Musician Ada Lea on giving yourself space to create

You wrote a lot of your last record in Banff but you live primarily in Montreal. How did this new environment affect your creative process?

A lot of the songs were Banff songs, but there were definitely a handful that were created before then. Early on in the pandemic, I found a very cheap cabin to rent and I was still living at my parents’ house, and was like, “Oh, this is a perfect opportunity to leave the home and move to the country.” I would come back to the city every few weeks and I realized right away my anxiety and overall view of life would just get really dark immediately, just feeling overwhelmed and having all these obligations. Not to say that I don’t enjoy talking to people, I definitely love to do that, but there is something with nature where I don’t have to pretend to be something that I’m not, and I can just create at my own pace. I feel most connected to myself and when there’s that silence. I seem to have a really hard time finding it in the city.

Since you know this about yourself now, how do you find ways to get yourself in that space more often?

I don’t think I could have finished the album if I had stayed in the city, even though that’s where I got everything towards the end done. It’s not that I didn’t have time when I was in the city, I had months and months, but I just couldn’t seem to do it. So, the recording process wouldn’t have been completed, had I not moved out of the city. There’s just so much–waking up to the birds and rather than airplanes flying over my head. You don’t realize it until you’re away from it, how invasive it is being in the city and being around all of the noise. Choosing to find those quiet moments, it’s really hard now that I’m back here to find that silence, but what trying to get back to it looks like is being online and looking for more places that I could rent, and hopefully one day just fully moving to the country. I would love to be able to do that.

There’s often this extended sense of time outside of cities, and time is such a valuable resource when it comes to creativity. In thinking of time as a resource, how has the unfolding of your career has felt, the pace of it? Have you been able to take things at your own pace and find a sense of control?

I definitely don’t feel I have control over it, but I do see the larger patterns. There’s the frenzy of creating and then there really needs to be the downtime of integrating, which is just as important. I think that’s the hardest thing to do, to step back and integrate. I’m not always willing to admit when I’m in that process because it feels I’m just giving up in some way, like “Oh, the things that I’ve been creating just really suck and I need to assimilate.”

Do you feel like that comes from a sense of pressure when it comes to being productive?

I was listening to a George Saunders interview and he was saying that in his younger years, he would write off an entire day of creativity if something came up and he couldn’t have a block of four or six hours to write. Then he realized, “Oh, actually, I’m really only looking for these 20 minutes of time, because those minutes add up.” I really do believe in that approach, because you can take 20 minutes anywhere really, even on tour. I feel I’ve written a lot of the things that I’m most happy with in that way. I’ve somehow written while traveling, even when I don’t have those huge blocks of time that I always think I need to create something meaningful. So in that sense, it’s been okay, but then there’s also being exhausted while touring. You can’t really do anything interesting when you’re exhausted and when your mental health isn’t great.

Mental health is such a massive part of an artists’ capacity to be creative. How did trying to maintain your mental wellness play into the work of making a record?

2019 was particularly difficult. Towards the end of that year, when I was in Europe and when I was writing the rest of the album, there were some of the darkest moments. I know for sure that came from the stress and the financial anxieties that come with touring. I was just expected to somehow find money to pay for everything on tour, and it was just horrible.

I’m surprised that I managed to write stuff in Banff, but somehow I did. I knew that I was going to be recording in early February with Marshall [Vore, who produced Levy’s latest record], so I thought “I need to have more songs, I just need to do this.” In Banff, I approached it like some sort of game where I was trying different sleeping schedules out, and had a goal of just writing a song a day, and then recording it either that day or the next day. That was pretty cool, it worked well.

That’s really interesting. The sleeping schedules, you were waking up in the middle of the night trying to write songs?

There was one method I was trying where I wouldn’t have a full night’s sleep, I would just take naps and try working at these random times and intervals. I read somewhere that it could be helpful, so I thought I’d try it. It became really weird, because the place that I was sleeping, all of the other accommodations were a walk away, so I kind of lost all sense of time and everything became very distorted. I didn’t know what day it was or how long I had been there.

How do you feel like that shows up in what you made during that period?

“Can’t Stop Me From Dying” was written in that way, and I thought, “This is the weirdest thing.” I shared it with some of my close friends asking “Is this a funny song or this cool? Is this horrible?” and they were like, “You should finish it. Why not?” I don’t think anyone really understood what was happening for me, emotionally. There was another song that came out at that time, “Hurt.” It feels like a weird time to try and remember because it really felt foggy even when I was living it.

In addition to your music, you’re a painter and you’ve dabbled in poetry, how do all these practices coexist in your daily life?

I’d love to talk about my idea of the perfect creative day, which would start with waking up between 5:00 and 6:00am, having coffee and writing. I found The Artist’s Way really cringey in so many ways, but there was one thing that I took away from it, which was the morning pages. I’ve grown really used to writing them every morning, so those three pages are where I work through any issues happening on an interpersonal level. Then I’ll try and work through some of my more vague ideas and logistical things there, then I can get on with my day. Ideally, reading would happen after that, then from 7:30 to 9:00am, I would work on a song or a demo. I would make my way to my painting studio at 11:00am, and this is where I try and work in blocks. So a time block of painting, a block of drawing and then writing. The big picture for me is this Holy Trinity, the painting and drawing, writing, and song. If I can hit all of those, then I’m in a great mood. Sometimes I can’t and right away I’m so irritable. I feel like I spent the last 12 years trying to figure out the perfect routine, trying to find the perfect day. And this is close to it, I would say.

Do those different creative practices overlap or talk to each other?

I don’t think that they do so much. Right now I’m taking classes at Concordia University, a painting class, a drawing class, and I’m auditing a course on New American poetry. It’s easy to separate everything, because the projects don’t look the same, and with these different projects I’m not after the same things.

With more general writing there’s this method that I’ve been using, similar to my Banff method of writing a song a day and then recording it. I came up with it with a friend and we call it The Method, which I’d love to write some sort of book or how-to guide on, but this friend wanted to try a literary method, where every three days you submit a short story. I’d never written short stories before, so I saw it as a good exercise.

It sounds like working in this dynamic way helps to keep the creative channel really open, and it might help to keep it, not impersonal, but keep it light. A way of helping it to feel like not everything you make has to be a referendum on whether or not you’re some great artist, and not everything has to be released.

That’s it 100%. I think failure comes from being too fixated on the finished product, and so creative success is the focus on the process. Fixation on the product blocks you because you’re like, “Well, there are all of these other things that I have to get better at before I can actually do something that’s good.” And then you just start to get overwhelmed.

For me personally, if I’m just approaching it from the place of “I have all of these things I need to learn and I’m just working through it very slowly,” the product really doesn’t matter. I just really want to get better at writing the song, and writing a story, and painting, and just trusting that eventually if you do enough of that, you’ll have a little body of work or collection of some sort. Because you’re definitely not going to get better by just focusing on the preciousness of the final product and laboring over that one thing. I don’t think you need to release everything that you make, but it is showing the emphasis on the process.

You give a lot of different things the opportunity to breathe, and then whatever wants to rise to the top, that’s there, then there’s also a ton of stuff in the middle and maybe on the bottom for other people to find. What’s your take on technical skills?

I love talking about the importance of developing technical skills. It’s also interesting at the school I’m at now, the painting program is so different from the music program that I went to at The New School. There was so much emphasis on theory, ear training and instrument proficiency. It was really a program designed to get the students to a level where the instrument isn’t in their way anymore.

The ultimate goal was, “Let’s get you so good at all of these things that the instrument doesn’t become an obstacle anymore.” And with the painting program I’m in now, there’s really no structure, and it’s all these abstract ideas. And I’m like, “I’m here because I want to learn about the techniques, teach me the skills. I can do the creative thing on my own.”

And the teacher is like, “We can’t teach creativity,” and I’m like, “Exactly.” Obviously, I’ve gotten into some arguments at school with the teachers and stuff. Like, “Yeah, of course. You can’t teach creativity, but you can teach us the skills and the techniques that we can then use to be creative.” And without those skills and techniques, then I don’t even know what the process would look like. And I guess before schools were around, there was just this mentoring process, and with COVID and stuff that’s just completely lost.

I really do see the value in the techniques and developing a skill set. Personally, that’s something that I see as a tool.

Ada Lea Recommends:

Works by the author Rachel Cusk

The Matrix: Poems 1960-1970 by N.H. Pritchard

The Dialectical Behavior Skills Workbook by Matthew McKay, Jeffrey Wood and Jeffrey Brantley

Walking for 25 minutes

“the Method” as described above

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Emma Bowers.

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