Ada Lea
Quarry House Tavern, Silver Spring MD
September 13, 2025
Just as a reminder that I don’t just watch legacy acts from the 1990s, I saw young Montreal singer-songwriter
Ada Lea (Alexandra Levy) with band at the Quarry House Tavern in Silver Spring last night.
On a night with very bad weather the crowd was scant. There were only a few dozen people in the audience, although one of them was Bob Boilen, formerly of NPR
All Songs Considered.
Opening act
Devonly was a few songs into their set when I arrived. They’re a local band, doing noisy blurry indie pop with too much on the low end. They are clearly in the post-Helium kind of musical lineage but lacked the crispness of songwriting. The muddy sound wasn’t helping, either.
The sound issues worsened as Ada Lea prepared for the set on guitar and keyboard, with massive feedback, popping and scratching on the microphone as Levy’s bassist and drummer set up. The sound problems continued for the first several songs of the Ada Lea set, marring some very good songs, most of them from the new record,
When I Paint My Masterpiece on Saddle Creek Records (not the only Bob Dylan joke we would see in the set).
She opened with “
baby blue frigidaire mini fridge,” which is both surrealist but also poignant. During most of the guitar-based songs, Levy was harmonizing with the drummer, in her simple folk-rock setup of a four-piece band: Chris Hauer on lead guitar, Summer Kodama on bass, and Tasy Hudson on drums. Ada Lea songs on guitar reminded me quite a big of Big Thief, veering from chugging folk-rock to mildly psychedelic, but I like Ada Lea in general better than Adrienne Lenker.
Levy is quite a visual presence, wearing lots of glitter in her boots and skirt and giant hoop earrings. She did two sets of songs on guitar, interspersed with a four- or five-song keyboard set in which most of the band retreated to quiet accompaniment.
In front of the keyboard, Levy’s songwriting is more traditional and less focused on jams. She did at least two tracks from
Masterpiece on keyboard, including “
midnight magic” and “I want it all,” before doing a heartbreaking new song she described as being about a second-trimester miscarriage, “Canada geese.” (She lowercases all her song titles, but I’m not going to lowercase the name of her home country.)
In the brief set, she wrapped up returning to guitar for full-band songs “the party,” from
What We Say in Private, which goes from contemplative to frantic, and closing with the jokey-but-mildly-profound “bob dylan’s 115th haircut,” in which she played harmonica and ruefully chastises herself for her artistic shortcomings.
In songwriting and lyrics, I’ve heard Levy described as “surrealistic” and that seems accurate but incomplete. If you read through the lyrics to “midnight magic,” you see biblical references, erotic and mystic yearning, and sensory gratification (the scents of spices and fruits). I’m not a dylanologist, but honestly, it’s much less Dylan and much more Leonard Cohen in its ancestry.
Levy is an accomplished visual artist, and her videos, art design, and even makeup and attire show a lot of forethought into crafting an image. Once she gets her touring band sound and presentation figured out, a lot more people will be seeing the next round of shows.
On a blustery, rainy night there were no other band t-shirts except for my 1994 Tori Amos
Boys for Pele tour shirt and a Quarry House staff member wearing a Fievel is Glauque shirt, a band for which I have never seen a t-shirt. But props for the guy wearing the David Cronenberg CRASH shirt, which is a definite aesthetic choice.
I made an incomplete setlist at setlist.fm:
https://www.setlist.fm/setlist/ada-lea/2025/quarry-house-tavern-silver-spring-md-4b41bb4a.html
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 09/17/2025 08:45AM by zwirnm.
