On Multitudes, Feist Turns Shadows Into Light

Around this time two years ago, Leslie Feist found herself at a crossroads. The Canadian singer-songwriter had recently undergone a series of seismic life changes: moving from her long-time base of Toronto to Los Angeles, adopting her daughter in 2019, and, of course, grappling with the devastating effect of the pandemic on her livelihood as a musician. Then, after spending much of the first phase of COVID hunkered down in the Ontario countryside with her father, an abstract painter, and her daughter—and embracing the challenge of writing a song a day, as part of a group effort with the likes of Mac DeMarco and Maggie Rogers—everything changed when her father died unexpectedly in the spring of 2021. 

Feist then began the long and turbulent process of grieving while preparing to tour the songs that would eventually become her sixth album, Multitudes, out now. What she’d already planned as some of the most stripped-down shows of her career (partly out of necessity, due to the limits on audience numbers imposed by the venues), eventually took on a deeper resonance. Beginning with five nights in Hamburg, before moving on to Ottawa and Toronto, Feist’s thoughtful, egalitarian reinvention of the standard gig formula saw her surrounded on all sides by an audience of no more than 150, the room enveloped by meticulously engineered immersive sound, and the boundary between performer and observer slowly but surely broken down over the course of the show. What could have felt gimmicky instead felt like a sincere expression of what everyone was craving most at that time: simple human connection. 

All of this, and more, is captured on Multitudes, which weaves together Feist’s trademark intimacy and her more baroque tendencies with confidence. From the rickety, rambunctious opening track “In Lightning,” which seeks to capture the revelatory feeling of setting one’s intention to be joyful, to the twinkling, reflective beauty of “Love Who We Are Meant To,” in which you can hear every slide of her fingers on the guitar strings and the almost-imperceptible crack in her voice as she sings of fading romantic love. (Across the record, Feist’s odes to love span multitudes: from family to parenthood, community to friendship, and even all womankind.) It’s the sound of a musician who is still willing to explore new sonic avenues more than 20 years into her career, as well as a genuinely affecting document of the kind of confluence of life events that either breaks you, or rebuilds you even stronger. If you’re wondering whether Feist ended up falling in the latter camp, a listen to Multitudes is all the proof you need.

Vogue: I read that you first started writing songs for this project while doing a “song a day” challenge with a bunch of other musicians during lockdown. Was there a specific moment during that process when you felt like there was a through line in what you were writing, or that those songs could be threaded together to make this album?

Leslie Feist: Writing a song a day was remarkable, because it helped me bypass the normal endless questioning of the meaning of and weighing of every word—all of that being batted to the side, and turning it into a kind of game. With the craft and the technical skill of all the people involved, we were somehow able to get past ourselves, to short-circuit the Rube Goldberg machine of never making a decision. And the kind of positive peer pressure of it, too, helped me to just churn it out. I did about four or five weeks of it over the course of a year. And so that was about 35 songs. And out of those 35 songs, I think it became clear which ones seemed to be a record. There were maybe five different records that could have been found in that body of songs, [including] ones that spoke to this type of liminal state of asking so many questions and knowing I don’t have answers, and thinking, How do you sing about not knowing something? Because you’re supposed to use words, and words are usually what you say when you know something. So it was trying to figure out how all the songs could collect themselves into a kind of gentle question. The ones that belonged on the record together eventually made themselves known to me. 

Did it feel scary at all to expose your process in that way?

Well, I guess because we were all in the same shoes, we could kind of commiserate about how impossible it was. And it was really emboldening to listen to people that I have so much respect for expose themselves in the same way. Although it was very annoying how Mac DeMarco could not write a bad song. He just was incapable of writing a bad song. Every single song he sent, it was like, is this on a record? But I tried my best. Some days, I just did an a cappella lullaby to not be disqualified, having not had time that day. I just didn’t want to get booted, or voted off the island or whatever. [Laughs.] But the songs did continue to change through the live shows too. That was something I’m unaccustomed to doing, playing brand-new songs in front of people, having not really concretized them for myself. So that felt quite vulnerable. I actually intended for them to be done by the time the show started, but then the workshopping nature of the show lent itself to giving myself increasing amounts of permission to show the process as it was happening in real-time. If we’re inventing a new context for people to relate [to each other] inside of a concert setting and toward the “concert-ness” of the concert, then why can’t everything else be allowed to be reinterpreted on the fly?

Was there something about the songs that you felt lent themselves to this reverse-engineering of making an album—touring them first, and then recording them after letting them evolve along the way? 

Probably having done the album endeavor a bunch of times now, I was glad for a topsy-turvy approach. Nothing about me felt familiar anymore at that time. I had just become a parent, which is really a knock on the head. It’s incredible, and it’s so challenging. I didn’t really know how I would approach the old songs if there hadn’t been this moment when the theaters were asking for shows with very few people. We had actually come up with the idea years ago—we had developed the whole show with Rob Sinclair, the production designer, and we had the whole show thought out. And then we found it impossible to stage because I needed it to be so few people, that economically it wouldn’t hold water. So this moment of the pandemic allowed the show to be set as a kind of target on my calendar, where I had the personal goal to finish the songs in time for that. It then became an album, of course, but at each step, I was just looking at the next goal, which was to play one time in Hamburg…okay, play it 17 times in Hamburg. [Laughs.] And then we ended up doing it 90 times around the world.

I also read that before you embarked on the shows, you felt you had nothing performative left in you anymore. What did that feel like, as a professional musician whose lifeblood is touring?

Well, the vocabulary of the show was built upon the audience being the subject of the show, and the production was focused entirely on them. Everything that we did—even the subliminal messaging that we built into the production—was about them being on the same plane as I was. They were lit as I was, there was no stage, there was nowhere to hide, but not in a confrontational way. I wasn’t meaning to disarm anyone. First of all, none of us had been near to each other in so long. And the show was built in Dolby Atmos surround as well, which we wanted to use as a kind of somatic cell disrupter. I played the first half of the show acoustically and quietly, with simple harmonies and melodies that felt like a salve for the brain, almost. But then when the Atmos turned on, it was a single finger bass drop; then that array of sounds came that surrounded people, and gave them access to their bodies, and it became quite an emotional experience. 

Nothing about it made me feel like I was on a podium or stage, the old-fashioned soapbox, like it has been my whole life. There is a certain authority [when you’re] in the spotlight, there’s an intentionality to performing when you step into it, even though all my life I have endeavored to—or just accidentally found myself trying to—dismantle the idolatry part of it. Because in terms of the way I live my life every day, nothing about that is accurate. I know that those roles can really serve culture at large at times—there’s something so aspirational about Madonna, for example—but I felt, and it was very likely a Canadian instinct within me, that I wanted to do the opposite. And so this show was without spotlights, and without any of the regular signposts of the audience-performer binary. I think when I said there wasn’t anything performative in me, I meant there was nothing within me that wanted to pretend anything other than the fact of my days, which had become pretty difficult after losing my father and becoming a mother. It was a true life crossroads, and I felt that the show was really reflective of my own discomfort. It just made sense. There was this collective transformation. That’s not to say the show was transformative or something, but I did have some friends say it felt like a collective grief ritual. We were joking around a bit too, because of course, what do we do in the face of discomfort? Often we just laugh. There was a joke that everyone’s masks were like tissues collecting the tears, because everyone had gone through something, and had at least one thing in common, which was that things hadn’t been business as usual for a long time.

Did the communal aspect of the shows, and the pulling back of the curtain a bit on your process, influence the sound of the record at all?

I would say I’m really lucky, because right near the end of making the record, I brought it to Blake Mills, who’s an incredible musician, but also an incredible producer and mixer. And his co-mixer and engineer, Joseph Lawrence, had been to the show. So he had a memory in his body of how spatial everything was. There were moments where you’d be looking at me, but then all of a sudden a choir would rise behind you because of the Atmos surround. The voice was traveling and the bass came from below, and there was a real spherical experience to it. So to have the record be mixed to reflect that physical experience was incredible. The recording of it was also about finding the fidelity of being ultra-present. Over the years, I’ve tended to obscure myself inside of a graininess or a tape hiss or a noise ceiling, usually because we’re recording live, so I’m in a room and there’s a sort of naturally occurring ambient bleed between all the instruments. But in this case, Atmos helped me learn about this new type of unguarded fidelity to the sound that was almost like ASMR—like a tiny miniature of me is perched on your shoulder and singing right into your ear and hoping to make the hair stand up on the back of your neck. That pillow-talk proximity thing that was part of the show definitely made its way onto the record, for sure. 

There are also parts of the record that feel conversational, or as if you’re breaking some kind of fourth wall in how you address the listener. Did that arise from the nature of the shows also?

I think there could be something in that desire to be in conversation that came from the pandemic, and the realization of how important it is not to be isolated. Everything that happened really brought that into relief. Maybe the songwriting having happened at that time made me feel like, Can we just get rid of anything in the way of me and being able to connect to somebody? It was probably subliminal in that sense. I had a new feeling of irreverence, especially when it came to the rarefied air of the concert as it usually is.

The album ends on a lyric about beginnings, and as a whole, it has a kind of open-ended feel to it. Do you think the unusual process of making it has left you thinking more about its life after release? Do you think it’s something that will keep evolving as you continue to tour it?

Well, some of the songs on the record were not in the show—they came from the song a day exercise, and somehow found their way onto the record. I guess I felt that maybe a central feeling of the record, especially on “In Lightning” [the opening track of Multitudes], is trying to develop an instinct out of something that currently isn’t instinctual—which is to lean positive, essentially. To collect the moments of hope, rather than collect the moments of evidence to the contrary. I know I could so easily keep in my back pocket all the excuses for why everything sucks, but the last song, “Song For Sad Friends,” is about the fact that pain serves a purpose. That pain isn’t something to be placated away, and say, “Oh, don’t cry,” as you pat someone on the back or whatever. It’s like, no, absolutely you know better than anyone the reason why you are crying, and the reason why you have come to this shadowy dark moment. And it’s from the recognition of that moment, and the recognition of the particular constellation that makes up our individual, isolating problems…that exact equation is the only thing that you can move forward towards hope from. Understanding it, maybe not making friends with it, but coming to terms with it. It won’t ever stop: that dark narrative inside our heads, and our tendency to label and name and story-tell within ourselves isn’t going to stop. But to use it as an asset to make the next best move, or the next aspirational decision, it did feel like the place to end the record, because it’s an arrow back to the start of the album, and to “In Lightning.” It’s a sort of recognition of the cyclical nature of being our own worst enemy and slowly, slowly learning how to make a truce with that.