Lisa B Reopens the Utopian Possibilities of the ’60s on The Y-Verse

The phrase “the spirit of the ’60s” can become vague quickly. It is frequently reduced to a handful of visual cues: tie-dye, psychedelic posters, protest signs, and idealistic choruses about peace. On her upcoming album, ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse, Oakland singer, poet, and spoken-word artist Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) is interested in something less decorative. She wants to know whether the era’s belief in imagination, collective action, and personal freedom still has practical value.

Due digitally August 21, with a physical release following September 25, the record revisits songs including “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “Spooky,” “Windy,” and “Everybody Get Together.” Most originally appeared during the cultural ferment of 1967. Lisa approaches them as living material rather than historical artifacts, reshaping their language through soul-jazz, funk, rock, Latin rhythms, hip-hop, and spoken word.

The project’s new single, “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” provides a useful entry point. Traffic’s 1967 original asks a mysterious musician to play something that might ease the room’s sadness. Lisa hears the character as a wounded healer, an artist carrying pain while being asked to help others imagine a way through their own.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqDTRcJBWBE

Her version 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 before his entrance, 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.

The collaboration also contains a layer of Bay Area recording history. Lyrics Born returned to Oakland’s Pajama Studios, where he recorded much of Latyrx’s influential debut, The Album. There, he reconnected with engineer Jim Gardiner, who worked on that earlier project and has remained part of Lisa’s recording world. The detail reinforces the album’s interest in circles, memory, and ideas returning under altered circumstances.

Lisa’s background helps explain why these songs move so easily between literary interpretation and rhythmic reinvention. She began as a poet, studying creative writing at UC Santa Cruz and earning a master’s degree from San Francisco State before publishing The Transparent Body through Wesleyan University Press. Poetry readings led her toward performance, singing, jazz study, and eventually a recording career that has crossed several genres without settling comfortably inside one.

That sensibility shapes the album’s organizing idea. Every covered song title contains the letter Y, initially a playful restriction that developed into a wider metaphor. The Y can signify “why,” resemble a peace symbol, or suggest a parallel universe where inherited assumptions can be reconsidered. The concept is whimsical, though the underlying questions are serious.

’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse does not argue that earlier songs contain ready-made answers for the present. Lisa seems drawn to them because they preserve an openness that current culture often discourages. “Dear Mr. Fantasy” 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.