Leslie Feist’s sultry voice stays with me even when I’m not listening to her new album “Let It Die.” Sexy chanteuse, decadent disco kitty, Americana in a swanky skirt, Feist is a benign siren whose songs synthesizes happiness, disappointment, and realism. All coated in her honey voice and elegant guitar, emotions ranging from banal to exquisite find their ideal musical expression. She adapts perfectly to the sonic environments she creates in each track on her new album, as diverse as a patch of rainforest that still has unnamed species of birds and flowers. This song bird won’t fly away: she’s here to sing us to sleep, to sing songs for beautiful spring days and rainy spring days and sweaty sleepless nights, for all the different kinds of reasons nights might be sweaty or sleepless.
Winner of two Juno awards, Grammy’s from her native Canadia, Feist could be the soundtrack for a heartbreak as easily as cocktail party without being mediocre or inappropriate on either account. Her sound is unique enough that she’ll (hopefully) never be co-opted and squeezed into a Norah Jones costume: she’s just too feisty.
So how do you feel working on your own material versus the collaborations you’ve done before?
I guess it just feels a little more potent. It gets kind of lonely but somehow there’s that satisfaction of getting to follow one idea through and not slice it apart into many ideas or thread it together with other people’s ideas. It’s really just one of the kind of selfish acts that you don’t have to feel bad about. Most of the time if you’re selfish you’re, aw, that was selfish, and you feel terrible about it. But in this case it’s not a negative thing.
But it is lonely sometimes, at least creatively?
Well, not creatively, just on the life kick.
You’re living in Paris now, right?
Sort of, I am, I have a flat there, but I’m not really every there, I never really get a chance to be there. I did some math around New Years and for the four months before New Years I’d been there for about a week, but like a day a day a day, swapping suitcases and stuff. But it’s a great place to have as a pit stop.
If you gotta stop somewhere, you might as well have a good cup of coffee.
Exactly
Do you like singing in French?
What I liked about that is that it was a task in intuitive syllable following. I got what the story lines were – it’s about love doesn’t last forever. And then I got the gist of what each verse was. And then on one side of the page I wrote what the real lyrics were in English if they were translated and on the left I had syllabic symbols and hieroglyphs and the way I knew how to tell myself how to pronounce it. I played one French song with Juliet Grecco. She’s an amazing, when you think of the French chanteuse in the sixties she’s the one who started the idea of what that was. She went out with Miles Davis for years. When he had his European time it was with her. She was this hot sexy young girl with a black bob, you know sleeping with women sleeping with men and all over the place – Miles Davis, Marlin Brando. And she meanwhile was a great musician and a great writer and a great amazing voice and I find a lot of the French musicians –the way that the way that I base my love of things is not just in interpreting things it’s in the whole package. And the French breathy girl singing, very breathy, sounds almost more like oratory – like giving public speeches like drama class? So Juliet Greco is just an amazing voice. She’s now in her seventies and she still looks totally stunning. She wears these plunging necklines black velvet gowns with a train behind her and she takes up all the space on the stage without even moving her feet. A bit like Lassa. I saw this singer named Lassa who had the same power on stage. She didn’t even move her feet once and she just fills up the whole room. So I sang a duet with Juliet Greco. It was her signature song and it was for this TV shows thirtieth anniversary party this three hour special. Like the old guard and the new guard. And I had my lyrics again in French phonetically done up in my hieroglyphs on the teleprompter because there’s no way I could memorize these seemingly random words and songs. And she leans in and says what is that and she couldn’t tell, what is that on the teleprompter? Well it’s French, my version, that’s what French is to me.
That’s probably how good my French is. So you’ve sang with all these amazing people and done all of these great covers. What draws you to a song when you first decide you want to work on them?
Well, covers, I never had ever been drawn to before. I had a matter of pride in my early grunge days and the punk band era. It was half that we weren’t capable of playing other people’s songs and also that the thing was to write your own. But later on, if you love a song well enough you’re going to try to see if you can figure out how to play it and that’s what I did with “Secret Heart” and it’s probably one of the covers I ever learned. And then I learned a song by my friend Tony Sheer called Sacramento and later ended up rewriting the lyrics and calling it lonely lonely on my record. But basically, I had never been interesting in playing covers. But when I was on tour with Gonzales it was two years of singing his songs which is kind of like playing covers.
Right because it wasn’t your own material.
Right, because even if it’s a good friend you didn’t come up with it, you didn’t’ hatch it. I kind of got into that habit, that mindset He was almost like an accompanist sometimes when he just played the piano and I would just lean against it singing. And that’s something I had never done before. And there’s always something fresh and you get a whiff of it and you want to check it out and you have to follow that thread.
So how do you make the song your own?
Well, it’s easier with the traditional songs, “When I was a Young Girl, “or “See Line Woman,” that’s actually a traditional song and Nina Simone also interpreted it, but the point is that the songs are part of the oral tradition, story telling passed orally. And the point is to reinterpret them. They’re not attached to any one person’s identity so you have a lot more freedom.
So there’re just sort of floating out there waiting to be interpreted.
What songs were in the era that’s actually recorded on these folk anthologies that the Smithsonian and the library of congress put out. The Harry Smith and the Alan Lomax, those collectors put together amazing audio photographs. They’re the most amazing imagination sparking songs because they’re these people who you know weren’t calling themselves musicians by any stretch of the imagination, probably but it’s like the Paris subway musicians – you can see and hear that they put in years to what they do but the Paris subway musicians are playing to people who give them dirty looks or not even listening and the ones on these records were coming home from the coal mines and sitting on their porch playing on a fiddle they made themselves and playing these songs that they learned from the grandparents and their grandparents and you don’t know where they came from. These amazing little floating around floating islands. That’s why I like to interpret them because what a CD player is in normal everyday homes now, that’s what songs and signing around the fire and signing with your home made instruments, that’s to the same degree that’s what’s living in other people’s homes in that era. If I take a song like “When I was a young girl” and bring it into this era then maybe it will be covered by someone in the next era then maybe music will only be holograms or tattoos on your inner ears.
Like little stories that people are still living.
Yeah, well hopefully not because “When I was a young girl” is about dying of syphilis. But about life, it stretches across every era. That’s why I love reading historical fiction and autobiographies and biographies from years and years ago because I really love seeing that the simple stuff will always be the same.
Right, right, whether or not it’s tattooed on your inner ear.
Right.
Do you miss your old costumes?
Yeah, sometimes I do.
Wanna put them on? Bring a sock puppet on the stage again?
I want to make a video that’s all about sock puppets. I think that’s how I can bring sock puppets back.
I think that’s all you. If anybody’s going to do it then it’s going to be you.
Me? I guess I have to write songs that would need a sock puppet video before I can do it. But yeah, that was the thing that was so great about touring with Gonzales and Peaches as Bitch Laplap is that we were all creating these superheroes that could carry these songs out that and that showed what it needed to be. We needed to be heroes and super villains. It was really about the larger life show, a reaction to ironic distance.
So where were you in those costumes?
Where was I?
Somewhere behind the façade or pulling the curtain strings?
That’s a good analogy. You know, what touring with those guys got me into was thinking about shows as performances and entertainment. Like vaudeville, if your timing was even a second off, you’d get tomatoes thrown at you. The audience were harsh harsh critics. Nowadays they just cross their arms over their chest and just look at you with squinty eyes and one eyebrow raised. That’s the equivalent to getting tomatoes thrown at you. And what I loved about the Gonzales and Peaches show was it was just unabashed entertainment. And I’d played with a lot of bands that were like opps how’d I get up on the stage I don’t know how I got here, I’m just going to look at my feet and pretend… And that felt real for that music. But for the Peaches and Gonzales you gotta entertain and respect the fact that people carried their bodies to wherever you’re putting on the show and put on the show for them. Luckily that music really serves that idea well. Like I’m on tour with the Kings of Convenience, well I just finished that tour, and the they put on their show is completely at home with their music. I think that the point is just to be at home with the music and put on a show that suits it, that you feel natural about. It wouldn’t make sense any way. That’s why I called this project Feist and not Bitch Laplap because these songs didn’t need to be wrapped in a cape with sock puppets. Even though that could be fun. But they are my own and this is a voice that doesn’t need any superpowers. It was just very simple and very, I don’t know, I didn’t need to lift cars off people or lift buildings up. The opposite, the absence of anything big with a lot of muscle.
Well a lot of your songs were very personal. Even the covers, it still feels like you’re singing to an audience. And it communicates that sense of intimacy. And you slip so easily between these different styles.
Well, thank you. I think about it because I’m more interested in melody than in structure or genre or the purpose behind it or how it’s going to be perceived. I’m really in love with melodies. Whenever one happens to squiggle past my sight line I just grab it and stick it in this little box in my head where I collect them. And then when it’s time to make them into songs, the core has got to be the melody. Just like a body, you put clothes on it. The clothes don’t make much sense unless their on someone. It’s just like a shell and a core. So, I really just follow these melodies and they told me what clothes to wear. It’s kind of a cheesy analogy…
I think it kind of works since you used to wear so many different costumes, there’s a connection there.
And in real life all I ever wear is jeans and a T-shirt.
Well, being on stage you get to try on different styles. And it sounds like you’ve been doing that for awhile and have found your own place in all of that.
Yeah, I’m glad I had played in so many different types of bands and played so many different roles. You know I’ve been the front man and the side man and the hired gun, I’ve been the drummer who doesn’t really know what she’s doing and just laughing and apologizing when she fucks up, and I’ve watched a band that I’ve been in rise to notoriety but in a definitely out of the lime light kind of role so I was able to see it go down and how people react. It was great to be on the sidelines for so many years. On the Kings of Convenience tour I opened for them and then sitting in with them and then they’d play a few songs with me baking me up and then we’d do some of the songs we recorded on their record. And I love, I love that role, that support role, I just love it. Knowing what someone else is doing and knowing what I can add to it.
That lets you borrow their little melodies and put them in your box.
Yeah, exactly. |