We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us. – John Steinbeck
She counted to four, and then she stopped. Leslie Feist, an artist with a voice of silver fog and a hit single that made Apple and Sesame Street sing, was out of control. Not in the wild way, but in the way of someone on a roll who is pushed, nudged and tugged for more. Knocked askew by the whirlwind success of her 2007 album, The Reminder, and its not one, not two, not three, but four Grammy nominations and five Juno trophies, she withdrew two years ago, musically exhausted from the grind.
Now she’s back, with Metals, an elegant, mellifluous work by an artist recharged and in charge. Recorded in a barn in Big Sur, Calif., her fourth album reflects a period of solitude, with a lyrical structure taking inspiration from the writings of John Steinbeck, an author from that neck of the woods.
Another album, another trip, then, for the Toronto-based singer who just wanted to get her hands back on the wheel.
“I ended up veering off-track, going to a lot of places that, not that I didn’t want to go, but that I wasn’t deciding upon,” Feist said recently, recalling the final days of The Reminder’s marketing cycle. “I was just being brought there.”
Specifically the 35-year-old singer-songwriter was referring to a tour of Canadian hockey arenas in late 2008. Speaking over coffee at a hotel in downtown Toronto, Feist is in pretty form – blue jeans, blouse, red lipstick and her hair pulled back – as opposed to the more Bohemian style she often presents.
For an artist so concerned with the artful presentation of her work, transforming those barns into a space for music was a “super-interesting puzzle” to solve, but the tour wasn’t completely pleasurable. “Buses would arrive in the underground parking of those arenas, and you’d wake up and be in a concrete bunker, following the duct-tape arrows to some food and a shower,” she said. “Some of those days you wouldn’t go outside and see the light of day at all.”
Looking back at the experience now, Feist isn’t bitter – it just wasn’t her thing. “It was more reactive, trying to keep up,” she said. “It’s not where I wanted to continue to be.”
Jeffrey Remedios, co-founder of the Arts & Crafts label, the Canadian home of Broken Social Scene and that band’s breakout star, Feist, recalls that final Reminder tour with mixed feelings. “I was at those shows, and they were beautiful, incredible,” he says. “It was unfortunate to read, about her [feeling] creatively dead, because she never expressed it to me.”
During our talk, the indie superstar is relaxed and amiable, with no celebrity airs at all. When a publicist tells me to wrap up the interview, Feist is actually embarrassed. “They should give you more time,” she whispered, cupping a hand to her mouth. “You’re The Globe and Mail, after all.” On whether or not her dulcet-toned voice is insured, she laughs. “The only thing sure about it is that I’ll lose it from time to time, particularly after a night of too many glasses of wine.”
As for not expressing any reservations over the arena tour at the time, the likable singer attributes her stoicism to her Alberta upbringing. “I was reacting to all of it with this stalwart kind of Prairie sensibility,” she said. “It’s about sweat and ingenuity and adaptability necessary to survive.”
Not long after that, Feist received a phone call from Canadian author Michael Ondaatje, who was about to board a ship to the Arctic to investigate climate change – a trip the singer had just taken herself. “He said to me ‘I just have this instinct that you should draw up the drawbridge. At some point you have to cut yourself off from the traffic and find a new vocabulary.’”
What Ondaatje was talking about was retreating, and finding the starting point for writing again. “I needed to take enough time off to feel reorientated,” Feist explained. “To do something relevant for my own sake, and to feed my own curiosity about all of this again.”
