ARCHIVE: Ada Lea | Plus a New Release
Revisiting our Issue 16 conversation with Ada Lea, as she lets old fragments and new songs sit unresolved on her latest EP, "the end is a wave".
Ada Lea has always worked in prolific fragments: two hundred songs whittled into an album, a decade of half-finished tapes waiting for their moment in the record store sun. On the end is a wave, out today via Next Door Records, the Montreal musician born Alexandra permits these fragments to nest beside each other unresolved. “For this EP, I wanted to combine songs that were cut from when i paint my masterpiece, as well as the ones I’d recorded a million years ago when I was just a child,” says Levy. “It was to test their fragility. How would they behave next to the other? The old and the new? The brave and the haunted? The impression and the finely sculpted.”
The seven-song EP indeeds pulls songs cut from last year’s sprawling LP, and it seems less a tidy follow-up than a test of what survives contact. As we discovered in our Issue 16 interview with Levy, she has spent the years since her Polaris-nominated one hand on the steering wheel the other sewing a garden widening what “artist” means for her, teaching songwriting at a community group built on the same instinct this EP runs on. Check out this latest release and revisit our archival conversation with Ada Lea — listen here.
