The way we talk about gender in the music business hasn’t seemed to progress at all over time. “Female-fronted” is still the way bands get pitched to me from publicists, while “all-female” is too frequently cited as something of a gimmick to set a typical rock act apart “Woman Here” is practically what these exploitational press releases promise, though Ada Lea’s new single “woman, here” is the quiet inverse to this declaration, a modest, mildly wonky guitar-driven number in which the songwriter recognizes in the chorus that “[she] can’t be a woman here” (nor “over there”)—whether she’s referring to her industry or anywhere else seems irrelevant.
Less than a year after the release of her highly-acclaimed debut album, “what we say in private”, Montreal, Quebec-based musician Alexandra Levy – who records and performs as Ada Lea – returns in early 2020 with a new four-song EP which acts as a bridge between what’s come before and where she means to go next.
A mix of both the old and new, the “woman, here” EP takes its name from a brand new composition recorded recently in LA with Marshall Vore ( Phoebe Bridgers, Better Oblivion Community Center). Perhaps her most direct work to-date, the new song offers a beautiful glimpse into the bold new chapter of Ada Lea. “I went to LA and recorded the song in a day and a half with Marshall,” Levy says of the song. “The writing and recording of this song happened like magic.”
Aside from the title-track, which is shared here alongside a raw and captivating demo version, the woman, here EP also offers two previously-unheard recordings from the what we say in private sessions, in the form of the reflective and melancholy ‘perfect world’, and the sparse and dream-like ‘jade’, which was inspired by a John Updike short story.
A fascinating glimpse behind the curtain, Levy says that the new EP should be seen as being “like a second cousin” to what we say in private. “We included the songs that we still felt close to,” she explains, “but didn’t seem to have a place on the album.”
Ada Lea – “woman, here” from the EP woman, here, Out 27/03/2020
The Fat Angel Sings 