Feist Holds Up A Mirror On “Multitudes,” Her Best Album To DateExBulletin

On her sixth album, Feist’s barely-adorned honesty is consummated, the result of someone who’s lived enough to have a story and worked hard enough to put it brilliantly into song.

Sara Melvin & Colby Richardson/Courtesy of the artist

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Sara Melvin & Colby Richardson/Courtesy of the artist

On her sixth album, Feist’s barely-adorned honesty is consummated, the result of someone who’s lived enough to have a story and worked hard enough to put it brilliantly into song.

Sara Melvin & Colby Richardson/Courtesy of the artist

The commercial machinations of the music industry hate staged maturation. Consider the constant chatter about what’s young and new, as if true excitement, engagement, and even insight could only come from the hitherto unknown. Yes, it’s totally intoxicating to believe that you experience the bleeding edge of culture with each incoming tide of top new artists; however, it is demoralizing to remember that a whole industry exists to present them with the fresh and spotless face of a still innocent future for the benefit of others. Youth tickles, reminding us of something we could have been but now can only witness.

After all, if and when we praise artists who have passed the music industry’s ridiculously small window of mainstream viability to reach, say, 40 or maybe even 30, it’s often because of an unprecedented stylistic reinvention or perhaps a return after a supposed senescence. They are reminders that we could still become something else ourselves. (The third common option for the Really old? The legacy assessment, reserved for someone we fear, may not last much longer.) But a methodical refinement of what you’ve been doing for decades and now doing better than ever won’t. isn’t exactly sexy and, in turn, not easily salable. This remains especially true for women in an industry that often treats its artists like commodities, marked with unwavering expiration dates.

The same goes for Leslie Feist, the Canadian singer-songwriter who has been making inquisitive and curious solo albums for a quarter of a century, but is now at her peak, Multitudes. It is unequivocally the best album of his career, because it so clearly collects and examines the struggles, joys and takeaways of his 47 years, then shares them in ineffable songs stripped very close to their magnetic center.

Feist has long been through his artistic reinvention, moving from a past of freewheeling punk and transgressive chicanery (alongside his former roommate Peaches) to intimate acoustic eccentricity, like renovating Laurel Canyon for an art museum. contemporary. On just five albums since 1999, she’s repeatedly worked this ground, seeking another way to sing complicated emotional truth with admittedly mixed results. On his sixth album, his barely adorned honesty with his age and experience, his voice and his flaws, his setbacks and his hopes is consummated, the result of someone who has lived enough to have a story and worked enough for the brilliantly put to song.

If you know the music of Feist, if only since sound “1234” lights up sesame street or his ear worm on the knee-deep walk in snow”,Mushaboom“, you will immediately recognize it on any of Multitudes‘ dozen titles. In her late teens, Feist temporarily quit music because it had damaged her vocal cords; his alto retains the resulting trademark grain here, as textured as a worn saw blade even as it glides to high notes or collapses into a whisper. “Forever Before” is so lighthearted you might consider it a leak risk, but Feist’s tone sets this anthem to engage in whatever gravity it demands.

And remember the rhythmic caress of “1234”, how Feist found melodies by lightly strumming and clicking guitar strings like a diaphanous Leo Kottke? It’s here in “I Took All of My Rings Off,” his anthem for letting go of the illusion but not the world, and “Love Who We Are Meant To,” which spys on the cad in The Old Chestnut Tree by Stephen Stills and gallops in the other direction. Shaped by a modest cast of collaborators who excel at enhancing songs by blending into their structure, like Blake Mills and Shahzad Ismaily, Multitudes is the Platonic ideal of how a Feist record should sound approachable yet odd, comfortable yet thoughtful, pretty yet sharp.

Yet, as familiar as Feist may appear on Multitudesalmost all In the songs changed, mirroring the changing circumstances of his life. In 2017, when she released the discursive and uneven Pleasure, Feist has talked a lot about letting go of familiar expectations or disavowing the feeling that your life should follow a simple path to marriage, children, and stability. “When you’re younger, you just assume there’s a golden door that will open and there’s some kind of shining eternity.” she said The Guardiancalling the scenario a fantasy.

It was extremely prescient of the twists to come in the interval since 2017 Pleasure, a six-year entanglement of utter joy and utter despair. At the end of a 2019 arena tour, Feist adopted her first child, Tihui, unwittingly becoming a single mother before a global redirection pandemic began. The couple “a matriarchy of two”, as she said lived with his father, the explosive abstract painter Harold Feist, outside of Toronto in these early days of lockdown. When he died a year later, she found herself negotiating a swing of new love and new loss, two extremes entwined into one enduring span.

Without flinching or grimacing, and above all with a sober accompaniment that highlights the wisdom without overflowing it, Multitudes room for take-out. “Into the Earth” is crystalline eulogy for all who will ever live, with Feist heeding our hopes for infinite transcendence with our time-limited reality. “Dust into dust as material must / Ash into ash into plexi and trash,” she sings, her voice processed so that timing and tone are distorted, confusing past, present and future in a stubborn haze.

During “Of Womankind”, she seeks the strength not to accept what she cannot change but to criticize it, to punish faults until she can reckon with them. There are snapshots of vulnerable women brandishing pepper spray as they search for predators under their cars, of companies overpowering the people who once propelled them. Remember, Feist abandoned an Arcade Fire tour shortly after sexual misconduct accusations emerged against singer Win Butler; she publicly placed her actions where her ideals lay. “Come outside,” she sings, her voice echoing until it becomes a one-woman choir. “Trees reach out and don’t know how to lie.” It’s a mic drop moment, Feist turning her back on others’ unnecessary problems to find a better space for herself and everyone who really needs it.

Multitudes, as its name aptly suggests, is not all discouragement and confusion, not even close. Invoking Bjrk and Bon Iver, the shockingly radiant opener, “In Lightning,” is about finding a way forward, even if it’s only “in the flickering light.” And its earnest follow-up, “Forever Before,” is a hymn to his daughter, framed by ignoring the childish indulgences of Feist’s four decades in order to completely care for someone else. It’s a love song for letting go.

Each image is, of course, more complicated than just good or bad, happiness or sadness. Multitudes thrives in this ambiguity. “Hiding Out in the Open,” for example, documents the baggage that every relationship accumulates, a jumble of complications that we can never fully unload. “Nothing’s gonna make us new / What’s done won’t undo,” Feist sings, letting the words sag until they’re rude, as if even she wanted to avoid her own axiom.

But in the second verse, as she preemptively laments a difficult conversation she must have with a lover, she smiles mischievously at the thought of their physical spark. “I want you warm as a loaf of bread / A thousand ways to be fed,” she sings coldly, taking a moment before letting out a happy little cry just within earshot of the microphone. It’s a sweet and disarming track, an assurance that there’s nothing wrong with indulging in pleasure to briefly dull the pain. Even on such a candid and unguarded album, the scream avoids any remaining divide between Feist and us, between sage and student. Is life too short to worry about covering up the truth, or too long to matter anyway?

At the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, there is a pale pastel painting by Diane von Frstenberg, the fashion icon who popularized the wrap dress in the West. Sitting on a stool, von Frstenberg, then 55 years old, carries one of these treasures. What’s most striking, however, are her eyes, all distant and sunken under bags and heavy cheekbones. His skin is like crumpled parchment, stretched by invisible hands. This seems to be part of painter Anh Duong’s point: “In my older face, I see my life,” reads the accompanying text, citing von Frstenberg’s 2014 memoir. “My face carries all my memories. Why should I delete them?

This is how Feist feels during Multitudes, too indifferent to the experiences of her past, unapologetic for the scars and creases they have certainly left on her future. Over the past six years, she has witnessed death and birth and the uncompromising burden of a world repeatedly pushed out of order. “Don’t be sad, my friends / That’s the last thing I’d say,” she opens the masterstroke closer. “If you’re sad, my friends / Why should I take that off?” It is his permission to greet the fullness of life grief, joy, sex, sadness, all at the same time without prejudice or self-doubt. Take the world as it is, not as you planned. She looks warm but worn, doing her best to lull a world as tired as she proudly was, at least for a moment.