Feist: ‘songs are the perfect medium for the unanswerable’

Singer-songwriter Feist returns with hard-earned wisdom on her first new album in six years, the bracing Multitudes

Feist. Picture: Sarah Melvin & Colby Richardson

Canadian singer-songwriter Feist returns with her first new album in six years, Multitudes.

Leslie Feist, 47, has had a freaky career. In the three-decades she’s been in a musician she’s fronted the Calgary punk band Placebo (no, not that one); toured with fellow Canadians Peaches and Gonzales; has been a one-time member of Broken Social Scene; acted alongside Cillian Murphy in a languorous short film; and guest-starred on Sesame Street.

In the 2000s, she scored a mid-career hit with her iPod commercial sync ‘1234’. The single’s subsequent album, The Reminder, made Feist a platinum-selling star in Canada. But she didn’t seem all that interested in vying for commercial success, she retreated, releasing a series of increasingly stark, introspective, arty albums — often with years long breaks in between.

Multitudes, Feist’s sixth album, was penned in isolation in her “little shed in LA” and the forests of her native Canada. The writing was bookended by two transformative events — the birth of her adopted daughter, and shortly after, the shock death of her father. “I feel grave and heavy-hearted half the time and then laugh harder than I ever used to be able to,” she tells The Australian.

The songs were workshopped during a series of “intensely communal” shows during 2021 and 2022, at a time when the world began to tentatively dip its toe back into live-music. Working with production designer Rob Sinclair, who designed David Byrne’s Tony Award-winning show American Utopia, Feist crafted an immersive concert in which navigated the new songs in real time at the centre of a venue, while crowds circled around her. The result is an album that is heavy in atmosphere and free from preciousness or obfuscation. A quiet storm of songs about birth, death, ancestry and re-emergence — with the exception of the glorious eruption that is lead single ‘In Lightning’.

Feist 'Borrow Trouble' Picture: Mary Rozzi

What are you getting at with the idea of “Multitudes”?

Time has been folding over itself. There are these portals in time where I feel simultaneously a grandmother, a 5-year-old, and the mother of a 3 years old. My daughter will be rolling around in a blanket and I’ll remember exactly the feeling as if I’m instantly her age again and all of these memory selves are either doing or watching or wishing to be in the blanket, in a state of utter certainty that their singular moment of observation is the one real thing. But they all are, and increasingly, they all are all at once.

This album was written alone at a time when you imagined that no one would potentially ever hear it. However, the record was built upon these experimental live shows that toured throughout 2021 and 2022. How was it creating an album that was conceived both in solitude and communally?

Yes, the songs were written in my little shed in LA and my little bit of forest in Canada, during different eras of lockdown. It went on for so long that, yes, there were times I couldn’t imagine how or if it would ever lift. The tour came a long while after when imagining how it would lift gave way to designing how it might be able to feel AS it lifted. We made that show to speak to that exact moment, the re-emerging from so much communal solitude.

There are a lot of heavy feelings in this album. Its creation was bookended by the birth of your first child, the loss of your father, and the general gravity of the last few pandemic years. How did you manage to hack through the weeds and write about it?

I suppose I was lucky that I write songs. Songs are containers for questions, the perfect medium for the unanswerable and aren’t obliged to speak to conclusion. They can be whatever shape needed to hold whatever shape needed. So I just put my questions there.

What have you learned about yourself since becoming a mother? Has it informed your writing in any way?

I’m still working that out. I feel grave and heavy-hearted half the time and then laugh harder than I ever used to be able to, so it’s still a real mystery.

You said that the experimental Multitudes shows were about “chipping away any grandiosity.” What did you mean by that?

I guess I meant that we had all been through the great generational leveller, and on the inside of my private life I’d feel that sort of triple fold. Being on stage can sometimes sort of indicate that you capital K KNOW something, and I felt that performing a truth that I didn’t believe to be true, which would have been anything declarative, would have been disingenuous. We built the show to echo that levelling that had occurred, to make space for the mutuality of our solitudes.

Six years is a long time between albums. I read that prior to the release of Pleasure, you got into woodworking. How have you been spending your time between that release and Multitudes?

Ha! Well I toured Pleasure for 2 years and then became a mother and a global pandemic hit pretty much at the same time. So I’ve been reeling and living in equal parts.

Throughout your career, you’ve messed with the formula that we’ve come to expect from artists. You took a hard left after your breakout album The Reminder, and with the release of Pleasure, you sent out a questionnaire to journalists. With the Multitudes concerts, you experimented with the boundaries of a live show. Where does this desire to play come from?

It must be from a lifetime of playing shows, relating to people so intimately but from a strange remove. The times when circumstances dissolved expectations and people showed up differently, I found myself so excited by the newness. Warmth shows up so readily, willingness and momentum and synergy and curiosity and mutual respect too. The unexpected, when it catches me by surprise, is such a gift that I eventually started to create scenarios where that would get a nudge.

What was on your mind when you wrote the lyric “So good at picturing the life that I was gonna be left out of, rather than the one I‘d made” from ‘Borrow Trouble’?

Well in the context of that song, the idea that you can make a bad situation worse is at the core. The idea that our perspectives can skew the facts, that whatever we choose to look at is what we’ll see.

Multitudes is out Friday 14 April