Sharing its title with a Bob Dylan song, this third album of 16 tracks of experimental folk and Americana by the Montreal singer-songwriter aka Alexandra Levy comes with a free-flowing acoustic brush of the imagination, a rich seam of art and literary reference, and lyrics of the dream-like psychedelic with notes of optimism and plainspoken wisdom. While Levy’s sound is closer to that of Big Thief and Adrianne Lenker, Dylan is referenced musically and lyrically, such as on Bob Dylan’s 115th Haircut, or that classic mouth organ sound on Snowglobe, which though, is very much a song entering the Ada Lea world, in a lyrical narrative that refracts a dinner scene glimpsed in retrospect through glass object by a child. More curious objects come to the fore in the beautiful and surreal Baby Blue Frigidaire Mini Fridge: “… that I traded last week / For a box spring and a pair of sunglasses / Took the tiny Red Bird matches, too / Tonight I'm looking, not seeing anything like you. / Paul Celan at one hundred / Book of Francesca Woodman's photographs / Someone sent to me as a present/ It appeared on my apartment's front doorstep / Tonight I'm looking, not seeing anything like you.” Moon Blossom is a gentle, lovely acoustic number, while Midnight Magic is even more exquisite, but piano-based, decorated with psychedelic lyrics of clouds and dragons, and at times echoing the work of Judee Sill. This an album of delicious escapism and noodling tunes and feelings, even the dolefully downbeat It Isn’t Enough is delicious. It’s an album to let flow over the imagination, all the way to the closing track There is only One Thing On My Mind. This brings a a series of magical transformations drawing inspiration from a Chagall figure and the mythical novelist Olga Tokarczuk’s honoring of otherness and inexplicability, and the surrealist painter-novelist Leonora Carrington’s engagement with mysterious forces of nature, and the self as an observed observer. “Just like in the museum/ We keep a little distance.” Overall it’s an album not about attaining perfection, but letting the imagination in. “The hand knows best,” as she quotes the painter Margaux Williamson. “A shape produces itself, where I go toward what is intuitive, rather than logical.” Beautiful. Out on Saddel Creek.
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