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Although its source material comes largely from 1967, ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse has a distinctly Bay Area identity. Lisa B recorded the album with musicians and engineers whose experience reaches across jazz, hip-hop, R&B, alternative music, and spoken word, giving these well-known compositions a local context that extends far beyond their original decade.
The Oakland singer, poet, and intuitive reader has spent seven previous albums moving among genres without treating their boundaries as fixed. Her eighth applies that openness to a tightly connected program of 1960s songs, along with one new original. The album has arrived on digital, and will receive a physical release on September 25th.
Its most explicit hip-hop connection arrives through “Dear Mr. Fantasy.” Bay Area mainstay Lyrics Born contributes an original rap that reconsiders Traffic’s fantastical entertainer as a figure capable of imagination and repair. His verse adds a contemporary perspective while fitting the song’s long-standing request for relief from gloom.
The recording also returns Lyrics Born to Oakland’s Pajama Studios, a location closely tied to Latyrx’s debut, The Album. James Gardiner, who worked on that record, participates in Lisa’s project as an engineer. That continuity gives the collaboration a subtle historical weight: one strand of Bay Area hip-hop history is being used to revisit British psychedelia from an American present.
“Windy,” the album’s current focus track, reveals another side of the ensemble. Ben Flint’s keyboards, Aaron Germain’s bass, Jeff Marrs’ drums, Brent Sunderland’s percussion, and Sandy Cressman’s background vocals shape a Latin pop-soul-jazz interpretation of The Association’s hit. The arrangement is inviting and mobile, matching the title character’s association with freedom.
Lisa begins the performance with a poetic connection between “Windy” and Oya, the Yoruba wind goddess and orisha. That introduction changes the scale of the song. A figure associated with carefree independence becomes linked to transformation, mystery, and feminine force.
Dale “D-Wiz” Everingham, whose engineering work spans Bay Area hip-hop, R&B, and alternative music, shares the album’s engineering duties with Gardiner. Lisa and Ben Flint supply the expressive arrangements. Their collective experience helps explain why the album’s stylistic shifts feel connected rather than assembled from unrelated genre exercises.
The repertoire creates its own map of 1967, moving through Traffic, The Rolling Stones, Classics IV, The Association, and the Youngbloods, with Bob Dylan’s 1964 “The Times They Are A-Changin’” serving as the lone exception. Lisa’s original title track, a vocal rap-drum duet with Marrs, provides a contemporary response to that history.
There is a geographical as well as musical logic to the album. San Francisco and the greater Bay Area played a defining role in the counterculture Lisa is revisiting, yet the project comes from present-day Oakland and Sausalito studios rather than an imagined Summer of Love. It hears the earlier period through musicians shaped by everything that followed.
That makes ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse an intergenerational record in practical terms. The album connects 1960s pop and political ideals with later Bay Area developments in jazz, hip-hop, funk, and spoken word. Lisa will continue that local conversation with an October 3rd performance at Berkeley’s The Back Room.
