Feist: ‘The high of falling in love isn’t desirable for me’

The Canadian singer who defined twee mid-noughties indie with 1234 is back with Pleasure, her first album in six years. But, she says, the fantasy of everlasting happiness is long gone

Leslie Feist decided to call her new album Pleasure because life wasn’t one. At the cusp of 40, she found herself disillusioned and confused, her misery compounded by a “low-grade shame” that she didn’t have everything figured out. She was unhappy, so she made a decision: to take back control.

“I understood that there was actually a choice,” she says, describing the switch in perspective that led her to a better place. “You can decide to lean positive, you can decide to give things a silver lining, you can decide to have the glass be half full – as opposed to just feeling like my moods are god, as if whatever mood is passing through me has complete control and I have no say.”

Feist’s album provides a clue as to what triggered such emotional upheaval. Preoccupied with romantic disappointment, it crackles with lyrics about elation curdling into despair, and lovers suddenly exposed as hostile strangers. Yet for all its openness, it’s tricky to pin her down on the topic – she frequently bats away queries about a potential soured romance with enigmatic phrases such as: “My relationships have gotten exponentially deeper as I have started to realise that there’s no promise in them.”

Such gnomic behaviour is at least a fitting accompaniment to Feist’s kooky, beguiling and free-spirited music. After she was propelled into ubiquity by her 2007 single 1234 – which famously soundtracked an iPod advert – she became the ultimate manic pixie dream girl of indie pop, musical shorthand for everything that was breathily twee about the mid-noughties: in interviews she was vague and giddy, in videos she did whimsical dance routines. I ask whether she appreciates how evocative of the previous decade the likes of 1234 and Mushaboom sound now, but in true question-dodging style she responds with thoughts on my terminology. “I have never heard the term noughties!” she grins. “It’s cute.”

Yet Feist is more enlightening when she eventually opens up about the themes of happiness and fulfilment that informed Pleasure.

“When you’re younger, you just assume there’s a golden door that will open, and there’s some type of shining eternity,” she says of the mirage-like salvation society taunts us with. “There’s a promise, if you achieve dot dot dot, then you will have dot dot dot. There’s some fantasy that’s implanted in us, for happiness or foreverness or togetherness.” Instead of life being a skywards trajectory towards everlasting joy, Feist realised that happiness was no longer a goal, but something that ebbed and flowed on a daily basis. “I have good friends who play a game with their kids called highlights/lowlights. At the end of every day you talk about the highlight and the lowlight, the idea being that there’s both in every day. There’s going to be difficulties and victories every day. So the album in a way was me putting a pin in that pivot, this parallel positive and negative.”

This new mindset led her to stop pursuing pleasure in conventional ways. “The high of falling in love with someone isn’t a desirable state for me any more”, she says – a development that inspired Pleasure’s stability anthem Get Not High, Get Not Low. “Maybe that was [written] on one of the days of I can’t be that low any more but I also don’t want to be high. In my teens I would have thought what a sellout to want a middle road, but the middle road is a deeper road, because when you’re high and then you’re low and then you’re high and then you’re low, you’re just dipping your toe in each, you’re not ever really invested in either.”

It’s not hard to imagine why the teen Feist may have disapproved – hers was a life spent in pursuit of extreme kicks. Growing up in Canada, she became deeply involved in the hardcore scene (“I’m in England here so I can’t really claim punk if it was the 90s in Calgary,” she laughs), where she spent her time playing in a band called Placebo (not that one), writing lyrics about her dreams, and singing so fiercely that at 18 she “blew [her] pipes out” and was forced to take a break from performing. It’s not the most obvious starting point for a career characterised by folky indie – although the album does pay tribute to her teenage tastes. A Man Is Not His Song, one of Pleasure’s tracks about romantic deflation, ends with a Mastodon sample – “a metal moment” to sum up the idea of masculinity, says Feist. Although it might not have quite the comfortingly nostalgic connotations for everyone else as it does for her. “I could fall asleep listening to Mastodon,” she insists.

After Placebo ended, Feist moved to Toronto, where her life became populated by what would turn out to be some of the major players of noughties alternative music. She toured – and lived – with shock rocker Peaches (in the show, Feist operated a sock puppet and called herself Bitch Lap Lap). She befriended and began collaborating with Canadian rapper/pianist/producer Chilly Gonzales, as well as forming a fraction of Broken Social Scene, the obtuse and sprawling indie outfit founded by her former partner Kevin Drew. The band are in the midst of a reunion, with contributions from Feist, but it’s not necessarily a trip down memory lane: Feist never ditched her pals from the Canadian scene in the first place. Pleasure, like all her records, is produced by old friends – this time musicians Mocky and Renaud LeTang. And although it’s “not quite like ringing someone’s doorbell at one in the morning to see if they’re still up”, the fractured friendship group still manage to mix business with pleasure – Feist seems to be in London mainly to watch Gonzales perform Room 29, a collaboration with Jarvis Cocker about the spectres of Hollywood legend.

This sense of community spirit is something Feist aims to foster with Pleasure, albeit in a slightly different way. Just the very admission of weakness, she says, can spawn a kind of support system. Discussing such feelings, she explains, was a “leap of faith”, but “when you have the privilege of knowing the difficulty someone’s having, there’s a lot of warmth that can be exchanged there”. Ultimately, it’s one of the major boons of making art: you are free to articulate the pain you have experienced on your own terms, and get the opportunity to offer others solace in the process. It’s a pleasure, you could say.

Pleasure is out on Universal

Contributor

Rachel Aroesti

The GuardianTramp

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