you can get sometimes with a different-sounding recording.”
The EP has its surprises, no doubt: the punchy indie rock pickup of “okay, ok, o.k.!”. The concrète drum track of “copycat,” created with a combination of slippers scraping the floor, a vintage sampler, and the stovepipe of a rocket mass heater – a heating system she and her church-owner friend built, which looks like something from a frontiersman’s lean-to.
And then there’s the Leonard Cohen cover tucked between a masterpiece-era song called “Phases” and the EP’s brief acoustic coda. The song in question is the plucked, poignant standard “Chelsea Hotel #2,” from Cohen’s 1974 record New Skin For The Old Ceremony. Lea nixes the brass swells, nails the spirit of closing-chapter reflection, and sings like it’s the middle of the night and the crew are packing down around her, unwavering, spotlit.
Lea was down in the Big Apple last November for a show at Nightclub 101 – “the only venue I play in NYC” – with Of Montreal’s Kevin Barnes. She crashed with a friend who grew up in Chelsea, not far from the fetishized hotel that once homed a laundry list of 60s and 70s counterculture gods. “I was walking with my friends, Tussie and Kaylee. We just kind of stumbled by. I was like, we have to go in. I couldn’t believe it. I became obsessed,” she remembers. “It was just so beautiful. I wanted to walk upstairs and take a look at the rooms. I felt so energized, like I was on some sort of chemical drug without being on anything.”
In other words, of course she had to cover the Cohen song. This one would’ve made sense as the closing track – a capstone cover is a classic move, and it has the required authority and depth – but that responsibility falls to “i miss the heavy shoulders of the trees.” It seems to call Lea back after her stray into city life, far away from home.
“I do have a lot of touring coming up, but I was experimenting with the idea of just being out here full time,” she says of cabby livin’. As her two worlds agree to disagree over the course of the EP, we’re reassured that Ada Lea will sound like Ada Lea wherever she roams – a forever songwriter for the bustle and the bush; the final wave or the first sign of sunrise.
the end is a wave releases 12 August, follow Ada Lea here.