A gust of wind can signal arrival, disruption, or a change in direction. Lisa B draws on all three possibilities in “Windy”, the latest focus track from her newly released album, ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse. Her version of The Association’s 1967 single becomes the clearest entry point into a record built around transformation.
Before the familiar song begins, Lisa links Windy to Oya, the Yoruba wind goddess and orisha. That brief prelude shifts the character away from the charmingly unknowable woman of the original and toward an older, larger vision of feminine force. Wind becomes an agent of power and change rather than a decorative image.
The music then enters a Latin pop-soul-jazz setting shaped by keyboards, bass, drums, percussion, and layered background vocals. Ben Flint, Aaron Germain, Jeff Marrs, Brent Sunderland, and Sandy Cressman give the track its ensemble character, while Lisa’s arrangement balances the song’s durable hook with a different rhythmic identity. The official music video accompanies the release.
“Windy” also completes a loose sequence of magical or elusive figures found across the album. Spooky, Mr. Fantasy, Ruby Tuesday, and Windy each represent a particular kind of freedom, yet Lisa avoids treating them as symbols with fixed meanings. Her added spoken passages and poetic raps allow those characters to evolve, respond, and take up additional space.
That approach makes ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse feel closer to a collection of creative readings than a conventional covers album. Lisa considers what each song has carried through the decades and what may have gone unheard within it. Her changes arise from those questions, whether she is giving the woman in “Spooky” a voice or exploring Ruby Tuesday as a full character.
The record’s historical center is 1967, the year in which every selection except “The Times They Are A-Changin’” first appeared. That narrow span captures an unusually fertile period of genre mixing, political engagement, freeform radio, psychedelic experimentation, and pop idealism. Lisa hears an unresolved relationship between personal liberation and collective action running through that music.
Her version of “Dear Mr. Fantasy”, featuring Lyrics Born, demonstrates how comfortably the album crosses eras and forms. Lyrics Born’s original verse places hip-hop inside Traffic’s composition, while the Oakland recording session grounds the track in a living Bay Area musical lineage.
The album’s title gives its interpretive strategy a playful container. Each cover includes a Y in its title, but the Y also becomes a question and a visual echo of the peace sign. The “verse” is both musical language and an alternate universe, one in which songs listeners may know by heart can yield unfamiliar ideas.
Released digitally today, August 21, ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse presents its revisionist instincts in a concise seven-track form. A physical edition will arrive September 25, followed by an October 3 performance at The Back Room in Berkeley. “Windy” may arrive as the latest focus track, but its movement, openness, and appetite for change run through the album as a whole.
