Feist

0:05Pushkin. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human When it comes to the holidays, I believe you fall into one of two camps. Someone who loves holiday music, or someone who won't admit they love holiday music. There's something about a voice you love singing a familiar opening phrase, maybe it's Donny Hathaway, maybe it's Mariah Carey, that just flips a switch, and you instantly back into that warm and cozy headspace only the holidays can bring. For me, that feeling pairs perfectly with a cup of Starbucks Caramel Brulee Latte. That's their signature espresso with steamed milk and a rich caramel brulee flavor topped with whipped cream and a crunchy caramel brulee topping.

0:46It's like the sound of the season, but in drink form. And that's really what this season's about. Because this season and every season together is the best place to be. Come together over your favorite holiday favorites at Starbucks. If you've ever hired for your small business, you know how important it is to find the right person. That's why LinkedIn Jobs is stepping things up with their new AI assistant so you can feel confident you're finding top talent that you can't find anywhere else. The best part is those great candidates are already on LinkedIn. In fact, employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor.

1:21That's a big deal when every hire counts. Hiring doesn't have to be complicated. With LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant, you can skip the confusing steps in recruiting jargon. It filters through applicants based on criteria you've set for your role and surfaces only the best matches so you're not stuck sorting through a mountain of resumes. When you have a business to run, you don't have hours to spend on hiring. You don't want to just wait around hoping the right person stumbles upon your job. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests 25 great candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving.

1:50Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash broken, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI Assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash broken to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. Every December, we start singing at church, around the fire, in our cars, with the radio turned up. But have we ever stopped to ask, where did our favorite Christmas carols come from? And what makes them so magical? Join me in unwrapping the meaning and the magic behind these caroling classics. Listen to Hark, the stories behind our favorite Christmas carols.

2:29Available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and at americamagazine.org. Canadian-born singer-songwriter Feist has been one of the most dynamic indie voices of the last two decades. She scored international fame early in her career thanks in part to a nano iPod commercial featuring the song 1234. But for fans of Feist, her appeal lies in how she minds her complex emotional life. Just last month, Feist released her sixth album, Multitudes. She recorded it in the aftermath of tremendous personal loss and change. In late 2019, Feist adopted a baby just months before the pandemic started. About a year later, her father died suddenly.

3:17Multitudes is a raw and intimate look at how she grappled with deep-seated grief and a new kind of love. On today's episode, Leah Rose talks with Feist about how being assaulted in high school ultimately led to her gaining resilience. Feist also remembers the day her music career began when she was asked to front a hardcore band, and how screaming on stage and ultimately blowing out her voice forced her to develop her intimate, career-defining singing style. This is Broken Record, liner notes for the digital age. I'm Justin Richman. Here's Leah Rose with Feist. I have read the PR blurb about the new album, but I would love to hear, in your words, just talk about how the project started to come together.

4:07Yes, well, everything was pretty topsy-turvy there, wasn't it? I mean, there was a complete reframe. There was no presumption of the way things used to be is the way they're going to be. And interestingly, the outside world was sort of echoing what was going on for me in my inside world, which was that nothing was to be presumed. Nothing that had been was going to be because I had just become a mother, right, four months before the pandemic started. So it was sort of a double down of complete reassessment. And, you know, a friend of mine said something that has become unfortunately so true. I mean, fortunately, unfortunately, that to become a parent is to be incinerated.

4:54So true. But who rises from the ashes is a more interesting person to be for the rest of your life. And I'm still working on that. I'm trying to figure out if this is more interesting. Yeah, I know. It's like I just feel like a depleted version, but hopefully eventually more interesting. Well, the way I've been looking at it is the person who decided to, the person who felt capable of being a mother, decided to become a mother. She was actually not very useful and not very helpful at being a mother. so you know that was then echoed by the whole world kind of being uncomfortable with their former selves that didn't serve them anymore in this new context and oh every I felt like everywhere I looked anyone close to me let alone kind of collectively there was just this crucible that was just incinerating every presumption that came from a previous time you know and so songs kind of they they became what they're they always have been to me but like they certainly were even And more so a kind of a habit that I returned to that brought me comfort.

6:02Or like it might be in that incineration, some last living arm lunged out of the quicksand and grabbed a little filament of a former self or something. because I found it really helped me to use some of those wee hours and that liminal state of pure exhaustion and to open myself to that. And a lot of new things and new parts of me were very slowly given a place to work out what that was going to look like in the form of songs. So it was, you know, kind of like some people return to hiking or they go swimming, clear their head. They, you know, whatever they've done their whole life to return to a kind of a privacy that is going to maybe help them like untangle something.

6:57In my very fortunate case, I've always found that in writing a song over the years. Like I can put almost every one of my songs has in some way been my attempt to understand some unknowable moments. Are there any songs on the new album that directly relate to being a new parent that helped you articulate something that you couldn't quite grasp before? Well, I would say the only song that, you know, she will know was about her is the song Forever Before, which I think might be the second song, I think. And it came from this idea that to commit so intentionally, to walk so directly right towards the precipice of complete vulnerability is to become a mother.

7:46and I had never begun a forever before. I mean, that was sort of, there was no sidling out of that commitment. It was a true commitment. And, you know, as much as I feel that I have been committed to things in my life before, I've shown all the way up to different things and different relationships and different ways of thinking or ways of being, ways of relating. I had never done something that could not be undone or that I hope will never be undone. It is, it's the first hundred percent, like, just like dive, dive in, you know? And so that song kind of helped in a way it chronologically over the three verses, it's sort of, it's like a little parentheses around maybe the years leading up to understanding the basis of my life and how it was no longer enough or something.

8:39and that I wanted to expand and make myself prone to the unknown. Yeah. On your song, Borrow Trouble, there's some lyrics that talk about picturing a life that you were left out of and how that is maybe different than what you imagined. And it seems to me like you're now trying to appreciate a life that you've created for yourself. Yeah, I would say I found the idea years ago that if I can't make it better, if it's not within my power to make it better, it being whatever I'm in the midst of trying to face or solve, like psychic algebraic equation of like solve for X. It's like the X is ever changing and it is ever present and it's just going to shapeshift and always be something to need to solve.

9:32And if I can't make it better, at least I can learn how to not make it worse. And to not make it worse means to not spin my wheels in concretized thinking or learning actually what the mechanics of passive aggressivity is and what it is to. And that's another thing about to commit to the words that come out of your mouth. It's sort of boot camp for committing to the steps you take towards in which directions. And all of that, I guess, it's sort of been the quiet background of all the work I've done in my life, in my mind. And as art imitates life, the songs, these songs in particular, have taken the form of like a roadmap.

10:16or as we all self-mythologize, you know, in our, and you don't, and as friends who work very different, they have different jobs than me, friends who don't get a response from the world about what their work is, they say, Hey, don't, don't kid yourself. I have the exact same self-mythologizing. I, I invest in my, the lore of my life. What is, you know, the background of my childhood and what it did to me and how it created this expectations that I then had to fight to, you know, it's just that in my case, I, I work it out in this way that can then be like a silly putty puzzle piece that someone, people can take it and then reform it to fit the puzzle that they're trying to solve, you know?

11:02Yeah. I'm curious, like, what were you like in high school? What were you into? What, like, what kind of kid were you in high school? Well, I suppose I was probably kind of shy, but I also had started to go to all the punk shows in my town and I had assumed the exterior of looking other than what I was on the inside. And I was sort of, you know, I had piercings and shaved my head and it was manic panic. And I was and I went to a pretty conservative high school. And maybe in the first couple of maybe the first month or two or something of my first year of high school, I was attacked by a group of guys.

11:45Not like I mean, here I am making excuses for them, like not violently, but come on. Like I was lifted up and slammed into a wall and handcuffed to a door. and then I've actually never told this story except to friends but at this point I kind of understand how this was all the adversity I was against was like ultimately helpful but very difficult but the whole student body you know no one came to my aid they they created kind of like a giant school-sized semicircle around me and you know laughed and jeered and snickered and then were shooed into the cafeteria. And then the vice principal, I guess after like half an hour or something, I got handcuffed and was completely in shock.

12:32And then he was like, who did this? And I said, I don't know. They came up from behind me. And he said, that's why we don't want kids like you here. And then he made me walk through the entire cafeteria in front of him while he walked behind me through a dead silent cafeteria so that I would tell him who had done this. And up and down the rows of the different seats, while the only sound in the cafeteria was my own crying because I was, you know, choking in my like, and I was being marched up and down these aisles. And then, you know, in the silence, someone screamed freak. And then the and then 1200 people laughed.

13:08And I'd say that was the basis of my high school. And I started skipping. And I started started going to like more and more shows and not really knowing where to go and what to be and what to do. And luckily these girls came up to me in the hallway and they were like, Hey, you go to all those shows, right? But aren't you in the choir? Cause I had found the choir at that school and I was like, yeah, I'm in the choir and I go to all the shows and they're like, well, we need a singer for our band. Do you want to, do you want to join our band? And I was like, without that I have no idea where I would have ended up and then I transferred myself to an alternative school and I didn't my mom didn't even know you know it was like maybe many months in the school contacted her and said Leslie's expelled she hasn't shown up and my mom was like assumed I was just completely and I was like no no no I just didn't tell you because I knew you would probably make it even harder for me to just pull this off so I just did it I went and I was at this alternative school and I was in this band and like, you know, kind of turn that frown upside down sort of thing through the support of like genuine community.

14:18Did you tell your parents about the incident with the being handcuffed? Yes. My mom, I didn't live with my, my dad was across the country, but yeah, I told my mom and I think that, you know, she had just watched her daughter change so radically that she might have just been so frustrated that like she, you know, Let's just say that in recent years, I've recontextualized, hey, P.S., nowadays, luckily, there's language to meet this type of moment that at the time there was no language for. And I can say that I'm grateful that now, like, you know, the gradations of experience that any single word can carry within it is now at least available to be evoked when it needs to be.

15:05because that principle, you know, like I can still get angry. I can still think I need to find out who that was. I need to write an open letter to that school, letting them know how, you know, they might be like, Ooh, will you come speak at our graduation? It's like, well, I might have something to say that you don't necessarily want to hear. But it was a different time and not to excuse it, but I can say that like, it just, we all know it to be true. It was a different time. There was no vocabulary around this. And without that, I don't know where I would be. And so it's like anything that helps you grow or causes you to have to unavoidably find some interior basis for understanding.

15:47And you can cave into bitterness or you can, you know, and I'm sure I had many years of caving into bitterness, but something else rose from it that I'm grateful for. When did you start writing songs? Well, in that band, I suppose, was the beginning of songwriting. Even though we were doing it together, it was baby steps in lyrics and, you know, who's the narrator? Is this first person? Is this dream sequence? Is this dream of consciousness? Or just, you know, melody. But it was a hardcore band. So ultimately, our main asset was volume. and uh yeah and melody came a lot later i mean there was melody i suppose at that time but it was mostly i didn't play guitar i just was the front person and i uh and volume was you know kind of where i what i leaned on and uh yeah so many years later after i blew my voice out on tour with that band like just from screaming uh i ended up kind of under doctor's orders to you know, stay silent.

16:53I had nodes. I had the whole, that period of regenerating. And I learned, I kind of taught myself to begin to play guitar at that time when I was in this sort of imposed silence and I'd had to quit the band. I'd moved to Toronto. I, you know, was living in my dad's basement and just like kind of dealing with my first dose of isolation. And what I found there was, you know, melody, essentially. Do you remember some of the first songs you wrote once you started playing guitar? Yeah. I also had this thing called a melodica, which is kind of like a wooden boxed miniature xylophone that I was really, and also had a four track.

17:34My dad had given me a cassette four track, a Tascam. And I had started with layers and singing harmonies and making these long overtones with the metallophone. And I kind of maybe something like sound sculptures using the radio, using interference and just kind of playing with the form. And like maybe the first songs I wrote, the kind of clunky first, you know, broad strokes attempts were, you know, it's like now I listen to them and it's like the touching yearbook photo kind of thing. Do you identify with any of the lyrics still? Maybe there was a kind of a sensibility, an interest in metaphor already was there, a kind of wordplay.

18:18You know, I can hear now the kind of grandfathered in sort of tendencies to like how to speak around a subject rather than directly to it. Yeah, I guess I wouldn't like sit and probably cover any of it. I would say in C, I'm even calling it covering, like as if it's not my own. That's so interesting. A former self. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, probably wouldn't cover her songs. But I can appreciate that there's some DNA there. We're going to take a quick break and then come back with more from Leah Rose and Feist. I firmly believe when it comes to the holidays, you fall into one of two camps. Someone who loves holiday music or someone who won't admit they love holiday music.

19:06There's something about a voice you love singing that familiar opening phrase, maybe it's Donny Hathaway, maybe it's Mariah Carey, that just flips a switch, and you're instantly back into that warm and cozy headspace only the holidays can bring. For me, that feeling pairs perfectly with a cup of Starbucks Caramel Brulee Latte. That's their signature espresso with steamed milk and a rich Caramel Brulee flavor topped with whipped cream and a crunchy Caramel Brulee topping. It's like the sound of the season, but in drink form. And that's really what this season's about. Little moments of pairing, little moments of connection.

19:39Sharing a song, sharing a story, sharing a caramel brulee latte. Because this season and every season, together is the best place to be. Come together over your holiday favorites at Starbucks. If you've ever hired for your small business, you know how important it is to find the right person. That's why LinkedIn Jobs is stepping things up with their new AI assistant so you can feel confident you're finding top talent that you can't find anywhere else. The best part is those great candidates are already on LinkedIn. In fact, employees hired through LinkedIn are 30 % more likely to stick around for at least a year compared to those hired through the leading competitor.

20:14That's a big deal when every hire counts. Hiring doesn't have to be complicated. With LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant, you can skip the confusing steps in recruiting jargon. It filters through applicants based on criteria you've set for your role and surfaces only the best matches so you're not stuck sorting through a mountain of resumes. When you have a business to run, you don't have hours to spend on hiring, and you don't want to just wait around hoping the right person stumbles upon your job. That's why LinkedIn Jobs AI Assistant suggests 25 great fit candidates daily so you can invite them to apply and keep things moving.

20:49Hire right the first time. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash broken, then promote it to use LinkedIn Jobs' new AI Assistant, making it easier and faster to find top candidates. That's linkedin.com slash broken to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. You know, the holidays have this way of bringing up all these feelings about tradition. For me, some of the best traditions aren't elaborate. They're just moments. Like when my kids and I are experimenting with different hot chocolate recipes or when I'm making gumbo with them for Thanksgiving.

21:21But then there are also these quieter moments where I need to step back and actually think about what all of this means to me. And that's really where therapy has made a difference. A practice that keeps me centered when the calendar gets overwhelming or when emotions run high or when I look up and realize half the year has somehow disappeared. Just having one hour a week that's completely yours can cut through all the noise and bring real clarity. If therapy is something you've been considering, December is actually not a bad time to take that step. BetterHelp connects you with licensed therapists in the U.S.

21:49who all operate under a strict code of conduct. They handle the matching process, you fill out a brief questionnaire, and they find someone who seems like a good fit for what you need. And if it doesn't click, you can switch therapists whenever you want. They've got over 30 ,000 therapists on the platform and have served more than 5 million people with an average live session rating of 4.9 out of 5 across more than 1.7 million reviews. This December, start a new tradition by taking care of you. Our listeners get 10 % off at BetterHelp.com slash broken. That's BetterHelp.com slash broken. We're back with Leah Rose and Feist.

22:25What do you think that you do as a songwriter, as a performer? What do you think you do especially well? Or what are you the best at? that's a nice question i i don't know that i can really characterize it in words it's it's a there's like a location in me that is interested in all sorts of variables and how they how they cross over and maybe i i on this record in particular i i was interested in kind of unseating some of my tendencies and seeing what might might be behind them and there's maybe for the first time in my life, an awareness that there's a kind of a rigor and a craft and an interest in craft that I wouldn't have known with my frontal lobe previously.

23:13I wouldn't have really thought that's what I'm doing, but I'm kind of, I continue to learn from what came before, like everything I've done previously is sort of composted into the new body of work. And I've, I can, I can say to people I'm working with, like, this feels a little bit like Mushaboom's great-granddaughter or something like there's some there's some DNA there's something in here that is or like if Century and Sea Lion had had a love child it might be you know Borough Trouble or something like that or yeah but yeah so there's a lineage maybe in what I've made so far that, um, that makes me curious about what will come next or what, how that perspective will continue to be interesting.

24:04Do you feel like the character that you've created, or do you feel like there even is a character that you've created through your work? And if so, is that person you or is it similar to you or does that make sense? It does. It does. It makes more sense now than ever. I feel like an alignment has occurred where I now know I owe nothing to the avatar. You know, the thing that is refracted by this particular light that's shined on this thing I do, that our society shines this particular timbre of light, this quality of light on what I do, and it refracts out beyond me. And in some cases, maybe leans a little bit too much importance on it in a way that is on the surface.

24:56I've learned that my investment in this very private conversation with myself and my voice being like literally and then part of my anatomy that over many years I learned to listen to from the inside rather than from the outside. and so it's kind of like I've never thought about this before but imagine like a you know like how a doorknob reaches through a door and on one side you can turn it to go in and on another side you can turn it to go out and those are two different gestures but they're there it's the same portal it's the same desire to move through and so my my voice or the way I've chosen to try to formulate not only the sound or the expression of it, but the words that it encants, I now acknowledge and I feel comfortable in knowing that that part is, it's as much me as it is what it becomes in someone else's listening, you know?

25:54So it's, and that's the part that I feel doesn't get refracted and like, it's not like a house of mirrors where that can't be changed by the perception of it. Because if my privacy goes into someone else's privacy, it's like hermetically sealed, it's safe. There is a safety to it. And I feel as I lean deeper into myself and into the discomfort of my continual daily misunderstanding of myself and just trying to align to some personal responsibility that's kind of a North Star that is looking for these dimensions, I'm hoping to find out how to be fed by them because I'm increasingly depleted and I'm realizing my like psychic organism cannot sustain often how much I'm attempting to be and do and to how many people into it's like I'm never quite solving for x it's just like every single day I'm I'm like I can't find x I can't solve for x and yet then these songs weirdly are a place where I I think I can because I can pause time and I can give myself just like a little, a little navigation somehow.

27:07Is there anything on the album that you feel like you did solve? Like any feelings that you either came to terms with or you were able to articulate? There was sort of like a secondary, you know, because I somehow wrote these songs through like this, this really difficult time. And I think I managed in that time to kind of make myself evoke or lean into also the responsibility to find the joy or to, you know, like be a little bit of a solar panel and face the light and be energized by these things that I'm learning or the relationships that, you know, just help me keep the horizon in sight and not get completely lost, you know?

27:52Yeah. And so weirdly, you know, you'd think songs are you're saying something out loud as if you know something. And so I once the record was kind of, you know, no longer just in my within my reach, like I'm still changing it. I'm still mixing it. I'm still working on it. And now it's like once, you know, from one day to the next now it's it's out or at least it's out of my it's it's sealed. It's done. It's like with a wax seal is like boop. and there was sort of this secondary wave of a discomfort and a kind of grief because I'm like, oh my God, like I don't feel any better. It's like maybe I could have, well, I mean, not to say, I mean, every day I feel a range of reality, but maybe even I thought that these songs could solve something for me or they could make something a little easier or something.

28:45But But the problems remain very much alive. You know, the kind of shape-shifting required, like the woman who became a mother wasn't useful as a mother, and now I need to become someone else to be able to be that mother. It's also the daughter who lost her father. Like these things are, the adultification is ongoing. And so to answer your question, maybe I think I caught a kind of hope, you know, like there is some optimism. I learned years ago that whatever I sing and in the repetition of it, I can find myself making it true and truer. Like whatever you look at becomes, you see it. And so if I'm looking to see more hope or more optimism or more like I'm trying to collect the little crumbs of clarity, put my puzzle together, that maybe is what I think I found in these songs.

29:44And even as I say all this, I feel a bit absurd because this is that self-mythologizing I was talking about. But it's important to me. I'd say it's more important to me than anyone else because this is the form I use to try to unpack and understand what's going on in there. Right. And just speaking of having the feeling that nothing has changed after accomplishing something, have you had the experience of like as you've gotten more successful or as you've experienced success over the course of your career, did you ever have the thought that when you reached a certain place of success or fame or whatever it is, that some of those problems would go away?

30:30I don't think that I ever had a fixed destination in mind or was it within, you know, maybe the illusion that I could make anything easier. But I will say that something that led to some of this cracking open was precipitated by going to that People Festival. I don't know if you heard about it, but it was a festival in Berlin that was curated or the context of it, which was created by Justin Vernon and the Desner Brothers of the National, Aaron and Bryce. And they created a festival and invited me to it. I think they invited me a few years and I didn't quite have the ears to hear what they were saying until I was ready to hear what they were saying, which is we really want to create a situation where people step outside of their own expectations of themselves and find something new.