In an unconventional production with limited capacity, Feist invites the audience to reclaim the stage with MULTITUDES, an intimate performance of new material. The production, developed by Feist with legendary designer Rob Sinclair (David Byrne's American Utopia, Peter Gabriel, Tame Impala), is an in-the-round performance experienced in custom 18-point D&B Soundscape immersive audio. A radically communal and topsy-turvy concert, MULTITUDES muddies the roles between audience and performer. It's formulated to bring people together as they re-emerge from lockdown while providing an outlet for connection between artist, art, and community.
Conceived during and in response to a pandemic period when stages had to remain empty and communal joy was interrupted, MULTITUDES offers a reclaiming of the stage to be performed surrounded by her audience. Featuring all new music written and performed by Feist, accompanied by Todd Dahlhoff and Amir Yaghmai, the multi-Grammy nominee welcomes audiences to sit back and watch, or raise their voices in collective anonymity. Anything goes.
~~~~~~~~
Feist's first album in six years reflects on secrets and shame, loneliness and tenderness, care and fatigue and is at it's core a study on self-awareness. As the fourth full-length from the Canadian singer/songwriter, Pleasure builds off the warm naturalism of the Polaris Prize-winning Metals and emerges as Feist's most formally defiant and expansive work so far. And while each album marks a departure from the next,Pleasure finds the 4-time grammy nominee again showing the extraordinary depth of her artistry.
With its endless movement from austere stillness to frenzied intensity, Pleasure is both painfully intimate and impossibly vast, fine-spun and anarchic, spellbinding and shattering. Recorded over the course of 3 months--Pleasure was co-produced by Feist with longtime collaborators Renaud Letang and Mocky. In addition to reaffirming Feist as a cagily inventive guitar player, the album threads her shapeshifting and often haunting vocals into sparse and raw arrangements.
------
For nearly a decade, Leslie Feist did not stop moving. Her 2004 Juno award winning album Let It Die led right into 2007s The Reminder, which earned her four Grammy nominations, six Juno wins, the Shortlist Music Prize, and the opportunity to teach Muppets to count on Sesame Street. She made her Saturday Night Live debut and toured the world. She covered an album with Beck, recorded with Wilco and watched Stephen Colbert shimmy in a sequined 1234 jumpsuit, and made a documentary about her visual collaborators on The Reminder. And then, finally, after the seventh year, Feist rested.
Theres a lot of output on tour, she says. and in the downtime afterwards I was a spongeI was trying to absorb as much as I put out for seven years. I was being still and trying to learn how to be quiet and remember that silence isnt aggressive, she adds. Sometimes after being in a lot of noise and movement, silence and stillness can seem completely terrifying.
When Feist was ready to make music again, she had very different ideas about how to shatter the quiet. I had played so many shows with such care, I really wanted to turn up again, she says, referring to her early days as a guitarist in punk and rock bands.
She wrote the album over 3 autumn months in 2010 in a tiny garage behind her house, after a year away from the spotlight. While the lyrics she has crafted often have an affectingly melancholic undercurrent, the arrangements, in which Feist ups her reputation as a guitarist, unfailingly lift the ear out of melancholy and into inspiration.
In January 2011, her longtime collaborators Chilly Gonzales and Mocky arrived in Toronto to arrange 12 songs that would become her fourth studio album, Metals. The trio spent a frigid month Trying to sound like we had played together as long as wed collectively known each other, around 50 years, then decamped for Californias rugged Big Sur coastline to record them.
Recording can be a weightless free float from your day-life, and I like to pick places with certain fertile qualities that can give me a visual hook that Im there to do something other than what I would otherwise do. And that clean line between land and sea, the graphic edge of the continent pointing out towards the east. meaning not the Atlantic next stop Europe feeling, but next stop somewhere youve never been. Feist says. Plus, you are somewhere that looks completely unfound and yet its been so perfectly recorded literarily. Steinbeck made 1000 albums there! Henry Miller and Anais Nin probably considered that line between land and sea, too. And on top of it, we truly found the perfect room to build a studio in, perched on the cliffs. A giant empty space.
The songs Feist and her bandGonzales, Mocky, percussionist Dean Stone, and keyboard whiz Brian LeBartonlaid down over two and a half weeks in February- plumb different emotional paths than her previous work. Time passes, time grabs you as it goes past, and then it changes you. You begin to catch patterns. she muses. I feel a little bit more like a narrator now. Rather than saying, heres my truth, Im able to say, heres something Ive just observed to be true. Which depending on the day can also be absolutely not true. Theres less certainty with time, as much as youd assume the opposite to be the case.
Metals is not a reaction to The Reminder, but Feist did learn a few lessons playing her acclaimed albums songs night after night. On [The Reminders] I Feel It All, to have a chorus, Ooh Ill be the one wholl break my heart/Ill be the one to hold the gun you sing that 300 times and eventually the universe listens. Okay, sure, we can do that for you. So this time I wanted to cast the spell 300 times saying something thats more of an observation, or adages and morales that you find embroidered in junk shops. A stitch in time saves nine or pretty is as pretty does. Good people can act badly. You can get things right after getting them very, very wrong. Maybe theres a reason those things are chosen to pass down as a sort of folk wisdom. theyre just the truths that people noted long enough to get out their embroidery needles.
Metals songs range from low rumbling and moody ambiences to brutal and intense, as if it sonically maps the fog rolling in and the resulting cracking of thunder. Theres a lot more chaos and movement and noise than Ive had before, Feist says. I allowed for mistakes more than I ever have, which end up not being mistakes when you open things up and make room for them. It was about un-simplifying things and leaning on these masterful minds I have so much respect for. We were sort of testing the air, like a sea captain licks his finger to see which way the wind is coming from. It was less Brill Building and more naturalistic.
Some of the results wound up being more intimate portraits of relationships, like Get It Wrong, Get It Right, which Feist describes as a slideshow of a season in a place and the seasons between two people. But more often she found herself gravitating to the universal. Its a calm declaration, We hold these truths to be self-evident she muses. After everything settles theres really no blame to be laid in a lot of these situations. People are being their true selves, everybody is in their story trying to get to the next chapter. There are good times that are as good as the bad times are bad.
Brainstorming along those lines helped lead her to the album title Metals. I was thinking about quiet, raw, dormant ore versus the highly engineered result of forging that into skyscrapers, Feist explains. and by the same equation, theres the way you feel versus the way you wish you felt. The raw material is one thing and what our minds turn it into are completely different states. Also, it echoes the word mettle, as in, a man proves his mettle by how his fortitude carries him through from raw act to reaction.
Sonically, Feist and her tight-knit crew strove to forge a connection between the future and the past. Theres more interest for me when you overlap histories, you know? When you use the modern facts and advantages of when were living to bang on things and break things. she says. Theres a bunch of human yelling into the air together, all this group singing thats all over the record, that felt ancient. And (keyboardist) Brian LeBarton really deepened our access to this modern-ancient concept. He has this amazing ability to make modern synthesizers sound extremely ancient. And he can make a celeste, which is basically a harpsichord, sound like its from Bladerunner. He glued the arrangements Mocky and Gonz and I had made together, truly.
Ultimately, Metals aesthetic has a deliberate patience, elemental wildness and natural beauty that echoes Feists new found observations on time. I read a National Geographic article about soil and modern farming, she says. The point is for food to grow, the point isnt for it to grow all at once and never grow again. Soil does its job, but unless you let it rest it cant regenerate its own minerals and do the same thing again. You just have to let it lay there under the sun, dry out, get rained on and be still a little while. That she did. And now shes back.
-----
She was born Leslie Feist in Calgary in the mid-'70s but goes by her surname when it comes to making music for a living. The Jhay-inspired songstress got her start playing in a high-school punk band called Placebo (not to be confused with the U.K. modern rock act of the same name). After winning a battle of the bands contest, Placebo played their first gig opening for the Ramones, and for the next five years, Feist perfected her rock ways. Touring cross-Canada in the end took its tool on Feist. She had strained her voice so much, she was told she'd never sing again. To regain focus and medical assistance from another specialist, Feist fled her hometown to settle in Toronto in 1998. She spent six months holed up by herself in a basement with a four-track recorder. She bought a guitar as a means of temporarily replacing her voice and began crafting a natural pop sound. A year later, Feist was playing guitar for By Divine Right. She went on to play in front of countless stadium crowds as By Divine Right opened for the Tragically Hip across North America. Somewhere in between touring with some of Canada's biggest acts, Feist found time to record and self-released her first solo album, 1999's Monarch (Lay Down Your Jeweled Head). After playing some smaller local gigs in and around Toronto, Feist moved in with electroclash rap vixen Peaches in 2000. Peaches christened Feist Bitch Lap-Lap and from there, Feist sang on and toured in support of Peaches' debut album, Teaches of Peaches. Not one to stay too long in once place, Feist joined Broken Social Scene in the recording of their sophomore effort, You Forgot It in People... - MacKenzie Wilson, All Music Guide
show less
Conceived during and in response to a pandemic period when stages had to remain empty and communal joy was interrupted, MULTITUDES offers a reclaiming of the stage to be performed surrounded by her audience. Featuring all new music written and performed by Feist, accompanied by Todd Dahlhoff and Amir Yaghmai, the multi-Grammy nominee welcomes audiences to sit back and watch, or raise their voices in collective anonymity. Anything goes.
~~~~~~~~
Feist's first album in six years reflects on secrets and shame, loneliness and tenderness, care and fatigue and is at it's core a study on self-awareness. As the fourth full-length from the Canadian singer/songwriter, Pleasure builds off the warm naturalism of the Polaris Prize-winning Metals and emerges as Feist's most formally defiant and expansive work so far. And while each album marks a departure from the next,Pleasure finds the 4-time grammy nominee again showing the extraordinary depth of her artistry.
With its endless movement from austere stillness to frenzied intensity, Pleasure is both painfully intimate and impossibly vast, fine-spun and anarchic, spellbinding and shattering. Recorded over the course of 3 months--Pleasure was co-produced by Feist with longtime collaborators Renaud Letang and Mocky. In addition to reaffirming Feist as a cagily inventive guitar player, the album threads her shapeshifting and often haunting vocals into sparse and raw arrangements.
------
For nearly a decade, Leslie Feist did not stop moving. Her 2004 Juno award winning album Let It Die led right into 2007s The Reminder, which earned her four Grammy nominations, six Juno wins, the Shortlist Music Prize, and the opportunity to teach Muppets to count on Sesame Street. She made her Saturday Night Live debut and toured the world. She covered an album with Beck, recorded with Wilco and watched Stephen Colbert shimmy in a sequined 1234 jumpsuit, and made a documentary about her visual collaborators on The Reminder. And then, finally, after the seventh year, Feist rested.
Theres a lot of output on tour, she says. and in the downtime afterwards I was a spongeI was trying to absorb as much as I put out for seven years. I was being still and trying to learn how to be quiet and remember that silence isnt aggressive, she adds. Sometimes after being in a lot of noise and movement, silence and stillness can seem completely terrifying.
When Feist was ready to make music again, she had very different ideas about how to shatter the quiet. I had played so many shows with such care, I really wanted to turn up again, she says, referring to her early days as a guitarist in punk and rock bands.
She wrote the album over 3 autumn months in 2010 in a tiny garage behind her house, after a year away from the spotlight. While the lyrics she has crafted often have an affectingly melancholic undercurrent, the arrangements, in which Feist ups her reputation as a guitarist, unfailingly lift the ear out of melancholy and into inspiration.
In January 2011, her longtime collaborators Chilly Gonzales and Mocky arrived in Toronto to arrange 12 songs that would become her fourth studio album, Metals. The trio spent a frigid month Trying to sound like we had played together as long as wed collectively known each other, around 50 years, then decamped for Californias rugged Big Sur coastline to record them.
Recording can be a weightless free float from your day-life, and I like to pick places with certain fertile qualities that can give me a visual hook that Im there to do something other than what I would otherwise do. And that clean line between land and sea, the graphic edge of the continent pointing out towards the east. meaning not the Atlantic next stop Europe feeling, but next stop somewhere youve never been. Feist says. Plus, you are somewhere that looks completely unfound and yet its been so perfectly recorded literarily. Steinbeck made 1000 albums there! Henry Miller and Anais Nin probably considered that line between land and sea, too. And on top of it, we truly found the perfect room to build a studio in, perched on the cliffs. A giant empty space.
The songs Feist and her bandGonzales, Mocky, percussionist Dean Stone, and keyboard whiz Brian LeBartonlaid down over two and a half weeks in February- plumb different emotional paths than her previous work. Time passes, time grabs you as it goes past, and then it changes you. You begin to catch patterns. she muses. I feel a little bit more like a narrator now. Rather than saying, heres my truth, Im able to say, heres something Ive just observed to be true. Which depending on the day can also be absolutely not true. Theres less certainty with time, as much as youd assume the opposite to be the case.
Metals is not a reaction to The Reminder, but Feist did learn a few lessons playing her acclaimed albums songs night after night. On [The Reminders] I Feel It All, to have a chorus, Ooh Ill be the one wholl break my heart/Ill be the one to hold the gun you sing that 300 times and eventually the universe listens. Okay, sure, we can do that for you. So this time I wanted to cast the spell 300 times saying something thats more of an observation, or adages and morales that you find embroidered in junk shops. A stitch in time saves nine or pretty is as pretty does. Good people can act badly. You can get things right after getting them very, very wrong. Maybe theres a reason those things are chosen to pass down as a sort of folk wisdom. theyre just the truths that people noted long enough to get out their embroidery needles.
Metals songs range from low rumbling and moody ambiences to brutal and intense, as if it sonically maps the fog rolling in and the resulting cracking of thunder. Theres a lot more chaos and movement and noise than Ive had before, Feist says. I allowed for mistakes more than I ever have, which end up not being mistakes when you open things up and make room for them. It was about un-simplifying things and leaning on these masterful minds I have so much respect for. We were sort of testing the air, like a sea captain licks his finger to see which way the wind is coming from. It was less Brill Building and more naturalistic.
Some of the results wound up being more intimate portraits of relationships, like Get It Wrong, Get It Right, which Feist describes as a slideshow of a season in a place and the seasons between two people. But more often she found herself gravitating to the universal. Its a calm declaration, We hold these truths to be self-evident she muses. After everything settles theres really no blame to be laid in a lot of these situations. People are being their true selves, everybody is in their story trying to get to the next chapter. There are good times that are as good as the bad times are bad.
Brainstorming along those lines helped lead her to the album title Metals. I was thinking about quiet, raw, dormant ore versus the highly engineered result of forging that into skyscrapers, Feist explains. and by the same equation, theres the way you feel versus the way you wish you felt. The raw material is one thing and what our minds turn it into are completely different states. Also, it echoes the word mettle, as in, a man proves his mettle by how his fortitude carries him through from raw act to reaction.
Sonically, Feist and her tight-knit crew strove to forge a connection between the future and the past. Theres more interest for me when you overlap histories, you know? When you use the modern facts and advantages of when were living to bang on things and break things. she says. Theres a bunch of human yelling into the air together, all this group singing thats all over the record, that felt ancient. And (keyboardist) Brian LeBarton really deepened our access to this modern-ancient concept. He has this amazing ability to make modern synthesizers sound extremely ancient. And he can make a celeste, which is basically a harpsichord, sound like its from Bladerunner. He glued the arrangements Mocky and Gonz and I had made together, truly.
Ultimately, Metals aesthetic has a deliberate patience, elemental wildness and natural beauty that echoes Feists new found observations on time. I read a National Geographic article about soil and modern farming, she says. The point is for food to grow, the point isnt for it to grow all at once and never grow again. Soil does its job, but unless you let it rest it cant regenerate its own minerals and do the same thing again. You just have to let it lay there under the sun, dry out, get rained on and be still a little while. That she did. And now shes back.
-----
She was born Leslie Feist in Calgary in the mid-'70s but goes by her surname when it comes to making music for a living. The Jhay-inspired songstress got her start playing in a high-school punk band called Placebo (not to be confused with the U.K. modern rock act of the same name). After winning a battle of the bands contest, Placebo played their first gig opening for the Ramones, and for the next five years, Feist perfected her rock ways. Touring cross-Canada in the end took its tool on Feist. She had strained her voice so much, she was told she'd never sing again. To regain focus and medical assistance from another specialist, Feist fled her hometown to settle in Toronto in 1998. She spent six months holed up by herself in a basement with a four-track recorder. She bought a guitar as a means of temporarily replacing her voice and began crafting a natural pop sound. A year later, Feist was playing guitar for By Divine Right. She went on to play in front of countless stadium crowds as By Divine Right opened for the Tragically Hip across North America. Somewhere in between touring with some of Canada's biggest acts, Feist found time to record and self-released her first solo album, 1999's Monarch (Lay Down Your Jeweled Head). After playing some smaller local gigs in and around Toronto, Feist moved in with electroclash rap vixen Peaches in 2000. Peaches christened Feist Bitch Lap-Lap and from there, Feist sang on and toured in support of Peaches' debut album, Teaches of Peaches. Not one to stay too long in once place, Feist joined Broken Social Scene in the recording of their sophomore effort, You Forgot It in People... - MacKenzie Wilson, All Music Guide
In an unconventional production with limited capacity, Feist invites the audience to reclaim the stage with MULTITUDES, an intimate performance of new material. The production, developed by Feist with legendary designer Rob Sinclair (David Byrne's American Utopia, Peter Gabriel, Tame Impala), is an in-the-round performance experienced in custom 18-point D&B Soundscape immersive audio. A radically communal and topsy-turvy concert, MULTITUDES muddies the roles between audience and performer. It's formulated to bring people together as they re-emerge from lockdown while providing an outlet for connection between artist, art, and community.
Conceived during and in response to a pandemic period when stages had to remain empty and communal joy was interrupted, MULTITUDES offers a reclaiming of the stage to be performed surrounded by her audience. Featuring all new music written and performed by Feist, accompanied by Todd Dahlhoff and Amir Yaghmai, the multi-Grammy nominee welcomes audiences to sit back and watch, or raise their voices in collective anonymity. Anything goes.
~~~~~~~~
Feist's first album in six years reflects on secrets and shame, loneliness and tenderness, care and fatigue and is at it's core a study on self-awareness. As the fourth full-length from the Canadian singer/songwriter, Pleasure builds off the warm naturalism of the Polaris Prize-winning Metals and emerges as Feist's most formally defiant and expansive work so far. And while each album marks a departure from the next,Pleasure finds the 4-time grammy nominee again showing the extraordinary depth of her artistry.
With its endless movement from austere stillness to frenzied intensity, Pleasure is both painfully intimate and impossibly vast, fine-spun and anarchic, spellbinding and shattering. Recorded over the course of 3 months--Pleasure was co-produced by Feist with longtime collaborators Renaud Letang and Mocky. In addition to reaffirming Feist as a cagily inventive guitar player, the album threads her shapeshifting and often haunting vocals into sparse and raw arrangements.
------
For nearly a decade, Leslie Feist did not stop moving. Her 2004 Juno award winning album Let It Die led right into 2007s The Reminder, which earned her four Grammy nominations, six Juno wins, the Shortlist Music Prize, and the opportunity to teach Muppets to count on Sesame Street. She made her Saturday Night Live debut and toured the world. She covered an album with Beck, recorded with Wilco and watched Stephen Colbert shimmy in a sequined 1234 jumpsuit, and made a documentary about her visual collaborators on The Reminder. And then, finally, after the seventh year, Feist rested.
Theres a lot of output on tour, she says. and in the downtime afterwards I was a spongeI was trying to absorb as much as I put out for seven years. I was being still and trying to learn how to be quiet and remember that silence isnt aggressive, she adds. Sometimes after being in a lot of noise and movement, silence and stillness can seem completely terrifying.
When Feist was ready to make music again, she had very different ideas about how to shatter the quiet. I had played so many shows with such care, I really wanted to turn up again, she says, referring to her early days as a guitarist in punk and rock bands.
She wrote the album over 3 autumn months in 2010 in a tiny garage behind her house, after a year away from the spotlight. While the lyrics she has crafted often have an affectingly melancholic undercurrent, the arrangements, in which Feist ups her reputation as a guitarist, unfailingly lift the ear out of melancholy and into inspiration.
In January 2011, her longtime collaborators Chilly Gonzales and Mocky arrived in Toronto to arrange 12 songs that would become her fourth studio album, Metals. The trio spent a frigid month Trying to sound like we had played together as long as wed collectively known each other, around 50 years, then decamped for Californias rugged Big Sur coastline to record them.
Recording can be a weightless free float from your day-life, and I like to pick places with certain fertile qualities that can give me a visual hook that Im there to do something other than what I would otherwise do. And that clean line between land and sea, the graphic edge of the continent pointing out towards the east. meaning not the Atlantic next stop Europe feeling, but next stop somewhere youve never been. Feist says. Plus, you are somewhere that looks completely unfound and yet its been so perfectly recorded literarily. Steinbeck made 1000 albums there! Henry Miller and Anais Nin probably considered that line between land and sea, too. And on top of it, we truly found the perfect room to build a studio in, perched on the cliffs. A giant empty space.
The songs Feist and her bandGonzales, Mocky, percussionist Dean Stone, and keyboard whiz Brian LeBartonlaid down over two and a half weeks in February- plumb different emotional paths than her previous work. Time passes, time grabs you as it goes past, and then it changes you. You begin to catch patterns. she muses. I feel a little bit more like a narrator now. Rather than saying, heres my truth, Im able to say, heres something Ive just observed to be true. Which depending on the day can also be absolutely not true. Theres less certainty with time, as much as youd assume the opposite to be the case.
Metals is not a reaction to The Reminder, but Feist did learn a few lessons playing her acclaimed albums songs night after night. On [The Reminders] I Feel It All, to have a chorus, Ooh Ill be the one wholl break my heart/Ill be the one to hold the gun you sing that 300 times and eventually the universe listens. Okay, sure, we can do that for you. So this time I wanted to cast the spell 300 times saying something thats more of an observation, or adages and morales that you find embroidered in junk shops. A stitch in time saves nine or pretty is as pretty does. Good people can act badly. You can get things right after getting them very, very wrong. Maybe theres a reason those things are chosen to pass down as a sort of folk wisdom. theyre just the truths that people noted long enough to get out their embroidery needles.
Metals songs range from low rumbling and moody ambiences to brutal and intense, as if it sonically maps the fog rolling in and the resulting cracking of thunder. Theres a lot more chaos and movement and noise than Ive had before, Feist says. I allowed for mistakes more than I ever have, which end up not being mistakes when you open things up and make room for them. It was about un-simplifying things and leaning on these masterful minds I have so much respect for. We were sort of testing the air, like a sea captain licks his finger to see which way the wind is coming from. It was less Brill Building and more naturalistic.
Some of the results wound up being more intimate portraits of relationships, like Get It Wrong, Get It Right, which Feist describes as a slideshow of a season in a place and the seasons between two people. But more often she found herself gravitating to the universal. Its a calm declaration, We hold these truths to be self-evident she muses. After everything settles theres really no blame to be laid in a lot of these situations. People are being their true selves, everybody is in their story trying to get to the next chapter. There are good times that are as good as the bad times are bad.
Brainstorming along those lines helped lead her to the album title Metals. I was thinking about quiet, raw, dormant ore versus the highly engineered result of forging that into skyscrapers, Feist explains. and by the same equation, theres the way you feel versus the way you wish you felt. The raw material is one thing and what our minds turn it into are completely different states. Also, it echoes the word mettle, as in, a man proves his mettle by how his fortitude carries him through from raw act to reaction.
Sonically, Feist and her tight-knit crew strove to forge a connection between the future and the past. Theres more interest for me when you overlap histories, you know? When you use the modern facts and advantages of when were living to bang on things and break things. she says. Theres a bunch of human yelling into the air together, all this group singing thats all over the record, that felt ancient. And (keyboardist) Brian LeBarton really deepened our access to this modern-ancient concept. He has this amazing ability to make modern synthesizers sound extremely ancient. And he can make a celeste, which is basically a harpsichord, sound like its from Bladerunner. He glued the arrangements Mocky and Gonz and I had made together, truly.
Ultimately, Metals aesthetic has a deliberate patience, elemental wildness and natural beauty that echoes Feists new found observations on time. I read a National Geographic article about soil and modern farming, she says. The point is for food to grow, the point isnt for it to grow all at once and never grow again. Soil does its job, but unless you let it rest it cant regenerate its own minerals and do the same thing again. You just have to let it lay there under the sun, dry out, get rained on and be still a little while. That she did. And now shes back.
-----
She was born Leslie Feist in Calgary in the mid-'70s but goes by her surname when it comes to making music for a living. The Jhay-inspired songstress got her start playing in a high-school punk band called Placebo (not to be confused with the U.K. modern rock act of the same name). After winning a battle of the bands contest, Placebo played their first gig opening for the Ramones, and for the next five years, Feist perfected her rock ways. Touring cross-Canada in the end took its tool on Feist. She had strained her voice so much, she was told she'd never sing again. To regain focus and medical assistance from another specialist, Feist fled her hometown to settle in Toronto in 1998. She spent six months holed up by herself in a basement with a four-track recorder. She bought a guitar as a means of temporarily replacing her voice and began crafting a natural pop sound. A year later, Feist was playing guitar for By Divine Right. She went on to play in front of countless stadium crowds as By Divine Right opened for the Tragically Hip across North America. Somewhere in between touring with some of Canada's biggest acts, Feist found time to record and self-released her first solo album, 1999's Monarch (Lay Down Your Jeweled Head). After playing some smaller local gigs in and around Toronto, Feist moved in with electroclash rap vixen Peaches in 2000. Peaches christened Feist Bitch Lap-Lap and from there, Feist sang on and toured in support of Peaches' debut album, Teaches of Peaches. Not one to stay too long in once place, Feist joined Broken Social Scene in the recording of their sophomore effort, You Forgot It in People... - MacKenzie Wilson, All Music Guide
read more
Conceived during and in response to a pandemic period when stages had to remain empty and communal joy was interrupted, MULTITUDES offers a reclaiming of the stage to be performed surrounded by her audience. Featuring all new music written and performed by Feist, accompanied by Todd Dahlhoff and Amir Yaghmai, the multi-Grammy nominee welcomes audiences to sit back and watch, or raise their voices in collective anonymity. Anything goes.
~~~~~~~~
Feist's first album in six years reflects on secrets and shame, loneliness and tenderness, care and fatigue and is at it's core a study on self-awareness. As the fourth full-length from the Canadian singer/songwriter, Pleasure builds off the warm naturalism of the Polaris Prize-winning Metals and emerges as Feist's most formally defiant and expansive work so far. And while each album marks a departure from the next,Pleasure finds the 4-time grammy nominee again showing the extraordinary depth of her artistry.
With its endless movement from austere stillness to frenzied intensity, Pleasure is both painfully intimate and impossibly vast, fine-spun and anarchic, spellbinding and shattering. Recorded over the course of 3 months--Pleasure was co-produced by Feist with longtime collaborators Renaud Letang and Mocky. In addition to reaffirming Feist as a cagily inventive guitar player, the album threads her shapeshifting and often haunting vocals into sparse and raw arrangements.
------
For nearly a decade, Leslie Feist did not stop moving. Her 2004 Juno award winning album Let It Die led right into 2007s The Reminder, which earned her four Grammy nominations, six Juno wins, the Shortlist Music Prize, and the opportunity to teach Muppets to count on Sesame Street. She made her Saturday Night Live debut and toured the world. She covered an album with Beck, recorded with Wilco and watched Stephen Colbert shimmy in a sequined 1234 jumpsuit, and made a documentary about her visual collaborators on The Reminder. And then, finally, after the seventh year, Feist rested.
Theres a lot of output on tour, she says. and in the downtime afterwards I was a spongeI was trying to absorb as much as I put out for seven years. I was being still and trying to learn how to be quiet and remember that silence isnt aggressive, she adds. Sometimes after being in a lot of noise and movement, silence and stillness can seem completely terrifying.
When Feist was ready to make music again, she had very different ideas about how to shatter the quiet. I had played so many shows with such care, I really wanted to turn up again, she says, referring to her early days as a guitarist in punk and rock bands.
She wrote the album over 3 autumn months in 2010 in a tiny garage behind her house, after a year away from the spotlight. While the lyrics she has crafted often have an affectingly melancholic undercurrent, the arrangements, in which Feist ups her reputation as a guitarist, unfailingly lift the ear out of melancholy and into inspiration.
In January 2011, her longtime collaborators Chilly Gonzales and Mocky arrived in Toronto to arrange 12 songs that would become her fourth studio album, Metals. The trio spent a frigid month Trying to sound like we had played together as long as wed collectively known each other, around 50 years, then decamped for Californias rugged Big Sur coastline to record them.
Recording can be a weightless free float from your day-life, and I like to pick places with certain fertile qualities that can give me a visual hook that Im there to do something other than what I would otherwise do. And that clean line between land and sea, the graphic edge of the continent pointing out towards the east. meaning not the Atlantic next stop Europe feeling, but next stop somewhere youve never been. Feist says. Plus, you are somewhere that looks completely unfound and yet its been so perfectly recorded literarily. Steinbeck made 1000 albums there! Henry Miller and Anais Nin probably considered that line between land and sea, too. And on top of it, we truly found the perfect room to build a studio in, perched on the cliffs. A giant empty space.
The songs Feist and her bandGonzales, Mocky, percussionist Dean Stone, and keyboard whiz Brian LeBartonlaid down over two and a half weeks in February- plumb different emotional paths than her previous work. Time passes, time grabs you as it goes past, and then it changes you. You begin to catch patterns. she muses. I feel a little bit more like a narrator now. Rather than saying, heres my truth, Im able to say, heres something Ive just observed to be true. Which depending on the day can also be absolutely not true. Theres less certainty with time, as much as youd assume the opposite to be the case.
Metals is not a reaction to The Reminder, but Feist did learn a few lessons playing her acclaimed albums songs night after night. On [The Reminders] I Feel It All, to have a chorus, Ooh Ill be the one wholl break my heart/Ill be the one to hold the gun you sing that 300 times and eventually the universe listens. Okay, sure, we can do that for you. So this time I wanted to cast the spell 300 times saying something thats more of an observation, or adages and morales that you find embroidered in junk shops. A stitch in time saves nine or pretty is as pretty does. Good people can act badly. You can get things right after getting them very, very wrong. Maybe theres a reason those things are chosen to pass down as a sort of folk wisdom. theyre just the truths that people noted long enough to get out their embroidery needles.
Metals songs range from low rumbling and moody ambiences to brutal and intense, as if it sonically maps the fog rolling in and the resulting cracking of thunder. Theres a lot more chaos and movement and noise than Ive had before, Feist says. I allowed for mistakes more than I ever have, which end up not being mistakes when you open things up and make room for them. It was about un-simplifying things and leaning on these masterful minds I have so much respect for. We were sort of testing the air, like a sea captain licks his finger to see which way the wind is coming from. It was less Brill Building and more naturalistic.
Some of the results wound up being more intimate portraits of relationships, like Get It Wrong, Get It Right, which Feist describes as a slideshow of a season in a place and the seasons between two people. But more often she found herself gravitating to the universal. Its a calm declaration, We hold these truths to be self-evident she muses. After everything settles theres really no blame to be laid in a lot of these situations. People are being their true selves, everybody is in their story trying to get to the next chapter. There are good times that are as good as the bad times are bad.
Brainstorming along those lines helped lead her to the album title Metals. I was thinking about quiet, raw, dormant ore versus the highly engineered result of forging that into skyscrapers, Feist explains. and by the same equation, theres the way you feel versus the way you wish you felt. The raw material is one thing and what our minds turn it into are completely different states. Also, it echoes the word mettle, as in, a man proves his mettle by how his fortitude carries him through from raw act to reaction.
Sonically, Feist and her tight-knit crew strove to forge a connection between the future and the past. Theres more interest for me when you overlap histories, you know? When you use the modern facts and advantages of when were living to bang on things and break things. she says. Theres a bunch of human yelling into the air together, all this group singing thats all over the record, that felt ancient. And (keyboardist) Brian LeBarton really deepened our access to this modern-ancient concept. He has this amazing ability to make modern synthesizers sound extremely ancient. And he can make a celeste, which is basically a harpsichord, sound like its from Bladerunner. He glued the arrangements Mocky and Gonz and I had made together, truly.
Ultimately, Metals aesthetic has a deliberate patience, elemental wildness and natural beauty that echoes Feists new found observations on time. I read a National Geographic article about soil and modern farming, she says. The point is for food to grow, the point isnt for it to grow all at once and never grow again. Soil does its job, but unless you let it rest it cant regenerate its own minerals and do the same thing again. You just have to let it lay there under the sun, dry out, get rained on and be still a little while. That she did. And now shes back.
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She was born Leslie Feist in Calgary in the mid-'70s but goes by her surname when it comes to making music for a living. The Jhay-inspired songstress got her start playing in a high-school punk band called Placebo (not to be confused with the U.K. modern rock act of the same name). After winning a battle of the bands contest, Placebo played their first gig opening for the Ramones, and for the next five years, Feist perfected her rock ways. Touring cross-Canada in the end took its tool on Feist. She had strained her voice so much, she was told she'd never sing again. To regain focus and medical assistance from another specialist, Feist fled her hometown to settle in Toronto in 1998. She spent six months holed up by herself in a basement with a four-track recorder. She bought a guitar as a means of temporarily replacing her voice and began crafting a natural pop sound. A year later, Feist was playing guitar for By Divine Right. She went on to play in front of countless stadium crowds as By Divine Right opened for the Tragically Hip across North America. Somewhere in between touring with some of Canada's biggest acts, Feist found time to record and self-released her first solo album, 1999's Monarch (Lay Down Your Jeweled Head). After playing some smaller local gigs in and around Toronto, Feist moved in with electroclash rap vixen Peaches in 2000. Peaches christened Feist Bitch Lap-Lap and from there, Feist sang on and toured in support of Peaches' debut album, Teaches of Peaches. Not one to stay too long in once place, Feist joined Broken Social Scene in the recording of their sophomore effort, You Forgot It in People... - MacKenzie Wilson, All Music Guide
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