PicoBlog

Leslie Feist played Toronto last week, at a venue called History. This newsletter just celebrated its six-month anniversary. Today I present one half of my Feist conversation from 2020, for Hearts on Fire.

She doesn’t need an introduction here. You probably also know that she has a new album, Multitudes, and that it’s very good and a continuing evolution of her craft. But this is about her earliest days.

I’ve often said that Feist is the MVP of the book, popping up in three different chapters in different contexts: Peaches and Gonzales, Broken Social Scene, Three Gut Records. She’s also, of course, one of the few true household names in the book.

I don’t claim to know Leslie Feist: we’ve met a few times over the years, had some good chats personally and professionally, and have mutual friends (not hard with someone as connected as her). She’s a very private person, by necessity. I knew that she didn’t often like to speak on the record unless she was promoting a new album.

I didn’t think interviewing her for Hearts on Fire would be a challenge, but her manager initially only agreed to grant half an hour on the phone. That wasn’t totally surprising: with someone of her stature, management is often concerned about someone profiting off their client’s story, and these days most artists want to control the books and films made about them. But half an hour? That seemed a bit slight.

No matter. Leslie Feist is always a fantastic interview. Once you get her talking, it’s hard for her to stop—especially if she’s “off-cycle,” talking about the past and not pausing to weave poetic metaphors about her current work and practice. So our half an hour easily stretched to 90 minutes. It only ended because she had guests arriving. And we only got up to the point where Let It Die came out in 2004.

I knew a lot of her early story, so I didn’t ask: born just outside Sackville, N.B., where her dad was an art prof; grew up in Regina and then Calgary, where she formed her first band in high school. That band was called Placebo; at an Albertan festival she met the Oshawa band hHead, who proved to be pivotal catalysts for her career once she moved to Toronto in 1996.

This interview gets into her early Toronto days: not as far back as Noah’s Arkweld (where I first saw her, opening for Yo La Tengo and Bettie Serveert at the Opera House), but starting around the time she was touring as a member of By Divine Right (a.k.a. BDR) and living with Peaches while that artist was making The Teaches of Peaches. She talks about early Broken Social Scene and being in the band Royal City for one summer. We find out what she didn’t like about Monarch, her debut record that I love. She talks about Sarah Harmer, Gord Downie, Chris Murphy, 9/11, Metric, Paris, Soundscapes, The Red Demos, Toronto after-parties with M.I.A. and performing with a sock puppet in Berlin. And I finally learned just how exactly she ended up getting a French record deal when she couldn’t get arrested in Canada. It had something to do with “Shameless Eyes” and everything to do with the generosity of Gonzales—or Gonz, as she calls him—who she says she still talks to every second day.

What initially brought you to Europe?

I lived with Peach when she first had me come to Europe. I was her flank—there’s no other word for doing the running-man [dance] next to someone with a sock puppet. There was no official musical title for my role.

Three years before that I had toured for eight months with the Hip. We’d done Canada and then down through the States. No one was bigger in Canada [than the Hip]. But in Portland, Oregon, we were playing in front of 300 people. There were five tour buses and two trucks parked down a residential street in Eugene, Oregon, to play a community hall—two days after playing two dates at [stadium] GM Place in Vancouver. That whole thing, of even the most monolithic gods of music in Canada not being able to make it elsewhere—I was seeing that. Contrarily, Peach and Gonz went and busked around Europe. The idea of DIY-ing yourself out of Canada was pretty attractive. 

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