Words: Viviane Kertesz

Shutter: Courtesy of EMI Music Canada

She’s a longtime member of indie collective Broken Social Scene and got her start as a punk rock vocalist. She has performed with Peaches, her former roommate, under the moniker “Bitch Laplap." In France, her songs serve as the backdrop for movie soundtracks—listen for the Canadian chanteuse’s sultry voice in Paris, Je T'aime—and made-for-TV perfume ads; here at home, her concerts sell out, the radio loves her, and she has already won four statues, two for Best New Artist and Best Alternative Album at the 2005 Juno awards. Little wonder this amazing homegrown talent need only go by her last name.

KLUBLIFE: You did some co-writing with Chilly Gonzales on Let It Die. What was the joint songwriting process like with him? And how did “Gatekeeper” come about?
FEIST: Gonzo’s such an old friend that there’s no self-consciousness at all with him and actually we spend most of our time jackassing around. So every now and then when something beautiful is born of a jackassing easygoing time then it’s so much easier to recognize it as beautiful, than when you’re sitting around with pen and paper trying to make something beautiful, you know? And his piano playing is world-class: he’s bar none my favourite pianist I’ve ever heard. And he has this way of taking away unnecessary flourishes and just getting right to the point. 
A song like “Gatekeeper,” I had written it years before, I had written it walking. I remember somehow being stranded on the Lakeshore in Toronto down by the Harbourfront and needing to get home, and I lived at Queen and Bathurst. It was winter and there were no more buses and I just couldn’t find a taxi and I ended up walking for about an hour in the freezing cold and I remember writing “Gatekeeper” on that walk. Like the whole—all the lyrics, all the melody, the chorus, everything, in my head. And then telling myself “I’m not going to record it when I get home. If I remember it when I wake up, then it’s worth remembering.” And then I did, and I remembered it for, you know, four years after that.

KLUBLIFE: Amazing to think that you might have woken up and not remembered it.

FEISTI think at that time I had never written anything like that and I just kind of thought “Well, what’s this? And where could it fit in the music that I make?” and “How could this work?” I wouldn’t even have had a clue of how to begin to turn this into something that’s understandable for my world I lived within. You know what I mean? I think I just sort of took if for granted. And then we had done all these sessions for Let It Die, and we kind of were—it was really dawning on us that we were making a record—and then on the last day Gonzo said “Do you have anything else? I mean, we’ve got this other day in the studio, we’ve got like 8 hours still and nothing else to work on.” And I said, “Well, there’s this melody,” and I just started to sing it to him and he pulled a half-broken nylon string guitar out from the corner and said “Should it go like this?” This is the story of our life, that he knows a thousand more chords than I do, so he’ll play all these insane chords, and I’ll say “No, more like…darker…no, lighter…no, like up a bit from there.” So it was literally, like that: we just sat and played the song and wrote the bridge together and literally within 10 minutes the version that’s on the album was almost like the first time it was ever played.

KLUBLIFE:  Open Season has remixes and some alternate versions from Let It Die including collaborations with Jane Birkin, Postal Service, k-os and Mocky. Why did you feel it was important to put out that album?
FEIST: I didn’t really think it was important, actually, I just thought these songs existed and all these new…you know, the songs from Let It Die had gone out and played dress-up and had their own party. And they’d met people I hadn’t ever met and they’d gone hanging out in people’s studios that I’d never really gone to, and I really liked this concept of the songs going off and having their own life. 
KLUBLIFE: As a member of Broken Social Scene, what do you like best about being in an indie collective?
FEIST: Oh jeez. It’s part The Breakfast Club, it’s part The Big Chill, it’s part Titanic, it’s part The Muppet Show, and I guess being the friends we are, we can just keep changing channels and redefining what it is to spend that time together, and we just do it on the stage. 
KLUBLIFE: You’ve collaborated with all kinds of Canadian and international artists, like Apostle of Hustle, By Divine Right, Kings of Convenience, Ron Sexsmith, The New Deal and Peaches. Which musical artists both local and worldwide do you love to play with and will you continue to play with?
FEIST: Jason Collett.
KLUBLIFE: Who are some people who’ve helped you with your musical career or education that you’re grateful to?
FEIST: Gonzo would be the top. I call him my enabler. He brought me on tour and gave me the chance to sing in a bunch of anonymous locations where my anonymity became my best teacher, in a way, because I didn’t get hung up on what I was doing, I just let each night refresh into the next and learned a lot about how to sing and how I want to inhabit a stage. 
KLUBLIFE: You recorded your last album in France. What do you like about it—is it the croissants, the café sensibility, the anonymity?
FEIST: (laughs) I don’t really live here but I spend time here in between tours. It’s become a familiar pit stop and I do have a pillow and a closet here. You know, it’s the closest thing I have to a home, I guess, but I think there will always be something about Paris that makes me feel like I don’t really belong here and I can’t really be at home here. I just haven’t seemed to click with Paris yet. But, at the same time, I keep ending up here, so maybe there’s a fascination there that will come to some new fruition.
KLUBLIFE: Which three artists are you listening to a lot now?
FEIST: M. Ward, Do Make Say Think and Lhasa.
KLUBLIFE: Why did you choose to go by “Feist”?
FEIST: I had been “Feist” since I was in grade school. It’s something about Calgary—it had been a nickname for years and it was just a matter of……it was just already my name. It doesn’t fly so well in Germany. Well, “Feist” means something there. It means something like from an archaic past unused language and nobody quite knows exactly what it means and everyone has a different definition but they all kind of screw up their faces and say “No, I don’t know, but it’s not something good.”
KLUBLIFE: Well, maybe “Leslie” can be the new “Feist” there.
FEIST: Yeah, exactly.
KLUBLIFE: Does anyone still call you Leslie?
FEIST: Sure. Some people who never called me Leslie are starting to call me Leslie because they think that now Feist…
KLUBLIFE: …that Leslie is the new Feist?
FEIST: Yeah, (laughing) they think that Leslie is the new Feist, exactly. 
KLUBLIFE: Of all the songs you’ve written for your next album, which is your favourite, or is that like asking a mother to pick her favourite child? 
There are 17 songs that we’ve just recorded for this new record and we really don’t know how many we can get away with putting on the new album. There’s no favourite, but it’s really hard to choose which ones to take off. And I wrote all of them except for this one that I covered of a girl named New Buffalo who’s on Arts & Crafts. So I wrote I guess 16 songs for this new record, and I just feel like I’ve got a scent: it’s like in the wind, like in a cartoon, when there’s that wavy line coming in the wind towards someone’s nose. And they follow it to the source of the freshly-baked loaf of bread.
KLUBLIFE: Good analogy.
FEIST: Yeah, well that’s what writing has become like. It’s like I’m just following the scent.