The Real Ding.com:
The songs…carry political urgency while retaining humor, sensuality, movement, and surprise… familiar enough to invite listeners inside, altered enough to make them reconsider what they thought the song was asking.
Darryl Sterdan, Tinnitist.com:
Lisa B and Lyrics Born dream of a better world in their inspired revamp of the Traffic classic "Dear Mr. Fantasy" …the Oakland artist moves Traffic’s psychedelic-rock standard into a distinctly Bay Area exchange, bringing poetry, jazz phrasing, political unease, and hip-hop into the same room.
Lyrics Born…as the title figure…[is] a clever casting choice. His voice brings natural charisma to the role. Lisa introduces him with a rap of her own. Her language distinguishes between fantasy as manipulation and fantasy as possibility, placing authoritarian spectacle on one side and a shared vision of freedom on the other. …. the collaboration feels genuinely conversational.
The Y-Verse updates its source material without abandoning the emotional architecture of the original song.
Aaron Willschick, V13.Net
’60s Magic Now! gathers the poet, singer, improviser, political observer, and intuitive reader into a single project....Poetry taught her to hear cadence and silence. Jazz taught her to respond in real time. Singing taught her to trust physical expression. Her work as an intuitive reader taught her how to ground a room and pay attention to what sits beneath the obvious. Those disciplines converge on her eighth album.
The project reimagines a group of 1960s songs through soul-jazz, funk, Latin grooves, hip-hop, rock, folk, and spoken word. Its source material is recognizable, but Lisa’s method is personal and analytical.
Her intuitive practice also informs the record’s larger purpose. Lisa speaks about music as an alternate reality that listeners can enter, one capable of helping them retune. The idea can sound abstract, but the album expresses it concretely through groove, character, language, and communal performance.
“Dear Mr. Fantasy” captures that synthesis in miniature: an old song becomes a space for new voices to listen, respond, and imagine their way forward.
Kath Galasso, Onstage Magazine.com
Lisa’s vocal delivery brings a soulful, conversational quality…an extension of the performance instincts she first discovered at poetry readings, where timing…and presence taught her how to hold an audience. Those skills matter on a record built around interpretation.
Instead of updating references or modernizing the production alone, she changes who gets to speak and what the songs are allowed to ask.
Music-News.com
’60s Magic Now! listens for the voices that earlier versions left at the edges and invites them toward the center. In doing so, the record shows how familiar songs can change when the people inside them are finally allowed to respond.
Several of the women who populate classic 1960s songs are remembered primarily as objects of fascination…Lisa B…asks what happens when they are granted greater interiority.
Lisa is well suited to this kind of reconstruction. Her foundation in poetry gives her an instinct for point of view, metaphor, and the pressure placed on individual words. Her years as a jazz and groove singer give her the ability to reshape meaning through phrasing.
She can change a song’s emotional argument through language, rhythm, or the placement of a breath.
Flex Music Blog.com
On her upcoming album, ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse, Oakland singer, poet, and spoken-word artist Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein)…wants to know whether the era’s belief in imagination, collective action, and personal freedom still has practical value.
Lisa approaches [the songs]… as living material rather than historical artifacts…’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse does not argue that earlier songs contain ready-made answers for the present. Lisa …asks listeners to imagine relief before they know exactly what relief will look like. For Lisa B, that act of imagination is where political and personal change begin.
The project’s new single, “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” … features Bay Area rapper Lyrics Born, whose newly written verse gives Mr. Fantasy humor, force, and a philosophy of restoration. Lisa contributes her own rap…contrasting manipulative political fantasy with the collective fantasy of freedom. The contrast gives the cover a contemporary political edge without flattening it into a topical rewrite.
Lisa’s background [as a poet as well as a singer] helps explain why these songs move so easily between literary interpretation and rhythmic reinvention.
Finneas Enright, No Transmission.com
Why return to these songs? Why did their visions of freedom remain incomplete? Why do their requests for love, change, and imagination continue to resonate? Lisa B does not resolve every question. She builds a rhythmic universe where asking them feels useful again.
