Leslie Feist Gets A Reminder To Lay Her Jeweled Head Down

As Leslie Feist barrels into the ultra-mod lobby of New York's Hotel On Rivington, it's clear how she's spent her last few hours: clothes shopping. Wearing a short, brown pea coat, a deep maroon, long-sleeved shirt and fashionable jeans, the somewhat diminutive, svelte brunette with the long bangs has become something of an underground fashion icon since her 2004 album, Let It Die (Cherrytree-Interscope), gained international acclaim, eventually winning Juno Awards (Canada's Grammy) for New Artist Of The Year and Alternative Album Of The Year in 2005. As she shows off her new beige jacket and shoes to her manager, she makes it clear that it's been a while since she's treated herself so kindly. Considering the fashion photo shoots many magazines request of her, it's the sort of quirky paradox that made her endearing in the first place.

As she darts up the hotel's stairs ("Aren't you glad we're stair people?" she says to her manager, who agrees with a laugh), her excitable, cheery mood almost belies the equally beautiful and contemplative folk on her touchstone's follow-up, The Reminder (Cherrytree- Interscope). Having spent 33 months on the road since Let It Die, both supporting her record and touring with her other full-time band, Broken Social Scene, Feist has made a record that reflects the wonder, loneliness and excitement of her life in the past few years. Holing up in a 200-year-old manor in suburban Paris, she kept everything as open and free as possible, even allowing the chirping birds and barking dogs outside to sing along with her. It's these frequent nuances that have built the singer's mystique to the point of becoming a playfully reluctant public feature.

"Everybody goes, 'Paris! Fashion!'" she says, settling cross-legged onto a red couch and pushing her bangs over to one side. "Everybody knew Paris is where I made the record so that was the filter they were seeing me through, and me and my shoddy jeans and T-shirt became shabby chic." She laughs about it, but Chanel invited her to speak with some of their designers. When she actually went to the studio, she felt intimidated by the situation's enormity. "It made total sense to me, but I'm in Calgary, so it didn't make such sense to me. Someday, though."

Located in south-central Alberta, Calgary sits at the foot of the Canadian Rockies. It's the country's third-largest city and its westerly geographic position provided a sense of wonderment to Feist as she grew up. To the east, about 2,000 miles away, was Toronto and over the mountains was Vancouver, "and those were the two big cities that I knew aboot," she says, letting her Canadian accent drift in. Her father lived in Toronto, and she'd visit him twice a year, delighting in how mature she felt riding the subway by herself. When she was 17, she first came to New York with a puppet troupe, and the city's skyscrapers and hubbub confounded her ("It was like Big City—capital B, capital C"). She's now 31, and the intervening years have taught her much about metropolitan life. In a way, those years made her who she is today.

In high school, she formed a punk band called Placebo with some other girls. "I was just the frontwoman, front, well, girl, I guess," she says. Since they were in the center of the country, they were the "it" band that opened up for the likes of the Ramones, the Jesus Lizard and Shudder To Think. About five years in, as has been well-documented, she lost her voice. She moved to Toronto to consult with a musical injuries specialist and to take care of her father, who was sick at the time. Since she couldn't sing, she taught herself guitar, eventually joining By Divine Right.

What people don't realize is that she didn't abandon punk out of vocal necessity; she had merely reached the age where it ceased to interest her. She became obsessed with Tortoise, Five Style and even Weezer, absorbing those bands' melodies in a different way. She found herself rooming with a slightly older, very liberated woman who called herself Peaches, and soon was performing with her. Feist even released her first solo album, Monarch (Lay Your Jeweled Head Down), in 1999. In between, she cooked, tended bar and de-thorned roses for a living. Since she had already been making music for years by the time Let It Die came out—and the bouncy, Triple-A piano rocker "Mushaboom" found its way into radio and TV commercials—the album's sudden impact didn't really rock her. Because of this, writing and recording The Reminder was easy.

"I just felt this grand calm," she says about her growth between albums. "Just this feeling of free-floating, relaxing sort of gratitude, this benevolent presence of people out there who would open up big doors for me. Just a bunch of individuals who I don't know, but together they formed this big red carpet rolling out in front of me, basically all of the people who came to the gigs. [With] record sales, I don't have any way to make that number real, you don't really see it. But then you see night by night enough people that you can recognize, you know, 2,000 people or a thousand people or 300 people or 3,000 people."

As she toured endlessly (she jokes that she's still not home yet), she learned that friendships are, in her words, elastic. In the beginning, she strove to keep things as normal as possible with her family and friends, but after a while she learned that she could let go and the relationship wouldn't end. "At some point the phones and computers don't help you stay in touch," says Feist. "They just act as these kinds of interference between what really should be happening, which is simple interaction. After a while I just stopped." She'd run into Broken Social Scene bandmate Emily Haines on a brief London sojourn or meet up with best friend and musical collaborator Chilly Gonzales (whom she calls "the Bobby Fisher of music," for his intuition) whenever circumstance permitted.

This is why she pushed to get everyone in the same room, no headphones or isolation booths, to record The Reminder. They positioned microphones in hallways and stairwells to capture everything, and she even sang into an amplifier. As a result, everything had to be recorded in one full take, and subsequently recording "The Water" took 23 attempts. In that regard, The Reminder seems more like a true, Alan Lomax-inspired folk and soul album, in contrast with Let It Die's Stevie Wonder-like melodies.

As twilight descends and a hotel attendee places a candle in front of her, she laughs and says, "Thank you, so romantic." Continuing on about her recording she says, "Basically, I didn't want to get too precious. I wanted things to be one-take as much as possible. At least to make it so that moment of that, 'huuh'"—here she demonstrates a breath—"would be audible... possibly, maybe." Perhaps the real reminder is that the complexities lead to simplicity and nothing has to be as it seems. Her duality even shows up in her call-and-response- heavy cover of "Sea Lion Woman," which she discovered from a Library Of Congress' Archive Of Folk Culture album, Afro-American Blues And Game Songs, which featured two young girls singing, and was also later covered by Nina Simone. She wanted to give a nod to both these little girls and a vocal jazz legend in one fell swoop, which is the kind of paradox only someone like anti-fashion icon Feist could successfully pull off. It's just who she is.

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