TORONTO
The Canadian singer and songwriter Leslie Feist, who performs and records simply as Feist, is about to release her third album of new material.
Podcast: Q & A with Feist by Jon Pareles (
Feist performing with Broken Social Scene, a group of friends that evolved into a rock band, in Atlanta last year.
ON the way to the video shoot for a song named “1 2 3 4,” Leslie Feist called her father on her cellphone, urging him to drop by the studio. “I’m going to dance like in ‘Fame,’ ” bubbled Feist, a petite 31-year-old brunette who uses her last name for her solo recording career. “I’m going to be carried around on the shoulders of 50 people, like Madonna in ‘Material Girl,’ only minus the pearls and the back muscles.”
She wasn’t exaggerating. “1 2 3 4,” which appears on her new album, “The Reminder” (Cherry Tree/Interscope), is an easy-swinging tune, almost like a nursery rhyme, that grows into a mass chorus. Tucked into it are lyrics that celebrate the intensity of teenage bonds and feelings: “Money can’t buy you back the love that you had then.” The video clip, to be completed in just two days of rehearsals and one of shooting, would be a big live production number: an uninterrupted, uneditable one-camera take.
Four dozen dancers in color-coordinated thrift-store clothes surrounded Feist, raising her overhead and, at one point, flipping her. The camera swooped around, amid and above them, revealing geometric patterns like a Busby Berkeley sequence. Feist had traded her usual T-shirt and jeans for a flashy blue-sequined pantsuit and pointy golden high heels, which pinched her feet. “It’s not the most pleasant sensation,” she said after dancing in them through take after take. “But it’s for the razzle-dazzle.”
What’s a nice indie-rocker doing in a scene like this? Courting a potential mainstream audience while offering something as substantial as it is catchy.
Feist’s third album of new material, “The Reminder” is due for release May 1. It’s the album that should transform her from the darling of the indie-rock circuit to a full-fledged star, and do it without compromises. “The Reminder” is a modestly scaled but quietly profound pop gem: sometimes intimate, sometimes exuberant, filled with love songs and hints of mystery.
This album is all Feist, unlike her 2004 album, “Let It Die.” She wrote or collaborated on every song except the traditional “Sea Lion Woman.” “The Reminder” is also her first album to arrive facing sizable expectations. “Let It Die” sold 400,000 copies worldwide, 118,000 of them in the United States, and earned Feist a devoted audience among musicians, critics and concertgoers. When she tours this time around, Feist will have a luxury: a seated audience in theaters rather than her former circuit of rock clubs. She is booked at Massey Hall, Toronto’s equivalent of Carnegie Hall, and she comes to Town Hall in Manhattan on June 11.
As an album “The Reminder” has some echoes of “Let It Die.” It too starts with a kind of bossa nova, “So Sorry,” and eases through folk-rock, ballads and electronica. Feist’s voice, clear and sustained with sultry flickers of vibrato, stays serenely in the foreground, and the music takes its time, even in upbeat songs like the first single, “My Moon My Man,” powered by a few thumping piano notes.
Yet where “Let It Die” dipped into private melancholy, then backed off with a final string of other people’s songs, “The Reminder” reaches deeper. Feist, whose conversation is often a stream of poetic imagery, said over a cup of tea, “I’m on the archaeological dig to find the place where my heart ended up.”
In her new love songs Feist apologizes, confesses to longing, hints at betrayals and misunderstandings and wonders what might have been. Her voice is self-possessed yet unguarded, and it hovers in arrangements that are often modest — just a handful of musicians playing together in a room — but can also proffer gleaming instrumental hooks and nonsense syllables that invite singalongs. The songs find equipoise within heartache.
Feist named the album “The Reminder” as “a pivotable riddle: something that could change and feed in and didn’t necessarily have a concrete point to it,” she more or less explained. “It just felt vague enough and open-ended enough to be able to encapsulate all the things I hoped the record would morph into.”
While making the album she tried not to feel commercial pressure. “I wasn’t thinking about the reaction to ‘Let It Die,’ ” she said. “My mind decided to create a benevolent blank slate on the whole making of the album. I saw a bunch of faces on all my touring, and they had moved their bodies from their homes to the gig, and that was a certain amount of trust. And now I’m just going to trust them.”
Jason Charles Beck, a Canadian keyboardist better known as Gonzales, was a producer for both “Let It Die” and “The Reminder.” The thought of making a hit album was “the elephant in the room,” he said by telephone from Studio Ferber in Paris. “Feist comes from an indie-rock world, where it’s sacrilege to admit any kind of ambition. But I had 100 percent in my mind the idea that we should have as much material as possible that could be played on the radio or resonate with a huge bunch of people. We already have the built-in reflex not to get behind anything that’s going to be hollow. And when you have an artist with this kind of credibility, the idea is to communicate to as many people as possible without doing something ridiculous.”
