Interview: Feist

On record, Leslie Feist is the fairest dame of melancholy, but in the flesh a certain reputation precedes her. She’s the distant beauty whose airy-fairy streams of consciousness wind and whirl, leaving hapless interviewers none the wiser; the fame-shy indie superstar possessed of a (mostly dormant) icy streak who often chats bare nonsense. Alack, the hour is upon us and all hands point to not-very-interesting interviewee o’clock.

So when the Canadian singer-songwriter pokes her head out of a huge, arched doorway in a five-star London hotel and giggles, then yanks it back, still emitting mild hysterics, there is cause for minor alarm. Yet more confusingly, moments later everything is back to normal: when we actually enter the room it’s to be met by a sullen, willowy figure, back-turned and staring out a window twice her height, looking almost melodramatically pensive and forlorn. But perhaps that’s just what she wanted us to say.

It’s apt that this hotel boardroom is dominated by a table with 12 seats, 10 of which are conspicuous by their emptiness: if anything has defined Feist’s career to date, it’s that paradox of a mainstream motor powering an underground talent. Indeed, the song ‘Comfort Me’ from her new album Metals croaks with dewy images of a “big sky / tiny bird”, and that seems as succinct an epithet as any.

The 35-year-old Feist has had a career as unpindownable as the unsettled upbringing that sent her, brother Ben and their mother trekking here and there about the breadth of Canada over the years. She eventually settled in Toronto to pursue more fertile musical pastures in her late teens, ultimately joining and helping define the sprawling ranks of Broken Social Scene before self-releasing a solo record, Monarch (Lay Your Jewelled Head Down), in 1999. And, for better or worse, young Leslie’s detached relationship with mainstream culture provided precious few access points to pop artists.

“I was always fascinated by the difference between the strange two-dimensional power you see — someone like Madonna — when you’re eight,” she half-explains. “Your access to people — I mean, mine anyway, coming from a small town — you just hear the music. Then there would be this college newspaper that would potentially talk about the local music scene. But I don’t think at that age, when I was singing ‘True Blue’ around my bedroom or whatever… I don’t think I would’ve even made the connection that that’s a person, the same as I’m a person. I would’ve probably thought they were built inside the television.”

Not surprisingly, then, if you casually throw it out there that the multi-million selling pop singer is an international star, or at least a pretty big space-borne rock, you’ll see an uncomfortable frown, a violent, full-body grimace and, finally, laughter.

And through this we can’t help piecing the absence of a fame-happy role model together with her somewhat flimsy image as a pop figure. Did she miss that iconic, quasi-parental hero-figure as a youngster?

“No, I think [not having] that was a good thing,” she says, in a careless and cross-legged sway. “It wasn’t like I felt I was missing anything — I was totally unaware that there were magazines like Rolling Stone. So my mind sought out the things I was interested in — very few things, and you collect them and you hold onto them. You actually really harvest the stuff that you’re interested in, and you keep it inside you, and there’s no chance to see more.”

A noble ideal, sure, but what of the craving — a craving so compellingly wormy that it can only be part of human nature — to familiarise ourselves with every nook and cranny of popular figures? She has said she hates to be asked what she did between wrapping up promotion for her 2007 album The Reminder and getting to work on Metals, because that was her time…

“It just feels like what your aunt would ask you when she doesn’t know what else to say at some boring lunch,” she grumbles. “I just end up having to come up with stuff. That makes me feel weird and hollow.” She chuckles awkwardly, then, in an instant, something drops and settles and the embryonic laugh becomes heartier. “Which is just part of this equation. It’s not the end of the world. It’s just, you know, days and hours in five countries and that seems to be the biggest thing they’re interested in. At least I don’t have a scandal under my belt that I have to talk about for the rest of my life. That would be 100 times worse.”

In the years separating The Reminder from Metals — her fifth LP and third for Broken Social Scene-affiliated indie Arts & Crafts — Leslie has been determined to flick the spotlight away from her own successes. Look At What The Light Did Now, a warmly received 2010 documentary on the triumph of strong musical community, was at pains to stress the importance of outside favours and friendships in pulling together The Reminder. Meanwhile $200,000 — and a fair haul of canned food into the bargain — were racked up for various charities after Feist turned gig-merchandise proceeds over to better causes, and a fair wodge more was indirectly bulldozed in via her collaboration with Ben Gibbard for Red Hot fundraiser comp Dark Was The Night. She recorded ‘You & I’, a cosy update on the Woody Guthrie tune, with uncles of Americana Wilco, before setting sail to investigate climate change on a science research vessel. Come 2010, The Reminder’s moody ‘Limit To Your Love’ ballad was receiving the mortal sadface treatment from dubstep’s James Blake: “It’s cool to see a song that’s already had its own lifespan reborn in someone else’s repertoire,” she says. “I think it is better than my version”.

Metals is the storm after the storm. It balances a stylish refinement of Feist’s ever-delicate vocal execution with a bottom-heavy expansion of sonic horizons — a neat and risky trick to pull on the tightrope of a much-awaited return. It’s an altogether darker affair that slinks away from the 500 Days Of Summer-baiting, first-person love stories of The Reminder and predecessor Let It Die, with its second half in particular swerving into the kind of hell-raising foreign-territory you imagine will have marketing aficionados running the other way. Check the untethered, classic rock playground chants of ‘Undiscovered First’: “Is this the right river / For us to forge! / Is this the way to live / Is it wrong to want more!” — blithely and brilliantly rambunctious, yes, but not, you suspect, prime Silentnight advertising campaign material, like Let It Die’s ‘Mushaboom’ was.

Her two-year “sabbatical” — inspired by the realisation that home had become “a conceptual place; I didn’t live anywhere any more” — gave the indie veteran a welcome break from 11 years on the road. This meant returning to Canada and hooking up with long-time collaborators Gonzales (who shot much of his 2010 film Ivory Tower in Feist’s bedroom) and esteemed jazz-school graduate Dominic ‘Mocky’ Salole — two countryfolk she clearly has quite the platonic hard-on for, gushing, “Gonzo and Mocky are like my brothers; two of my best friends,” and such for a precious three or four minutes.

“The new peak for me was fusing that musical clarity between Gonzales and Mocky,” she explains of eventually starting the new album. “It’s a culmination of so many years, and so many roles we’ve played in each other’s things. To be alone in a cabin in the woods with fire crackling, and snow up to the windows outside, and having our three minds in there, and taking the stuff I’d written and expanding each piece…”

There goes another one into the ether but, hey, we got the gist. Admittedly it’s difficult to align Feist the waffler with the Feist we found cheerily poking her head out that doorway earlier on, but perhaps that’s what we should take from her. Popstars needn’t simply represent the apotheosis of any one dimension. Feist eschews the black and white (shyness versus showboating; clean-cut pomp versus self-conscious kookiness) flourishing instead with a rainbow of idiosyncrasies in-between — colours that a format such as The X Factor’s tends to render entirely redundant. It’s a question of, ‘Where next?’ after Metals — the first album she probably didn’t have any financial calling to record — that makes the last note one of lucid optimism, equal parts sturdy-willed diligence and potentially deluded modesty.

“I definitely feel like my identity was formed as a person by being an underdog for so many years,” she ponders. “And you always feel like any inch you gain is by your own sweat, so you feel this pure satisfaction; there’s a pride in being able to be super resourceful with having so little. That’ll always be something — no matter what the resources become. It’s the same mindset, you know? For me, I hope to be 15 albums deep if I can stay with that type of clear mind. And if it means taking two years off or 10, then that’s what I’ll need.”

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