When Leslie Feist was five-years-old, there was a rule at the dinner table. Her mom laid down the law. No singing during meals! Otherwise, the future four-time Grammy nominee wouldn’t stop humming around the house, so her mom had to institute the dinnertime directive.
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Feist’s singing got to be so common that her brother would hide little cassette recorders around their home because she would sing stream-of-consciousness melodies so often. Then he would “torture” her by playing it all back. But her ambition paid off. She started choir when she was six, even going to an elementary school that focused on it. That prepared her for perhaps the most serendipitous moment of her early career. Feist, whose newest album, Multitudes, arrives Friday (April 14), says she began going to punk shows and one day in high school a few girls approached her about it. They’d seen her at the gigs. So, they offered her the chance to sing in their band.
“I don’t know where I would be, where I would have ended up in life,” Feist tells American Songwriter, “if they hadn’t basically handed me that role that I continue to hold.”
From then, her career undertook a steady evolution. A big part of that was due to the company she kept. The Canadian-born Feist was embedded in a musical community as she rose through the ranks. From playing “so many roles in so many people’s bands” to just watching another guitar player’s hands on a fretboard, she absorbed the life. She played to 12 people sometimes and 20,000 at others, depending on the gig, the tour, the day.
“I was able to slowly gain a quieter and quieter internal ecosystem of what my own creativity is about,” she says.
In her parents, Feist was blessed with two distinct examples. From each of her folks, who split up when Feist was young, she gained important perspectives. Her mother, she says, was practical. A single mom in the ’80s, she was strong and independent. Feist recalls the first time she borrowed money from her mom to buy her hardcore band’s first run of merch T-shirts. Her mother invoiced her back and charged her interest. Not for the money as much for the responsibility. In that way, Feist says, she instilled in her the “scaffolding” of financial responsibility, the consequences of her actions.
Her father, somewhat on the other hand, was an expressionist painter. Her whole life she watched him fill blank canvases, creating “his own private vocabulary with his craft.” He was philosophical and abstract.
The “1234” singer says she sang well before she played instruments. She didn’t play guitar until 19. But growing up, her father gave her a cassette four-track Tascam. Using it, she was able to turn her voice into an orchestra. Layering herself and creating stacks of harmonies. She sang through pedals and amplifiers. She understood tone because of singing. And the power that can occur when one sings quietly, hushed. Like a whisper. It’s a strategy she’s returned to on Multitudes. She wrote with a nylon string guitar, working with a new digital eight-track recorder. A new mom, Feist also has a new baby at home, so there was a need to be quiet, while still being vocally impactful. Doing all this, she laughs, reminded of being younger, in a small apartment with roommates.
“Leaning right in and singing right into someone’s ear,” she says. “More like pillow talk.”
Before Feist was a Grammy nominee, she played in myriad bands around Toronto. She even co-founded the popular musical collective Broken Social Scene. Equally adept at group dynamics or performing solo, she could fold into a group and it would feel like a potluck supper. Or she could play solo, a beam of light. Around this time, the turn of the 21st century, she was also performing with electro-punk artist Peaches.
In 1999, she released her first solo record, Monarch. In 2004, Let It Die was next. Then The Reminder dropped in 2007 and it included the hit song, “1234,” a track that would, in many ways, change her life.
“It was such great fortune,” Feist says. “But it’s always a double-edged sword when one song supernovas and eclipses the body of work that it came from.”
The track, she says, did a lot of work for her and for the rest of her albums. It was first featured in a famous Apple commercial, putting her music in front of millions. She’s since been on Sesame Street, and the track was featured in an episode of The Office. In the end, the song gave her a great gift. It afforded her a kind of autonomy, she says. She’s “achieved tenure,” meaning she belongs, and no one can toss her out. The song gave her the freedom to only answer to herself. It also afforded her help. Coming from largely the DIY world, more hands make for light work. That new help came from her label, Polydor.
“That song helped me keep my head above water,” Feist says, “and achieve autonomy. That’s the only true measure of success in the music industry—the ability to make your own decisions on your own timelines.”
With that earned time, Feist has done much. She’s released three more records, including now Multitudes, which is her first since 2017. The album was born from an experimental show she recently performed. In it, Feist upends traditional audience-singer forms, like eliminating the stage itself. It was a bit “radical for me,” she says. Recently, Feist underwent many hefty, “transformative” times, including losing her father and adopting a baby daughter. Not to mention the recent traumatic global events of the past few years everyone took in. So, she needed, through art, to work out the big knots.
In the show, Feist didn’t repeat any songs from her past catalog. She put herself squarely in the present moment, she says. There was no raised stage in the show, either, instead, she and the audience were on the “same playing field.” It was important for Feist to feel level and comfortable in the work while harboring hard questions that couldn’t be answered. That’s what the music was for. Each song a flashlight to help move through. Standouts that made it to Multitudes include the delightful, hypnotizing, “Calling All the Gods,” and pastoral, dynamic, “Borrow Trouble.”
“[Music] stops time,” Feist says. “It takes something very amorphous, and it gives it language. It takes feelings and gives them some space.”
Photo by Sara Melvin & Colby Richardson / Courtesy UMusic
