...Metals Su Bas Heavy...FEISTE DIE BESTE...For nearly a decade, Leslie Feist did not stop moving. Her 2004 award winning album Let It Die led right into 2007’s The Reminder, which earned her four Grammy nominations, six Juno wins, the Shortlist Music Prize, and the opportunity to teach Muppets to count on Sesame Street. She made her Saturday Night Live debut and toured the world. She covered an album with Beck, recorded with Wilco and watched Stephen Colbert shimmy in a sequined “1234” jumpsuit, and made a documentary about her visual collaborators on The Reminder. And then, finally, after the seventh year, Feist rested.
“There’s a lot of output on tour,” she says. “and in the downtime afterwards I was a sponge—I was trying to absorb as much as I put out for seven years. I was being still and trying to learn how to be quiet and remember that silence isn’t aggressive,” she adds. “Sometimes after being in a lot of noise and movement, silence and stillness can seem completely terrifying.”
When Feist was ready to make music again, she had very different ideas about how to shatter the quiet. “I had played so many shows with such care, I really wanted to turn up again,” she says, referring to her early days as a guitarist in punk and rock bands.
She wrote the album over 3 autumn months in 2010 in a tiny garage behind her house, after a year away from the spotlight. While the lyrics she has crafted often have an affectingly melancholic undercurrent, the arrangements, in which Feist ups her reputation as a guitarist, unfailingly lift the ear out of melancholy and into inspiration.
In January 2011, her longtime collaborators Chilly Gonzales and Mocky arrived in Toronto to arrange 12 songs that would become her fourth studio album, Metals (Cherrytree/Interscope). The trio spent a frigid month “Trying to sound like we had played together as long as we’d collectively known each other, around 50 years,” then decamped for California’s rugged Big Sur coastline to record them.
“Recording can be a weightless free float from your day-life, and I like to pick places with certain fertile qualities that can give me a visual hook that I’m there to do something other than what I would otherwise do. And that clean line between land and sea, the graphic edge of the continent pointing out towards the east…. meaning not the Atlantic “next stop Europe” feeling, but “next stop somewhere you’ve never been.” Feist says. “Plus, you are somewhere that looks completely unfound and yet it’s been so perfectly recorded literarily. Steinbeck made 1000 albums there! Henry Miller and Anais Nin probably considered that line between land and sea, too. And on top of it, we truly found the perfect room to build a studio in, perched on the cliffs. A giant empty space.”
The songs Feist and her band—Gonzales, Mocky, percussionist Dean Stone, and keyboard whiz Brian LeBarton—laid down over two and a half weeks in February- plumb different emotional paths than her previous work. “Time passes, time grabs you as it goes past, and then it changes you. You begin to catch patterns.” she muses. “I feel a little bit more like a narrator now. Rather than saying, here’s my truth, I’m able to say, here’s something I’ve just observed to be true. Which depending on the day can also be absolutely not true. There’s less certainty with time, as much as you’d assume the opposite to be the case.”
