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Feist’s new album was recorded in the winter of 2015-16 in California, Paris and New York State.

Singer's first album in six years is an intimate work of someone who felt lost, but managed to work her way out of the malaise

"I don't have the capacity to lay a plan in place. The songs require things to be there or not to be there, and the songs on this album were asking for nearly a solo album."

Sitting in a small room stuffed with guitars, keyboards and small vintage amplifiers, Leslie Feist is nevertheless speaking about a record that called for little orchestration. Pleasure, the mono-named artist's first album since 2011's Metals, is an intimate work of someone who had felt lost and weighed down, but who managed to work her way out of the malaise.

Recorded in the winter of 2015-16 in California, Paris and New York State, Pleasure is rougher around the edges than its immaculate predecessor. Stripping down to the barest of elements, Feist, with collaborator Mocky, produced an affecting work of stark, soul-bearing immediacy that might surprise those who identify her by her buoyant and breezy biggest hits, Mushaboom and 1234.

"In retrospect, you know there's value in going through what you have to go through," she says, speaking about her between-album unease. "Whatever was required that might have felt like a burden in retrospect became the flame you were forged by. But that's not known until later, when you're on the other side of it."

On the other side now, the singer-songwriter is happy to chat up Pleasure, which is the name of the album, and also the objective. "That's what we're here for," she exclaims on the title track.

Going through the album track by track with The Globe, Feist elaborates on such things as her poetry. She says she made a concerted effort to avoid her go-to instinct for metaphors using natural elements. "I wanted to catch myself in that knee-jerk reaction of invoking nature instead of telling myself what it is I'm trying to say."

Um, but Feist, you have a song on the album called The Wind. "Okay, well that's fine, because it's not a metaphor," she says, with an infectious laugh. "It's the actual wind I'm singing about."

Fair enough. Spare of metaphor and instrumentation, and including a song titled Baby Be Simple, the album Pleasure is Feist at her most elemental.

Pleasure

The title-track recalls the brittle tone of the English band XX and flashes of PJ Harvey ferocity, while establishing the stripped-down aesthetic to follow: " Mocky and I understood that we needed to make sure the arrangements didn't get away from me."

I Wish I Didn't Miss You

Waltzing, devastating and softly raw, the second track finds the singer-songwriter as fragile as we've ever heard her: "When I've been in various dark fogs of my own life, what I end up doing is looking for clues, from literature, from a film, from an artists' statement at a show. So, while this song is personal, the hope is that it becomes personal to people other than me."

Get Not High, Get Not Low

After I Wish I Didn't Miss You, a balmier tone is called for: "This song is a clue that I'm handing to myself. That when you go to the extremes, you're only visiting each one. You're a visitor in the darkness and the joy. There's a depth in the middle, because you're not a visitor. Also, I was just really happy to get Saskatchewan in a song. It's kind of a mouthful."

Lost Dreams

Even with the line, "Every night you go to sleep, a chance to have another dream," this woodsy ballad isn't about nocturnal visions. "It's about anything you get a fragment of and then it's gone. I wasn't thinking of it as a relationship with your subconscious, or what dreams mean. But that's the beauty of putting a song out. Now whatever anyone thinks it means is what it means. I love that."

Any Party

Strummy, chummy and carrying some punch, Any Party has Feist uplifted and with chant-happy friends: "This is the hinge. It turns a corner. You begin in an introspective, existential place – a bit of a minefield of your own sense of misunderstanding life and feeling lost. But Any Party is a declaration of love – it's at home with itself. I realized after I wrote it that it was a nod to Nick Lowe's Let's Stay in and Make Love."

A Man is Not His Song

More sing-along moments here – and a never-saw-that-coming metal outro – on a song about a songwriter's blurred lines: "I have seen people take on the characteristics or the persona that they invented to tell their stories. I don't have a final verdict on that. I've watched myself as well. It's not a natural thing to be talking about yourself. So, this song is a study of the relationship between real people writing things beyond them."

The Wind

With a grungy acoustic guitar, electro decorations and Colin Stetson's horns, this one feels painterly: "A few years ago, I started going up to Georgian Bay. I started to see the Group of Seven and those famous Douglas firs that face the same direction. Spending time sitting on a rock, the wind is coming from hundreds of miles a way, with nothing to stop it for days. The line, 'And the trees for their hundred years, lean north like calligraphy.' That's the Douglas firs. That's Tom Thomson."

Century

That's Pulp's Jarvis Cocker making like Carl Sagan on the end-song soliloquy. Punchy and snarling, this one seems like a fun one to play live: "There were songs on Metals that were difficult to play, because the arrangements were leaning on the cast of characters who played on them. But this album is different. It's an easy batch of songs to jump into."

Baby Be Simple

This introspective track is about building one's self from the ground up: "The joke about dogs is that they feel every moment is an eternity. If they're lamenting, they've always been lamenting and they always will be. And when they're excited, they've always been excited. They forget they were just lamenting. I'm a little like that."

I'm Not Running Way

The album's bluesiest number offers sly guitar licks from Feist, who sings about the endlessness and elusiveness of maturing: "Our heads have been six and nine and 16 and 26. Isn't that what growing up is, the accumulation of being all those versions of yourself? I feel I'm at this point where I'm supposed to rise out of all that into this adulthood – an arrival point. But it seems not to be the case."

Young Up

A searching album finds a soft landing: "It's a message in a bottle to my future self. I had very slowly felt this real bone fatigue – a lethargy of the weight of decision-making. It was causing me to get way older than I am. Just in a stodginess. Your sense of humour is the first thing to go. So, this song is a message to that part in me that I feel will have a tendency to reoccur. The message is 'don't be a living dead, in a type of habitual repetition that ceases to mean anything.' That's my aspiration for the 70-year-old Leslie: That she has that message in mind, first and foremost."