leslie feist

Quirky Canadian Feist's third album has been one of the pop gems of 2007. And to think she used to rap with sock puppets ...

Alice Fisher
Sunday September 16, 2007
The Observer


OK, cool Londoners - we're going to sing together!' For a moment, the cool Londoners are undecided. They shuffle in the sweaty darkness of King's Cross's Scala. The small woman in lacy white doesn't look much of a match for their ambivalence, but she cheerfully rattles off instructions. After an ominous pause, the venue fills with a warm three-part harmony that holds until everyone's breath runs out. Leslie Feist - known simply as Feist - beams from under her thick fringe and launches into the wistful 'So Sorry', carried there by the audience's dying harmony.

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Feist has a knack for this. The 31-year-old Canadian, touring her third album, The Reminder, follows that July gig with more hotly anticipated UK dates later this month. She is being borne from continent to continent on a wave of critical adulation and the adoration of her fanbase. The tone of her album stands out in a year that, while defined by female singers, has been dominated by the brash Allen, Winehouse and Nash. Feist sings about parks, but old ladies don't get mugged in them. She compares her man to a Brandy Alexander. Her videos - for singles 'My Man My Moon' and most recently '1234' (which has just been picked up by Apple for an iPod promotion) - are exuberant, slightly nerdy dance numbers. Her songs are musically complex; the words sound pretty and mean whatever you want them to.
It's all rather grown up, and so it should be. Feist's been performing and writing since she was 15. She's already been part of a defining musical movement, as a collaborator with Nineties electroclash dance music titans Peaches and Gonzales. She seems quietly pleased by the response to her mature new sound. 'The vibe is positive,' she says when we talk before the Scala gig. 'I feel benevolent safety.'

Feist really does talk like this, in an energetic, upbeat way, like a Canadian tourist trying to make friends on the tube. It takes a while, sat in her rather messy London hotel room, to get used to her rambling , but the circuitous style suits her story. Her parents (dad an abstract painter; mum a ceramicist) divorced when she was young and she lived with her mother. Her earliest musical memory is 'listening to "Strawberry Fields" on a red plastic Mickey Mouse record player' aged five. She started singing in the school choir and continued for the next 10 years. 'Choir is the purest introduction to harmony because you feel it physically. You're tucked inside something enormous.'

As a teenager her shaved head and Doc Martens led girls at school in Calgary to ask her to join their punk band, Placebo, which played for five years until Feist damaged her vocal cords and was forced to quit. She quit Calgary, too, heading to Toronto to stay with her father. There she recorded her debut album, Monarch, with a grant from the Canadian government. 'It was so much work and not much fun,' she recalls. 'I wasn't proud of the music and I felt too alone.'

Life changed in 1998 when she moved into a flat above a Toronto sex shop with friend-of-a-friend Merrill Nisker, internationally known as Peaches. 'She was a very responsible roommate,' says Feist. 'She paid the phone bill. She dealt with groceries.' But this is not how Peaches will be best remembered. She was the first lady of electroclash, and dildos are an integral part of her stage act. Feist joined her, rapping with sock puppets, dressed in a leotard, under the stage name Bitch Lap Lap. Feist also met musician/producer Gonzales, appearing in his Electro-Cabaret show, and joined Toronto indie supergroup Broken Social Scene, a roster of 19 musicians from local bands (her partner is Kevin Drew, one of the band's founder members). By 2001, Feist was in the coolest band in Canada and making an international name for herself.

When Gonzales and Peaches emigrated to Berlin, Feist soon followed. They were the vanguard of a Canadian invasion that's since brought Arcade Fire, Metric and the Dears to European attention. Feist started to write her own, very different, songs, and Gonzales asked if he could produce them. 'It was a spontaneous decision to fill up a week off in between concerts,' he says. 'For me, it's like putting on plays with the talented little sister I never had.'

The resultant Let It Die, recorded in Paris in 2003, started her on the road to solo recognition; one track, 'Mushaboom', is familiar from Lacoste's fragrance TV ads. McDonald's tried to buy the rights first. She refused.

After 33 months of touring, Feist finally recorded Let It Die's follow-up, The Reminder, in 2006, in a manor house just outside Paris. Despite her career having already spanned continents, genres, bands and even stage names, Feist says this feels like a beginning for her. 'This is a different thing. There's a residue of the electroclash mixed with the Social Scene sound. I'm bringing it all together. I can pick from all the things I've done.'

And she does it very well. As Gonzales says: 'She sold half a million Let it Die albums in three years and almost the same amount of The Reminder in three months.' But not everyone is pleased with her new direction. Electroclash was one of the last truly independent youth movements, never subsumed by the mainstream, and some of those who remember Bitch Lap Lap fondly have been hurt to find her renamed and relaunched by a major record label, singing about parks and cocktails. 'I've had questions from indie journalists - "how do you feel about your record selling in Wal-Mart?" But it's selling in indie stores, too. I feel comfortable with my decisions.'

Feist still doesn't see herself as a solo artist: 'I feel like I'm in a band [she tours with a regular backing band] - if I didn't, it would just be a yucky commercial exercise and the gigs would be less emotional.' But ask her what she's most looking forward to right now, and after fiddling with her water bottle for a while, she decides that it's the Police's invitation to sing with them on an MTV Unplugged session and having her photo taken by Annie Leibovitz. She shakes her head at how tiring and difficult Leibovitz's job must be. I point out that Leibovitz is not touring with four guys and playing until 11pm every night. Feist sits up straight and stops fiddling. 'Actually I tour with 11 guys and work until 3am.' A rare moment of pride. She should feel it more often - she deserves to.

・ Feist plays at Nottingham Social, 23 Sep; London Shepherds Bush Empire, 24 Sep; Dublin Tripod, 25 Sep; Glasgow Oran Mor, 26 Sep; Bristol Trinity Arts, 28 Sep

Canadian singer-songwriter Leslie Feist performed at Carnegie Music Hall last Thursday as part of a four-city tour to promote her sophomore album, The Reminder. Feist, who got her start in the band Broken Social Scene, released her first solo album in 2004, and gained notoriety with the single "Mushaboom," featured in Lacoste perfume commercials.

Released in May 2007, The Reminder follows in the footsteps of the first release with eclectic, bluesy songs written by the singer. The track list contains upbeat pop numbers like, "I Feel It All" and "1234" (currently in ads for the new iPod nano), as well as more jazz-influenced songs such as "My Moon My Man" and "Brandy Alexander." Guest producers from Canada, France, and Germany give many of the songs a different sound, yet all of the material is unified by Feist's ethereal voice, the focal point of every song.

Feist's live performance on Thursday was no exception. Entranced by Feist's lyrics and voice, the audience members often fell silent, and Feist even asked them to get up and cheer at one point. Challenging Carnegie Music Hall's formal environment, she encouraged her audience to pretend "you are at your favorite sticky-floored night club in Pittsburgh."

Feist asked the audience to participate several other times during her performance. She divided the audience into three parts, assigning each the note of a chord, in addition to letting the audience sing the backup for her well-known songs.

Although she is most known for her voice, Feist surprised those of us unfamiliar with her other talents ― she ripped on the guitar and accompanied herself on piano for two of her songs. Vocally, Feist kept her listeners on the edge of their seats with her jazz improvisation and her well-known descending octave trill "oh-oh-oh-oh" (for example, before the choruses in "I Feel It All") that she slipped in almost every one of her songs.

Aside from her talent, the most pleasant part of the evening was Feist's warm personality and her ability to converse with the audience. This was a nice contrast to the lead singer of the opening band, Rogue Wave, who was barely audible as he mumbled between songs. Feist was complimentary of her fans, Pittsburgh, and even the venue. "How do you get to Carnegie Hall?" she joked about the venue, "You practice. Well, it looks like we practiced!" To a fan who screamed out to Feist that she should wake up a man who'd fallen asleep in the first row, Feist responded, "It's alright. He can sleep ― I sing lullabies. We can get him a pillow backstage if he'd like."

Maybe it was the comfy seats of Carnegie Music Hall; the high, detailed ceilings; even the old organ pipes that served as a backdrop for the performance, but watching Feist perform was like going to a classical performance. Many of the songs were backed by instruments unusual to pop performances, like the trumpet and French horn. Feist also looped her own voice to create what sounded like a choir of Feists. But whether one or many, Feist put on a concert both enthralling and inspiring.