02/28/07
Text: Scott Indrisek
Photographers: Alex Freund
She’s one talented head on the amorphous hydra known as Broken Social Scene. She turned the Bee Gees’ disco hit “Love You Inside Out” into a piece of subdued pop perfection. Her last album, Let it Die, won a Juno Award in Canada: Feist’s native country, and where she’s a quasi-mainstream sensation. At one time she occasionally shared a stage with friend and former housemate Peaches, the raunchy songstress responsible for the immortal “sucking on my titties like you wanted me.” Her third solo album, The Reminder, retains the soulful songcraft of Let it Die and adds newfound guitar sounds along with a handclap happy skipping song and a beautiful duet with Eirik Glambek Boe of Kings of Convenience. Anthem sat down with Feist on two separate occasions nearly a year apart—the following interview is a mutant combination of both.
I was going to ask you what you do in your free time, but evidently you don’t have any.
Feist: We [had] a wonderful woman traveling with us, the wife of one of the band members. At about midnight I get a call in my hotel room the middle of some industrial-type mini-mall strip mall in Raleigh, NC. And the phone call says: [in faux-evil Germanic voice] ‘Miss Feist, your adventure begins in 20 minutes, mwahahaha!’ And I was like—what? What the fuck? And then a note slips under my door and it was the beginning of a scavenger hunt that she had set up, and it went on for about two hours inside this empty hotel in the middle of nowhere. We were following clues and solving little puzzles and it went from the pool where there was a bottle with a message in it that I had to get from the middle of the pool—and even the clerk at the desk of the hotel was involved. So that’s what we’re doing in our spare time: scavenger hunts.
And making the new album, The Reminder?
F: We toured our way straight into the studio, basically, and made a record. We rented a manor house outside Paris. It had a studio in the basement, but we wired everything upstairs into the parlor on the main floor—filled with couches, lamps, bookshelves, sliding glass doors. Sort of a dreamy, stained glass, high-ceiling jam spot.
Nearly half of Let it Die was made up of cover songs. It’s all original material this time—except ‘Sea Lion’ is a traditional song, right?
F: The first I heard it was on some of those Harry Smith or Alan Lomax field recordings. I heard a recording of these little girls—it’s a skipping song, and then Nina Simone made it famous. She did a version of it in the 70s. Nina Simone, as she does to a lot of traditional songs, claimed to have written ‘Sea Lion’—even tough she wasn’t alive when those little girls sang it, so I don’t understand. I’ve been calling it a double cover.
