Lisa B Brings the ’60s Into the Present With ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse

What happens when a Bay Area artist looks back at the songs of the 1960s not as artifacts of a vanished era, but as unfinished conversations?

For Oakland singer, poet, spoken-word artist, and intuitive reader Lisa B, the answer is ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse, a soulful, genre-fluid reimagining of songs that emerged from one of the most musically and culturally restless periods of modern American history. Released digitally August 21, with a physical release scheduled for September 25, the album is Lisa B’s eighth full-length record and a deliberate attempt to bring the spirit of the ’60s into the pressures and contradictions of the 2020s.

Rather than reproducing the past, Lisa B bends it.

That approach is especially vivid on “Windy,” her Latin pop-soul-jazz interpretation of The Association’s 1967 classic. In the original, Windy is an elusive free spirit. Lisa B takes that idea of freedom and expands it into something mythic, connecting the character to Oya, the Yoruba wind goddess and orisha, associated with wind, transformation, movement, and feminine power.

The song begins with a prelude establishing that connection before opening into a bright, rhythmically propulsive arrangement. Sandy Cressman supplies background vocals, while Ben Flint plays keyboards, Aaron Germain bass, Jeff Marrs drums, and Brent Sunderland percussion. Recorded at 2200 Studios in Sausalito with overdubs at Santo Recording in Oakland, the track was engineered by Dale Everingham and produced and arranged by Lisa B.

“‘Windy’ always felt to me like a song about a free spirit, but I wanted to open that freedom into something larger,” Lisa B says. “Bringing in Oya gave the song a mythic charge, a sense of wind as power, change, movement, and feminine force. Then the groove takes over. It becomes joyful, danceable, and alive in the body.”

That transformation is the organizing principle behind The Y-Verse. The album revisits songs that Lisa B associates with a moment when music, social change, experimentation, and personal liberation seemed inseparable. With the exception of Bob Dylan’s “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” which was released in 1964, the album’s covers first appeared in 1967, a year Lisa hears as a particularly potent cultural crossroads: freeform radio, psychedelic music, folk-rock idealism, soul-jazz, political activism, and an increasingly blurred boundary between musical genres.

The album includes “Spooky,” “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “Windy,” “Everybody Get Together,” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” alongside the original “’60s Magic Now!,” a vocal rap-and-drum duet with Jeff Marrs.

The record’s most recent single before “Windy” was “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” a collaboration with Bay Area hip-hop veteran Lyrics Born. Originally recorded by Traffic in 1967, the song becomes a meditation on imagining freedom. Lyrics Born steps into the role of Mr. Fantasy through an original rap, while Lisa B’s vocals reinterpret the song’s plea for someone to break through the gloom.

The collaboration also created a Bay Area musical circle, bringing Lyrics Born back to Oakland’s Pajama Studios, where he recorded much of Latyrx’s landmark debut, The Album. There, he reunited with mixing engineer James Gardiner, whose long history in Bay Area recording also intersects with Lisa B’s own musical journey.

The political and social atmosphere of the present day is part of what prompted the project. Lisa B describes the album as an urgent response to the Trump administration and the larger pressures of contemporary life, but The Y-Verse is less interested in nostalgia than in asking what remains useful in the idealism of the ’60s.

“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.”

That distinction matters. These aren't museum pieces in Lisa B’s hands. They are raw material.

She adds new poetic raps and spoken interjections to five tracks, using them to expose possibilities that might be overlooked in the originals. “Ruby Tuesday” becomes a character study. “Spooky” gives greater agency to the mysterious woman at its center. “Windy” acquires a mythological dimension through Oya.

Even the album’s title began as a playful constraint. Every covered song title contains the letter Y. From there, Lisa B developed the idea into something more expansive. Y asks “why.” Its shape evokes a peace symbol. And “The Y-Verse” suggests a parallel universe just far enough removed from ordinary reality to allow a different perspective.

“It’s a WHY verse,” Lisa B says. “It’s an open-minded and open-hearted approach. We’re singing and playing for you with open minds and open hearts.”

That openness extends to the music itself. Engineered by D-Wiz, also known as Dale Everingham, and James Gardiner, and arranged by Lisa B and Ben Flint, the album moves freely among soul-jazz, funk, Latin music, hip-hop, rock, folk, and spoken word. Everingham brings decades of experience in Bay Area hip-hop, R&B, and alternative music, while Gardiner, founder of Live Oak and Pajama Studios, has contributed to recordings associated with 42 gold and platinum records and two Grammy nominations.

For Lisa B, crossing genres isn't a gimmick. It is part of how she understands music.

Across seven previous albums, she has developed a body of work that treats jazz, soul, funk, hip-hop, electronica, spoken word, and literary songcraft as interconnected forms of expression. Her work as an intuitive reader adds another dimension to that practice. She describes the psychic, poet, singer, and improviser as different kinds of seers and listeners, all concerned with what exists beneath the obvious surface.

That perspective helps explain why familiar songs become something different in her hands. The goal isn't simply to cover them. It is to listen for what they might still have to say.

“What makes people excited about music,” Lisa B says, “is that you’re giving them an alternate reality to participate in and also to heal themselves through.”

That alternate reality is at the heart of ’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse. The album looks backward while refusing to stay there, drawing connections between the communal idealism of another generation and contemporary questions about freedom, identity, women’s power, social change, connection, and collective responsibility.

It is also distinctly Bay Area in spirit: exploratory, genre-fluid, politically conscious, playful, and willing to let a question remain open long enough for the music to answer it.

On “Windy,” that answer arrives as movement — percussion, groove, voice, breath, and the force of Oya's wind. A song born in 1967 becomes something that can live in 2026.

Lisa B isn't trying to recreate the ’60s. She's asking what might happen if we let some of its questions loose again.

’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse is available digitally, with a physical release following September 25. Lisa B will perform October 3, 2026, at The Back Room in Berkeley, California.

The album tracklist is “’60s Magic Now!,” “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Dear Mr. Fantasy” featuring Lyrics Born, “Ruby Tuesday,” “Spooky,” “Windy,” and “Everybody Get Together.”

Listen to “Windy” here: https://lnk.bio/lisablisabernstein