Singer-songwriter Feist has long been known for her soulful melodies and introspective lyrics. But when she lost her father to cancer, she found herself grappling with a grief so profound that it threatened to stifle her creative energy altogether. In a recent interview, Feist opened up about how she channeled that pain into her music, ultimately finding solace in the act of creation and rediscovering her voice in the process. In this article, we’ll dive deeper into Feist’s journey and explore how she used songwriting as a form of catharsis, ultimately emerging with a powerful and inspiring new album.
Leslie Feist is a Canadian singer who purchased a house in Los Angeles a few years ago. The property came complete with a small plot of land that allowed her to plant tomatoes in February and escape the freezing Ontario winter. Today, she sits outside in a Californian garden, where the sound of birdsong fills the air, discussing her life experiences with an interviewer over video call. Greeting her from above are two brightly coloured pictures, one created by her father, Harold, an abstract expressionist painter, and the other by her young daughter.
Leslie Feist has had a rich and varied life as a musician. Over the past three decades, she has risen from the Calgary punk scene, through electropop collaborations and a spell with the massive Toronto group Broken Social Scene, to become one of the most celebrated solo artists of her generation with five albums to her name that have garnered critical acclaim, prestigious awards, and even a place on Sesame Street. Her music has always been defined by its emotional intimacy and intellectual and experimental depth, as well as the breathtaking pitch and contours of her voice.
Feist’s life took a dramatic turn when she adopted her daughter in 2019. The experience brought new feelings of vulnerability, love, and fatigue into her already busy existence, and she found herself struggling to comprehend the changes. A friend offered her some advice that initially alarmed her, suggesting that she would be burned to ashes by becoming a parent, but the person that would emerge from the experience would be someone worth being. Initially shocked, Feist soon realised that her friend was right, and her daughter became a driving force that transformed her life for the better.
The challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic helped her to focus on her home and child by simplifying her schedule and removing the need to tour or produce albums. She could stay close to her father and daughter in the countryside outside Toronto, offering exactly the kind of stability and love that both of them needed. Her father, a thriving introvert despite being in his late 70s, spent time holding his new granddaughter, and the encounters seemed to rejuvenate him, providing a bright spot to counterbalance his other hardships.
Spring of 2021 brought a new challenge, however, as Feist’s father passed away, leaving her heartbroken and grieving. Suddenly, she found herself in the place that she refers to as “the conveyor belt of time,” caught between the loss of a parent and the needs of her young daughter. She was also preparing for an experimental work-in-progress residency show series that would help shape the songs she’d been working on over the previous 18 months and eventually lead to her new album, Multitudes.
The residencies started in Hamburg and continued on to Toronto, Denver, LA, and Seattle. They were designed to be an intimate and straightforward showcase of her music to help bring people together after the pandemic. Feist was surprised at how much the process helped her cope with her loss. Her work, which she named Multitudes, described the fact that she was inhabiting numerous new selves at the time, including new songs, new losses, and her evolving role as a mother. The new songs that she had begun to develop were uncharted territory, and the absence of her father made the experience of writing them feel even more challenging. Nonetheless, she felt a sense of continuing the conversation she’d always had with him through her work, even though he never heard the new tracks since she had only just begun writing them.
Feist’s approach to music writing changed after she became a mother, and she learned to write in the brief snatches of time that became available to her. She became more interested in melodies and harmonies with repetition that were calming, almost like lullabies. She listened to classical Argentinian and Haitian guitar music, as well as the songs and poetry of Molly Drake, and aimed for a style that was complex in its simplicity. She also found herself attracted to minimal equipment and worked with a digital eight-track recorder and a nylon string guitar. She was trying to find an outlet to ease the rigours of parenting that seemed to take everything out of her.
Feist also began to question the heavily symbolic and often highly coded nature of her earlier songwriting. She believed that she had written songs in which she was the only one who knew what was hidden and what was on show, but now she believed that it might be more interesting to remove that layer of opacity. Her new album explores themes that came into focus more sharply during the pandemic, such as re-examining our closest relationships and home lives. Feist wanted to “lean in” and become more visible emotionally, to be able to bring herself forward to grow as an artist and as a person.
When she began recording the album, she chose to work with a producer who could help her achieve a kind of ASMR-style proximity within her tracks. The sound would be so close that, combined with binaural headphones, a listener would feel as if there were a voice whispering in their ears that would cause shivers down their spine. Her producer built a foam half-shell that would help her achieve the desired sound, and the result is an elegant, nuanced album that perfectly captures the sense of introspection, vulnerability, and reflection that informed the writing process.
Feist’s ability to adopt an honest and direct approach, to reveal the inner workings of her life through her craft, makes her music more relatable, easier to empathise with, and more rewarding to listen to than ever before. She has shown us that speaking openly about our most private joys and fears, struggles and revelations, can result in powerful and resonant art.
In conclusion, Feist’s experience of losing her father and finding her voice provides us with a powerful insight into the healing power of music. Through her sorrow, she discovered a renewed sense of purpose and creativity that not only helped her through her grief, but also produced some of her most memorable work. It is a reminder that sometimes it is in our most vulnerable moments that we discover our hidden strengths and that music can be a powerful conduit for healing and growth. We can all take solace in Feist’s journey, and if we are ever struggling with grief or adversity, we can remember to turn to music as a way of finding our own voice and path forward.
