“Dear Mr. Fantasy” Sets the Tone for Lisa B’s Timely New Covers Album
Lisa B (Lisa Bernstein) has chosen a complicated moment to revisit the idealism of 1960s popular music. Calls for peace, togetherness, and collective transformation can sound distant from current public life, where suspicion and exhaustion often overwhelm the language of shared purpose. Her new album asks whether those earlier messages can withstand the present.
’60s Magic Now!: The Y-Verse will be released digitally August 21, with a physical edition arriving September 25. The seven-track project includes new versions of “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” “Ruby Tuesday,” “Spooky,” “Windy,” “Everybody Get Together,” and “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” along with Lisa’s original title track.
The record was prompted partly by Lisa’s reaction to the Trump administration and the wider pressures of the 2020s. Her response was to look toward songs written during another period of unrest, when ideas about civil rights, personal liberation, antiwar politics, gender, and communal responsibility were moving rapidly through popular culture.
The new single, “Dear Mr. Fantasy,” makes the project’s intentions clear. Lisa does not simply repeat Traffic’s request for a musician to lift the gloom. She asks what kind of fantasy is being offered, who controls it, and whether imagination can serve freedom rather than manipulation.
Her own newly written rap contains the song’s sharpest political language, contrasting a destructive “fantasy charlatan” with a collective vision of liberation. Lyrics Born follows with an original verse as Mr. Fantasy, bringing dexterity and warmth to a character Lisa views as a wounded healer. His presence turns the cover into dialogue rather than commentary from a distance.
The collaboration is rooted in Oakland history. Lyrics Born recorded at Pajama Studios, returning to a space connected to Latyrx’s influential debut. Engineer Jim Gardiner, who participated in that earlier chapter and has worked within Lisa’s recording history, helped bring the new track together.
Lisa’s approach throughout the album is grounded in her combined experience as a poet and vocalist. She has spent decades moving among literary writing, jazz, soul, funk, spoken word, and hip-hop. Her new verses are therefore less like explanatory footnotes and closer to improvisations that reveal alternate meanings inside the songs.
The track list is united by a loose conceptual game: every covered title contains the letter Y. Lisa uses the letter to suggest “why,” peace, and an adjacent universe. It is an eccentric premise, though it keeps the project from becoming solemn. The songs can carry political urgency while retaining humor, sensuality, movement, and surprise.
Lisa B is scheduled to bring the project to The Back Room in Berkeley on October 3. In recorded form, The Y-Verse already feels shaped by the Bay Area’s history of musical hybridity and political experimentation. “Dear Mr. Fantasy” offers a strong introduction: familiar enough to invite listeners inside, altered enough to make them reconsider what they thought the song was asking.
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