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McDaris, Glynnis
Feist
Issue #31
Three years after the release of her critically acclaimed Let It Die, the Canadian singer talks about the breakup that heavily influenced her breakthrough album. Still taken by her last collection of songs, we need no reminder of the chanteuse’s seducti
By Arye Dworkin
Published: March 1st, 2007 | 12:00am
The first time I saw Feist perform live, she was doing aerobics onstage at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, wearing a tight spandex uniform and a sock puppet on her hand. At the time, she went by the name Bitch Lap-Lap, and in the center stage, her creative partner-in-crime, bawdy electro-rapper Peaches chanted repeatedly, “Fuck the pain away! Fuck the pain away!” This is not the kind of scene you can forget easily. Especially when you consider that they were only the opening act.
Things have definitely changed since then. Well, not for Peaches — she’s still preaching about the cathartic benefits of intercourse — but Bitch Lap-Lap has officially retired to wherever the Lap-Laps escape when they’ve done enough awkward rapping in Spanish for one lifetime. Leslie Feist, now known by her last name, sits across from me on a heather-gray couch in the lobby of the newly constructed Hotel on Rivington, the tallest structure on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. The Calgary-born singer-songwriter is in town, in late January, for a few days to discuss her upcoming release, The Reminder. I had assumed I’d heard the album a few weeks back, but it turns out what I heard wasn’t the final version. Just yesterday, Feist personally delivered one of the few existing copies of the final version of The Reminder, which was then handed off to the publicist for an in-office listening session. When she goes home after the weekend, Feist will return home with the CD.
“I wasn’t into the record at first because, while it had a body, it had no legs,” Feist says of the initial track listing. “I worked on it a bit more so I could have a beginning with a little more pulse because I’m that girl who walks into an HMV [a large U.K. music store] and listens to the first song of a record for 30 seconds and then dismisses the whole thing if it’s too boring.”
It’s almost ironic to hear that the woman I’m interviewing is an impatient listener. After all, her records gracefully unfurl like fading nostalgia, like the soundtrack to seductions, soft and lithe, mysterious and breathy. Both Let It Die and The Reminder ostensibly could come from a time when movies were black and white and when “romantic” wasn’t always attached to “comedy.” And much to Feist’s chagrin, there’s something inherently French about her songs that conjure up the imagery of a European café filled with aromas of espressos and cigarettes.
“I don’t even really speak French,” Feist laughs. “And eventually, I grew so tired of the questions about Paris during interviews that I made a T-shirt that said, ‘Why Paris?’ Just because I lived there doesn’t necessarily mean it influenced my sound.”
“Initially, I made Let It Die as a challenge,” she continues. “I asked myself, ‘Could I do this?’ So when I finally decided to do that record, I asked [Chilly] Gonzales if he would play on it and he first asked me, ‘Why are you hiding behind all this lo-fi indie rock? Why are you hiding behind the distorted guitar?’”
And so a chanteuse was born, even though the chanteuse hates to be called that.
At the risk of bursting another bubble, Let It Die isn’t a very optimistic record. In fact, it’s about the implosion of a relationship. So if you were playing it from the speakers while making out with your significant other, you may want to find something a tad more hopeful, perhaps something without the word “die” in its title. When conversation turns to a Sloan concert we had both attended separately the night before, Feist tells me that the man on the cover of her debut is in fact Chris Murphy, the multi-instrumentalist and center-stage personality of the Canadian cult favorites, and the woman is she. “I’ve never really spoke about this before in an interview just because it wasn’t the right time, but now things are cool, and Chris and I are friends.”
“I think we dated for about two years,” Murphy says, somewhat unsure, over the phone a few days later. “A lot of my songs on the Sloan records Action Pact and Pretty Together are even inspired by her. And vice versa — a lot of songs on Let It Die are probably about our relationship.”
“I saw Leslie perform in a band called By Divine Right, and I could tell that she was this rocker girl,” Murphy reminisces. “Then I saw her do her striptease rap act with Peaches, and I thought, ‘Cool, she has a sense of humor, too.’ Then I saw her sing a song called ‘It’s Cool to Love Your Family’ on a MuchMusic [a Canadian music cable channel] program called The Wedge, and I basically shit my pants. I couldn’t believe that a person could sing that way. At that point, I said to myself, ‘I am going to find this girl and make her mine.’”
Feist’s debut’s standout hit, “Mushaboom,” the song remixed by the Postal Service, covered by Bright Eyes, and adored by thousands upon thousands, sounds deceivingly wistful and tender. When I hear it, I envision a world where everyone is wearing summer dresses and frolicking in a field of daises. Even the lyrics speak of a hopeful future full of child-bearing and lilac-planting. Paradoxically, Murphy hears the song in a very complex way. “Mushaboom is a place in Nova Scotia where we talked about buying a house, and it was always a really bittersweet song to hear on the radio,” Murphy tells me. “I think the hardest thing about that whole experience was that while we dated, I truly wanted her to be successful. She was just sitting on a world-class voice and she played guitar well. She had it all, and I think that every time I heard ‘Mushaboom,’ I thought, ‘I wish I could be celebrating this success with her in another way than just hearing that song on the radio.’”
—
Leslie Feist was born on February 13, 1976, in Amherst, Nova Scotia, but spent her formative years in Calgary, Alberta, where she grew up with an undeniable need to be a rocker. At the precocious age of 15, she started touring with her first band, Placebo, a hard-edged metal act with a penchant for turning up Marshall amps to 11. During our interview, the singer even admits to a heinous fashion faux pas: a singular fire engine–red dreadlock hanging from her head.
One of Placebo’s songs, “Back Down the Same Way,” still circulates on the Internet. It sounds strikingly similar to early Evanescence, with its angsty, sludgy rhythm guitar and a vengeful-sometimes-painful vocal, screaming, “Takin’ you down with me!” Despite Feist’s teen obsession with Dinosaur Jr., Luna, and Bettie Serveert, her band opted to sound like a grunge clone. “After being in that band for years and competing with the loudness, I eventually killed my voice,” Feist recounts. That, coupled with Placebo’s career stagnation, forced the group to part ways.
The restless singer soon thereafter joined as the guitarist for the power-pop indie rock band By Divine Right for a tour alongside the perennial Canadian rock-snob punchline the Tragically Hip. (Most Canuck hipsters will chuckle whenever this band’s name is mentioned.) During her residency in BDR, Feist first met her longtime friend Brendan Canning, one of the two founding members of the Broken Social Scene, an art-rock cooperative that would soon utilize her incomparable voice to stunning effect (as on You Forgot It In People “Anthems For a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl”). All the while, Feist found the time to record her now out-of-print, self-released debut, Monarch, featuring the aforementioned “It’s Cool To Love Your Family” of which there are only 1,000 copies in existence. “I recorded Monarch in 1997–1998, so it sounds very ‘tricycle’ to me,” Feist says. “I sold them out of my backpack while touring, very grassroots, and,” she smirks, “there’s a good chance you’ll never hear it.”
In 2000, Feist moved into an apartment in Toronto called the 701 with Merrill Beth Nisker, the woman who, at the time, was crafting and perfecting her alter-ego, Peaches. “That was a really creative and unpredictable period in my life,” Feist says. “There were five people who had the keys to that apartment: me, Peaches, Gonzales, Mocky, and [Malcolm Fraser, the one-man band known as] the World Provider. You would never know who was going to be sleeping on the couch.” The close-knit group of friends collaborated on one another’s projects like an organic collective. Feist maintained an intimate connection with a four-track recorder, particularly during her incarnation as Bitch Lap-Lap while touring with Peaches and Gonzales (or “Gonzo,” as Feist affectionately refers to him).
“[Leslie] was a small-town girl new in the big city of Toronto,” writes Gonzalez in an e-mail exchange. “I could smell her talent. I had just met Renaud Letang, a French producer, who asked if I could think of a project to collaborate with him on. Feist and I had just wrapped up a tour, so we began with the cover songs as a first try.” And this is how Let It Die came to be.
The stunning debut eventually went on to win two Juno Awards (the Canadian equivalent of the Grammys), one for Alternative Album of the Year and one for Best New Artist. It also went gold in both Canada and France. “I have a strange relationship with that record,” Feist grimaces. “Like, I never felt comfortable singing ‘Inside & Out’ live, especially as the disco version, because the song doesn’t feel natural to me. In fact, on Open Season [Feist’s remix album], I play ‘Inside and Out’ solo, which is how it felt more comfortable. But the French songs? No. I don’t speak French. I thought I was going to learn when I moved to Paris, but I didn’t.
“I also noticed that during the live shows, the covers started dropping off my set list like autumn leaves.” Feist is one of the few people who can use a falling autumn–leaf metaphor and get away with it.
But in the past year, unlike the precedent, the balladeer has stayed in true character long enough to produce her third record, The Reminder, a perfectly paced, equally disarming follow-up featuring collaborations with Gonzales, Jamie
Lidell, Mocky, Julian Brown of Apostle of Hustle, Ron Sexsmith, Afie J.
of Paso Mino, and Erik Glambeck Boe of Kings of Convenience.
The first thing I notice about the new album is that there are no covers. “It’s a confidence thing,” Feist explains. “At this point, I think I have enough strong material on my own that I don’t need to do covers anymore.”
“We were in this big ol’ house outside Paris,” says Jamie Lidell, the singer who released his critically acclaimed Multiply not too long ago. “Somewhat secluded. A full house with Feist and Gonzo, Mocky, Renaud Letang, Robbie Lackritz, not to mention the studio-owner guy, and his assistant and some other house people ... oh, and the cat and the dog.”
“A beautiful spiral staircase gave Feist a fine idea,” Lidell elaborates on a seemingly supernatural recording process. “She was to record a Dictaphone vocal part whilst descending the well. She captured the recording on the Dictaphone as we caught the halls and stairs singing in sympathy. A little digital magic later and there was the part as intended. For a moment, the house felt a little like a film set. The Reminder is more of a wild family picnic by the sea. It’s surrounded by activity. She’s caught in the market rustle.”
“In music, I’m looking for the goose-bump factor,” adds Mocky, a songwriter, producer, and Lidell’s creative partner, whose contribution proved invaluable on The Reminder (Feist was insistent that I interview Mocky for this article). “If there [are] goose bumps, then it’s working,” he says. “For the most part, I knew where Feist was going — [her] voice is lonely and yet reassuring at the same time. You feel it in your heart, not in your brain.”
“Mocky is an old friend and we wrote the song ‘So Sorry’ [the first track on The Reminder] together,” Feist says. She speaks of her collaborators with affection, and throughout our interview, she’s particularly careful to give credit to her colleagues. “I wanted to make a record with not just Gonzales in a studio. Mocky’s secret weapon is that he’s classically trained with the upright bass and plays the drums. So I asked Mocky, and he said, ‘Well, if you’re asking for my help based on my work on Multiply, you have to have Jamie there too.’ And I’m like, ‘Would Jamie come?’ And yeah, he totally did.”
The common thread among all of The Reminder’s participants is awesome admiration for Feist’s talent. Or, as Peaches tells me, “Feist has a voice like an angel and plays guitar like the devil!”
When I inquire about the typical problems that arise from having too many cooks in the kitchen, Mocky, Jamie, and Gonzo all insist that they were there in that house in Paris simply to help Feist capture her vision. That singular goal created an atmosphere of humility. “I was anxious not to interrupt the mood in the recording room, which was often very delicate,” Lidell says. “Feist was constantly amazing me as a singer and has it all in her already. Sometimes [she] just needed as little as a nod. I am still nodding.”
Ultimately, I discover that Feist is so damn enchanting because she’s gifted but not off-putting, possessing both a transcendent voice and a grounded humility. She’ll implicitly reject that she is the chanteuse or the seducer, but listen to that voice once — just once — and you’ll know that she’s in denial. It’s almost like listening to a model talk about how awkward she is in real life. But while sitting comfortably in the brightly lit lounge of the Hotel on Rivington, I accept this because if the denial inspires music like hers, well, in this instance, we can just pretend it’s a river in Egypt.
“I sang on one song on Peaches’ new record [Impeach My Bush],” Feist says, making one last attempt to prove that she doesn’t take herself seriously. “Eventually, she wrote me asking if she could put this picture of us in plastic bikinis in her CD booklet. And for a sec, I thought, ‘Can I still do this now that I’m Feist? Would it ruin the image that everyone has of me?’ But then that pushed me more to give her the permission to use it. And so it’s in there. Because, you know, I can’t live my life as how people think I am.”
And despite the fact that Feist isn’t wearing an aerobics uniform right now or sporting a red dreadlock, and regardless of the stylistic discrepancies between Bitch Lap-Lap, Placebo’s frontwoman, and the singer-songwriter that she is today, in reality, not much has changed. The restless soul is still vibrant and ever-present. Perhaps you could even say that the title of her newest record alludes to a mental note scribbled down in Feist’s conscience, a reminder that says, “No matter how accessible the music sounds, never let go of that defiant spirit.”
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