Leslie Feist Lets it Bleed

After several weeks in a flat in Berlin working up the songs in one room while Gonzales worked on his own piano music in the other, the two convened with Letang and their other musical friends, Mocky, Jamie Lidell and Feist’s live band—Bryden and Jesse Baird, Julian Brown and Afie Jurvanen—at Le Frette Studios outside Paris, a facility Feist had used a year earlier to record a song for the upcoming Ethan Hawke film The Hottest State. “We recorded in the basement where there’s a proper studio. While we were there, we spent a lot of time upstairs in the living room space of the house and I said, ‘I want to make my record there.’”

The studio was wired to the living and parlor rooms, and Feist recorded for two-and-a-half weeks in this casual environment. “For me, it was really important to make a recording that had people in a room playing together, not separated by even headphones,” she explains. “In one corner, we put a guitar amp that I sang through, and my guitar amp that I played through in another corner, and then the piano and vibraphone and organ. And in the other room we put two drum kits, and in the hallway we put the standup bass because there was a natural resonance. All the windows were open, and all the microphones were bleeding into each other.”

Several of the songs, including “So Sorry” and “The Water,” were first takes with no overdubbing, a way for Feist to circumvent her overworked mind. “If you can have your fingers or your voice influence more than your brain, then basically whatever comes out is tapping from a different source than your mind, and then that’s something that’s easier to listen to than if I can hear myself calculating and calibrating. I’d rather just slalom down through my instincts and catch the momentum of the moment and listen to the players around me.”

“She definitely had an idea,” says Gonzales. “She really had strong ideas of what needs to be there to be able to deliver that emotional payoff. Going out on tour, she realized [that on] certain songs on Let It Die, she had trouble getting behind it every night. She became a real expert on why.”

“All the covers had fallen off the setlist without meaning to,” admits Feist. “For whatever reason, I couldn’t climb inside them anymore.”

Gonzales is more to the point. “When you look at the lyrics in print to that [Bee Gees] song ‘Inside and Out,’ you realize what a horrible lyricist Barry Gibb is.”

For The Reminder, Feist collaborated on several key tracks. The Gamble and Huff, Philly Soul of “Limit to Your Love” came to Feist and Gonzales on the fast track, much like Let It Die’s favored track, “Mushaboom.” “That was only one of a couple of times in my life when five minutes after you have the initial idea, it’s finished,” says Feist. “He played a chord, I sang a line, and we listened back.”

“Brandy Alexander,” with Ron Sexsmith, on the other hand, was an exercise in persistence. The two had been running into each other for years. “He thought I was this one woman who’s Neko Case’s manager, who I’ve never met,” says Feist. “Then I was the ‘French girl who recorded ‘Secret Heart.’’ No, I’m from Canada, but I lived in France.”

At a party in Ottawa, Feist asked Sexsmith what he was drinking. “So, I began to tell her about the legendary ‘Brandy Alexander,’” explains Sexsmith, “which was apparently the drink John Lennon and Harry Nilsson were enjoying the night they got kicked out of the Troubadour in L.A. back in the ’70s. The next day or so, she emailed me a lyric.” An hour later Sexsmith left his piano with the music. A year later they ran into one another in L.A. and Sexsmith sang the melody to her.

“I didn’t have a Dictaphone to record his melody,” says Feist. “But it’s a Ron Sexsmith melody, so my mind recorded it. It was six months [later] that I was standing next to Gonzales at the piano singing him Ron’s melody, and he asked me what the chords were underneath. ‘Was it this?’ ‘This?’ When Ron heard it, he [said] ‘Yeah, I guess that’s pretty much it.’”

With her strong work ethic and Zen-like mastery of fate’s unpredictable twists, Feist is content to let each step form its own impression and dictate its own pace. She’s letting the songs speak for themselves. “Any explanation is just shining fluorescent lights on shadows that are otherwise interesting and curious,” she says.

Trusting the art and not the artist is how it should be. The tangled weave of love and life comes out differently than anyone can anticipate. And who wants to tempt fate by talking too loudly or bravely? But the sentiment of her most popular track to date, “Mushaboom,” still resonates within her when asked where she sees her life heading. She suddenly reflects on that idyllic and elusive bucolic retreat that retains its power as the never-reached destination.

“I’m looking for the trees,” she says. “I’m waiting to find my little forest somewhere, and I just haven’t figured out where it’s going to be yet.”