Long before Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) became a singer, poet, spoken-word artist, and intuitive reader, she was a child in a house filled with jazz records, poetry books, political conviction, and visiting musicians.
Her father was an electronics engineer, then an attorney, then a jazz photographer who published his first book late in life. Her mother wrote poetry. Jackie McLean was a family friend. Elvin Jones once held Lisa on his lap at a cocktail party. Cecil Taylor came over and, too shy to ask directly, had her father ask the young piano student if she would play Beethoven for him. Lisa was too shy to say yes.
Before she had language for it, she was being taught that a life in art could take many forms, and that the borders between those forms were mostly just suggestions. “I had a model that you could do multiple things well,” she says now. “My family validated art.” They also validated nonconformity. Her parents were progressive New York Jews who found themselves, briefly and somewhat improbably, in Orange County before returning east, then moving the family to Northern California. By the time Lisa was growing up in Cupertino and spending time among the Santa Cruz redwoods, she had absorbed a family value that would become central to her work: it was good to stand up for justice, good to question the culture around you, good to follow the strange current that made you feel alive.
Poetry came first. Lisa studied creative writing at UC Santa Cruz, earned a master’s degree at San Francisco State, co-founded the literary magazine Five Fingers Review, and her first full-length collection, The Transparent Body, was published by Wesleyan University Press. She was part of the Bay Area literary and performance art scenes of the ’80s and ’90s, giving readings in bookstores and alternative spaces where she began to recognize a different skill emerging inside the literary one.
“The inner performer in me really came out,” she says. “I sort of tricked myself into starting to sing by saying, ‘This is going to help my poetry reading voice.’”
Standing alone with poems had taught her how to hold a room, how to listen to silence, how to use breath and timing. Soon she was studying jazz and groove singing, gigging in San Francisco, and writing songs with Latin jazz musician Wayne Wallace. What began as a way to strengthen her voice as a poet became a second artistic life.
Or maybe it had always been the same life. “I grew up singing and dancing around the house to everything from R&B to jazz to musical theater,” Lisa says. “But I didn’t think I had the potential to do it as a career.” Poetry gave her permission. Singing gave artistic expression a body.
That body has always mattered to Lisa’s work. Jazz offered something poetry on the page could not fully hold: rhythm as physical presence, improvisation as conversation, the charged exchange between players, the room, and the moment. Her influences point toward artists who understood that language and sound could be inseparable: Carmen McRae, John Coltrane, Sheila Jordan, Jeanne Lee, Lambert, Hendricks & Ross, Gil Scott-Heron, Jill Scott, Aretha Franklin, Allen Ginsberg, and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, whose “great Black music, ancient to the future” approach showed her that performance could include costume, poetry, theater, politics, freedom, and groove in the same breath.
Across seven albums before the new one, Lisa B has built a body of work that moves through jazz, soul, funk, hip-hop, electronica, spoken word, and literary songcraft without treating any of those languages as decoration. Critics have called her “a true American original,” “a pliable, expressive voice dipped in blue,” and “one of the most daring and deft performers” working across jazz, hip-hop, soul, spoken word, and popular music. Yet her artistry has always been rooted in craft. She is clear-eyed about the labor behind it. “I wasn’t someone who woke up like Bobby McFerrin with this incredible voice,” she says. “I worked my butt off to develop the voice that I have.”
Her parallel work as a professional psychic and intuitive reader helped make that possible. Lisa began studying psychic tools in the late ’80s, around the same time she began singing. The practice, as she understands it, is less about spectacle than grounding: learning how to own a room, hold boundaries, listen deeply, see the truth under the surface, and distinguish what belongs to you from what does not. “I could not have become a singer without that,” she says. “I was this extremely sensitive little poet. I learned how to ground a performing space.”
Lisa's wide-ranging ensitivity runs through her new album, ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse, due digitally August 21, 2026, with a physical release following September 25. The record is Lisa B’s eighth full-length album and a vivid reimagining of 1960s classics for the present moment, with a July 24 album announcement arriving alongside “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” her new single featuring Bay Area hip-hop icon Lyrics Born.
All but one of the covered songs first appeared in 1967, a year Lisa hears as part of a broader cultural opening: freeform radio, genre cross-pollination, political action, psychedelic reinvention, folk-rock idealism, soul-jazz heat, and the belief that changing yourself and changing the world were connected acts. The exception is Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” released in 1964 and already issued by Lisa as a single on July 4, 2025. On the new album, that civil-rights-era call to action sits beside “Spooky,” “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “Everybody Get Together,” “Windy,” and Lisa’s original vocal rap-drum duet with Jeff Marrs, “’60s Magic Now!”
The album was sparked by what Lisa describes as an urgent response to the Trump administration. Rather than a retreat into nostalgia, ’60s Magic Now! is an argument for reactivating the imaginative, communal charge inside these songs. “That time of ‘everybody get together,’ ‘let’s love one another,’ and also ‘let’s change the world’ felt right,” she says. “In the context of the ’60s, loving one another was a community activity, and it involved social change.”
The Y-Verse began as a playful constraint. Each covered song title contains the letter Y. The album gathers four magical figures: Spooky, Mr. Fantasy, Ruby Tuesday, and Windy, each a distinct embodiment of freedom. But the idea quickly deepened. Y asks why. Y resembles a peace symbol. Y suggests a universe slightly adjacent to this one, a place where listeners might step outside the endless demands of the present and reconsider how they got here.
“It’s a WHY verse,” Lisa says. “It’s an open-minded and open-hearted approach.”
The sound follows that principle. Engineered by D-Wiz, also known as Dale Everingham, and James Gardiner, with expressive arrangements from Lisa B and Ben Flint, the album draws from soul-jazz, funk, Latin percussion, hip-hop, rock, folk, and spoken word. Lisa adds new poetic raps or spoken interjections to five tracks, using them to open hidden rooms inside familiar songs. “Ruby Tuesday” becomes a character study. “Windy” draws in the Yoruba wind goddess Oya. “Dear Mr. Fantasy” becomes a conversation with the wounded healer, with Lyrics Born embodying the title character in an original rap that expands swagger into repair.
The collaboration also carries a Bay Area full-circle story. Lyrics Born returned to Oakland’s Pajama Studios, where he recorded much of Latyrx’s landmark debut The Album, to join Lisa on “Dear Mr. Fantasy.” The session brought him back into the orbit of mixing engineer Jim Gardiner, who worked on that earlier record and has been part of Lisa’s own recording history.
For Lisa, those circles matter. So do the unseen ones. She thinks of the psychic, the poet, the singer, and the improviser as different kinds of seers and listeners, each accessing the truth beneath the apparent truth. Music, to her, is one way of helping people tune themselves again. It is physical, spiritual, intellectual, communal, and deeply practical.
“What makes people excited about music,” she says, “is that you’re giving them an alternate reality to participate in and also to heal themselves through.”
‘60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse offers that alternate reality with wit, sensuality, and purpose. It reaches backward to a moment when pop songs could carry innocence and rebellion at once, then pulls those songs into the complicated now. For Lisa B, the record is a continuation of everything she has been building: the child at the piano, the poet at the lectern, the singer learning to trust her body, the psychic grounding the room, the Bay Area artist asking why, again and again, until the question begins to groove.
