Feist on Feist
Canadian star chats with Uptown about her success as a singer/songwriter
John Kendle

Last year, Leslie Feist became indie Canada’s latest ‘overnight sensation’ with her second solo album, Let it Die.

Like most non-Idol participants who suddenly reach the public’s ears and eyes, Feist took much longer than one night to create the intoxicating blend of sensuous, simple café pop that marks the recording.

Now 29, she began her public musical life with a Calgary punk band called Placebo. After losing her voice at age 19, she went to Toronto to see a voice doctor and ended up staying, latching onto that city’s creative, independent spirit by recording and releasing her first solo album, Monarch, in 1999.

A solo career wasn’t necessarily Feist’s goal, though. She simply wanted to be involved. To that end, she took on a guitar-playing gig with By Divine Right and then sang on The Teaches of Peaches album with the avant hip hop performer — who just happened to be her roommate. That led to collaborations with electronic/hip hop performer/producer Chilly Gonzales (a Canadian who eventually based himself in Paris). Feist was also a part of the loose collective of Toronto performers who recorded and released Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It in People album.

So yes, Leslie Feist certainly paid her dues, and she has the indie street cred to prove it. Yet all of that activity wasn’t preparation enough for the hubbub created by Let it Die. Recorded in three sessions in Paris by Gonzales and Renaud Letang, the album was first released in France, where it sold 70,000 copies and was a media sensation. Canadian success followed soon after, and the album earned Feist best new artist and best alternative album Juno Awards.

Since April, Feist has been touring the United States, supporting the release of Let it Die on Interscope imprint Cherry Tree Records.

Uptown recently e-mailed Feist a list of questions that she apparently answered on a plane while on tour:

Uptown: Why does the Cherry Tree/Interscope release of Let it Die have a different cover? Did they request it? How did you feel about the change?

Feist: Cherry Tree had said to me that they wanted a different cover, and I was all for it. I had an album cover in my hard drive that a friend had made me four years ago for “when I made my next album,”… long before I knew I was going to. I was happy to be able to tie a bow around the story and have this cover ‘cover’ this album.

U: What have your learned about performing from your touring of the past year? Do you enjoy live performance? Why or why not?

F: Touring with Gonzales and Peaches got me into thinking about shows as performances and entertainment. Like vaudeville, if your timing was even a second off, you’d get tomatoes thrown at you. The audience were harsh, harsh critics. Nowadays they just cross their arms over their chest and just look at you with squinty eyes and one eyebrow raised. That’s the equivalent to getting tomatoes thrown at you.

And what I loved about the Gonzales and Peaches show was it was just unabashed entertainment. And I’d played with a lot of bands that were like ‘Oops, how’d I get up on the stage… I don’t know how I got here, I’m just going to look at my feet and pretend...’ And that felt real for that music. But for Peaches and Gonzales you gotta entertain and respect the fact that people carried their bodies to wherever you’re putting on the show and put on the show for them. Luckily that music really serves that idea well.

I think that the point is just to be at home with the music and put on a show that suits it, that you feel natural about. It wouldn’t make sense any other way. That’s why I called this project Feist and not Bitch Lap Lap (as she was billed when touring with Peaches) because these songs didn’t need to be wrapped in a cape with sock puppets (her Bitch Lap Lap uniform). Even though that could be fun. But they are my own and this is a voice that doesn’t need any superpowers.

It was just very simple and very, I don’t know… I didn’t need to lift cars off people or lift buildings up. It’s the opposite, the absence of anything big with a lot of muscle.

U: You play a song from the Anthology of American Music and a Bee Gees tune, among others. What do you look for in a song to cover? Do you keep a list of songs you might want to sing or record? What’s on it now?

F: Well, covers I never had ever been drawn to before. I had a matter of pride in my early grunge days and the punk-band era. It was half that we weren’t capable of playing other people’s songs and also that the thing was to write your own. But later on, if you love a song well enough you’re going to try to see if you can figure out how to play it, and that’s what I did with Secret Heart and it’s probably one of the first covers I ever learned. And then I learned a song by my friend Tony Sherr called Sacramento and later ended up rewriting the lyrics and calling it Lonely Lonely on my record. But basically, I had never been interested in playing covers. But when I was on tour with Gonzales it was two years of singing his songs, which is kind of like playing covers. Now I play a Kinks song, a Keith Richards song, but I’d prefer to sing my own.

U: Can you even fathom what your next album might sound like? When might you record it? With whom will you work?

F: The live show these days is a bridge between Let it Die and the next album, so that’s the most accurate answer.