Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein), the Oakland-based singer, poet, and spoken-word artist — whose work moves fluidly through jazz, soul, funk, hip-hop, literary poetry, and spiritual inquiry — has a new album: ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse, out digitally 8/21/26, with a physical release 9/25/26. Listen/watch here.
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GRAMMY VOTERS:
- Jazz vocal album category: listen on your favorite music platform
- Melodic rap performance: "Dear Mr. Fantasy" with Lyrics Born video
- Global music performance: "Windy" video
- Arrangement, instruments & vocals: "Ruby Tuesday"
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Lisa B’s eighth full-length album boldly reimagines beloved songs from the 1960s for today's complex world, capturing the innocence, rebellion, freedom, and cultural transformation that defined the era while giving them a fresh, contemporary voice.
The album was sparked by Lisa's urgent need to respond 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,” Lisa says. “In the context of the ’60s, loving one another was a community activity, and it involved social change.”
Engineered by Dale Everingham (D-Wiz) and James Gardiner, with expressive arrangements from Lisa B and Ben Flint, the album draws from soul-jazz and straightahead jazz, funk, Latin grooves, hip-hop, rock, folk, and spoken word. Everingham draws on decades of experience shaping Bay Area hip-hop, R&B, and alternative music, while Gardiner contributes the fruits of his work as the founder of Live Oak and Pajama Studios, where he earned two Grammy nominations and contributed to 42 gold and platinum records.
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.
The seven tracks include tunes spotlighting four magical characters (Spooky, Mr. Fantasy, Ruby Tuesday, and Windy), each a distinct embodiment of freedom. Lisa frames these with two anthems of the decade, the Dylan cover and the Youngbloods' “Everybody Get Together," which call for socially conscious responses to changing times. An original vocal-drum rap duet opens the record.
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. “Spooky” preserves the original song’s address to a mysterious female figure, then gives that figure a voice of her own. “Dear Mr. Fantasy” becomes a conversation with a wounded healer, with Lyrics Born embodying the title character in an original rap that expands swagger into repair.
The exploration of hidden narratives in well-known songs is central to the album’s larger sense of liberation. Alongside its calls for civil rights, peace, love, and collective action, ‘60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse amplifies questions of women’s freedom, fluidity, power, and voice that were beginning to emerge in the popular music of the era.
The collaboration with Lyrics Born 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 Jim Gardiner, who served as a mixing engineer on that earlier record and has been a key element of Lisa’s own recording history.
The Y-Verse began as a playful constraint: each covered song title contains the letter Y. 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. We’re singing and playing for you with open minds and open hearts.”
“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.”
With ‘60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse, Lisa B offers that alternate reality with wit, sensuality, and purpose.
