Pages tagged “feist”

Winking covers of cheesy '80s tunes by established indie artists are a dime—or, on Amazon, $18.97 new and $8.99 used—a dozen these days. Still, Feist and Constantines' cover of Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton’s 1983 hit "Islands in the Stream" is really quite stunning. With nary a bit of cheek, they've stripped the song down to the quietly earnest acoustic slow-jam it should have always been. Better still, Bryan Webb and Leslie Feist sound like they actually wanna make love to each other, which is not the impression we get from this chummy, vintage Kenny Rogers and Dolly Parton performance…:

…or, thank God, from this 2006 duet between Kenny and Carrie Underwood:

The cover, currently streaming at the Arts & Crafts website, joins an original Constantines track on their Islands in the Stream EP, out now. The band's Kensington Heights LP was released yesterday in Canada and hits the States on April 29th. Ah huh.

Related links:
Feature: Leslie Feist Lets It Bleed
Constantines on MySpace
Kenny Rogers Roasters
Dollywood.com

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

Quite possibly fueled by the fact that she won 1,2,3,4…5 (couldn’t resist) awards this past Sunday, April 6, at the Canadian Juno Awards, Feist has decided to tour for even longer than she was planning on before. So now, if you miss her the first time, you can see her the second time she tours the U.S. and Canada.

The Calgary, Alberta native won her glass and aluminum statuettes for Single of the Year, “1,2,3,4,” Album of the Year for The Reminder, pop album of the year, The Reminder, Artist of the Year and Songwriter of the Year. All in all, a good year for Feist.

In other recent news, despite the fact that she was pretty thrilled to win all those Junos, she insists that the true happiest day of her life was when she filmed “1,2,3,4” with Kermit (who actually has his own page on IMDB!) on Sesame Street. The episode isn’t out yet, but it seems like Feist has quite a thing for puppets these days.

She’ll (probably) leave the Muppets at home during these dates:

June
10 - Porto @ The Coliseum
11 - Lisbon @ Aula Magna

July
6 - Shelburne, Vt. @ The Green at the Shelburne Museum
8 - Boston, Mass. @ The Bank of American Pavilion
9 - Brooklyn, N.Y. @ Prospect Park Bandshell
11 - Highland Park, Ill. @ Ravinia Festival
12 - Omaha, Neb. @ The Memorial Park Concert – FREE!
13 - Kansas City, Mo. @ Starlight Theatre
15 - Denver, Colo. @ Fillmore Auditorium
17 - Park City, Utah @ Deer Valley Resort Amphitheatre
19 - Berkeley, Calif. @ Greek Theatre
20 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ Hollywood Bowl
22 - San Diego, Calif. @ Humphrey’s Concerts by the Bay

August
5 - Vancouver, BC @ Deer Lake Park

October
16 - Edmonton, AB @ Rexall Place
18 - Calgary, AB @ Pengrowth Saddledome
19 - Regina, SK @ Brandt Centre at IPSCO Place
20 - Winnipeg, MB @ MTS Centre
24 - London, ON @ John Labatt Centre

November
3 - Toronto, ON @ Air Canada Centre
5 - Montreal, QC @ Bell Centre
6 - Saint John, NB @ Harbour Station
7 - Halifax, NS @ Halifax Metro Centre
9 - St. John’s, NFLD @ Mile One Stadium

Related links:
News: Tireless Feist Picks Up American Tour Dates
News: Feist Enlists Puppetry Troupe for Next Music Video
Feature: Leslie Feist Lets It Bleed

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

What do you do after your last video becomes a ubiquitous hit following its inclusion in a certain MP3 player's television ads? Let puppets do your work for you, of course. According to several reports, Canadian songstress Feist has enlisted the help of the Calgary-based The Old Trout Puppet Workshop for the video of her latest single, "Honey, Honey," off the Grammy-nominated album The Reminder.

The Old Trout Puppet Workshop produced puppetry for the early 1990s blockbuster Honey, I Shrunk The Kids. (What? No Rick Moranis this time around?) Their work has also been featured on stage, in productions of Ronald Dahl's Little Red Riding Hood and Jack And The Beanstalk. This is the first Feist video in which the singer-songwriter does not perform.

"I am a mere spectator. I love this! I'm not even in it, I just get to hang out!", Feist told CityTv.com. Perhaps if we're lucky, and Feist really gets behind this do-nothing work ethic, we'll see the animatronic characters from Disney World's Hall of Presidents starring in the next Feist joint.

In related news, this isn't the first time Feist has worked with puppets. The Grammy-nominated artist once toured with Peaches as "Bitch Lap Lap," a leotard-wearing rapper with a sock puppet.

Puppets = Feist fetish.

Related links:
Feature: Leslie Feist Lets It Bleed
News: Tireless Feist picks up American tour dates
ListenToFeist.com

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

Green Owl Records wants you to help clean up the environment. And really, how can you resist? Just look at that cute, green face above!

But perhaps you need a little more urging, because a crudely drawn image of a green figure with claw-like hands may not be convincing enough. What if Green Owl Records threw in a two-CD/one-DVD collection that includes rare and unreleased tracks from your favorite artists? Then would you help clean up our polluted world?

You probably would, given that the compilation, informatively titled Green Owl Comp: A Benefit for the Energy Action Coalition features contributions from Paste-approved artists like Feist, Of Montreal, Bloc Party, and Pete Yorn. The money that you give to Green Owl Records starting April 8 (when the compilation goes onsale through the label’s website) will go to the Energy Action Coalition, which encourages youth involvement in clean energy movements.

Between the music, videos and that cute green guy, the perks of environmentalism have never been greater.

Green Owl Comp tracklist:

CD 1:
1. The Appletrees: "Look Up to the Sky"
2. Feist: "Honey Honey" (BBC Session)
3. Harper Simon: "Henrieta"
4. Young Love: "Underground"
5. Muse: "Knights of Cydonia" (live)
6. The Exit: "Hey Man"
7. Of Montreal: "Feminine Effects"
8. Pete Yorn: "Old Boy"
9. London Souls: "Someday"
10. Citizens Band: "Fortune Teller"
11. Violens: "Trance Like Turn"
12. Bloc Party: "The Prayer" (Hadouken remix)
13. School of Seven Bells: "Trance Figure"
14. Deerhoof: "+81" (BBC Session)
15. Juliana Hatfield: "Back to Freedom"
16. Satori: "Intimate Revolution"

CD2:
1. The Bad Plus: "Casa Particular"
2. Carina Round: "Hookah"
3. Asobi Seksu: "Strawberries"(CSS Remix)
4. Dragons of Zynth: "Xerathyn"
5. Earl Greyhound: "This Tree"
6. The Appletrees: "Messin Around"
7. A Place to Bury Strangers: "Never Going Down"
8. State Radio: "Camilo"

DVD:
1. The Appletrees: "Messin Around"
2. Young Love: "Underground"
3. The Exit: "Hey Man"
4. Satori: "A Clear View"
5. Violens: "Trance Like Turn"
6. Rebecca Schiffman: "Penguins and Igloos"
7. Interview with Billy Parish

Related links:
GreenOwlRecords.com
Green Owl Records on MySpace
EnergyAction.net

Got news tips for Paste? E-mail news@pastemagazine.com.

Modest Mouse's chart victories and Of Montreal's fly endorsement deals notwithstanding, Leslie Feist really has emerged out of nowhere to become the indie world's crossover success darling. And that now ubiquitous iPod Nano ad of hers is just the tip of the iceberg. Feist has become a hip name to drop among bloggers of all stripes, she's dominated the late night TV circuit, and now she's making a triumphant return to North America on her latest tour. Swooning yet?

You'll feel it all:

November
6 - Portland, Ore. @ Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
7 - Seattle, Wash. @ Paramount Theatre
9 - San Francisco, Calif. @ Nob Hill Masonic Center
10 - San Diego, Calif. ! 4th & B
12 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ Gibson Amphitheatre
14 - Denver, Colo. @ The Ogden
16 - Madison, Wisc. @ The Orpheum
17 - Chicago, Ill. @ The Riviera
18 - Columbus, Ohio @ Wexner Center
20 - Louisville, Ky. @ Brown Theatre
21 - Nashville, Tenn. @ Ryman Auditorium
29 - Moncton, New Brunswick @ Capitol Theatre
30 - Halifax, Nova Scotia @ Cunard Centre

December
1 - St. John's, Newfoundland @ Holy Heart of Mary Auditorium
3 - Hamilton, Ontario @ Hamilton Place
4 - Kitchener, Ontario @ Centre in the Square
5 - London, Ontario @ Centennial Hall

February 2008
18 - Toronto, Ontario @ Sony Centre for the Performing Arts

Related links:
Paste: Leslie Feist Lets it Bleed
Paste: 1,000 Words - Feist
ListenToFeist.com

Got news tips for Paste? Email news@pastemagazine.com.

She shares an apartment in Paris and has half a house waiting for her in Toronto, but if her plans go accordingly, Canadian solo artist Leslie Feist won’t be spending much time at either abode. She figures she spent 33 months on the road promoting her last album, the Juno award-winning Let It Die. At this point, she should consider putting the “Feist” brand on a line of luggage. “It’s my bed and my closet,” she says, a slight laugh offsetting the simple reality. “There’s been a lot of zigzagging across the oceans. It is what it is, and I’m doing it, and it’s part of the equation.”

The “it” Feist keeps referring to is, of course, her musical career, an accident that’s taken its share of hard work. The Reminder, her latest compendium of folk rock, electronica, Memphis soul and reflective ballads will put her back on the road until at least Christmas. It’s the first album she’s conceived knowing an audience will be waiting. “With Let it Die, I made the record in the studio,” she explains. “The songs I wrote for it came later. We started with covers, because the experiment was about us working together in a different way.”

The “us” Feist refers to is her production team, Jason Charles Beck (a.k.a. Chilly Gonzales) and Renaud Letang, two recording artists who agreed they’d work together when the right project came along. “The whole point was to start fresh,” explains Feist. “I put my guitar down. Gonzales put his samplers and sequencers and drum machines down. Renaud usually just sings by himself. It was about starting from scratch.”

Gonzales concurs. “She was leaving behind her indie-rock world, and I was leaving behind my electro world and trying to find a compromise between those worlds. Part of the reason I suggested we work some tracks together is because I discovered some of Dusty Springfield’s records and I saw something in Feist that was like Dusty, the versatility of the voice and the lightness of the personality.” A collection of five covers and six originals, Let It Die was Gonzales’ first outside production, playing Burt Bacharach to Feist’s Springfield. Says the singer, “It was a page being torn from some completely different book than I’d ever read before.”

Feist had never heard Dusty Springfield before Gonzales took her aside and played her Dusty’s records. She grew up in Calgary, singing in choir and attending an arts school before joining a punk-rock band at 15 and by 20, moving to Toronto to make her first impressions playing guitar for By Divine Right, who opened for The Tragically Hip in North America. “I just followed the road that uncurled in front of me,” she says. “I didn’t have any kind of master plan. I just liked singing and went from there.”

Feist spent years working in various capacities for friends, performing as Bitch Lap Lap behind electronica shock rapper Peaches, touring Europe as a vocalist with Gonzales and his less-confrontational material, recording tentative first solo album Monarch (Lay Down Your Jeweled Head) and eventually joining her old By Divine Right bandmate Brendan Canning in loose Toronto collective Broken Social Scene, after guesting on the band’s first album, 1999’s Feel Good Lost. “There are five guys in Broken who hold it together and keep it alive while the rest of us come and go like the swinging doors of an old Western saloon,” says Feist. “I still manage to play on the road with them when we can make our tours converge.”

But now it may be a matter of who opens for whom. Let It Die outdid all expectations, going gold in France, platinum in Canada and selling over 400,000 copies worldwide. The track “Mushaboom” went top 10 at commercial Adult Alternative radio in the U.S., even attracting the attention of Outkast’s Andre 3000, who placed the song at #1 on his People magazine and Rolling Stone playlists. “It took on a life of its own that I never could’ve predicted,” admits Feist. “I suppose I was a little bewildered, but I adapted pretty quickly. Your life is what’s in front of you and what you wake up to everyday.”

Her two 2005 Juno Awards—“Best Alternative Album” and “Best New Artist”—proved to her family that, though she hadn’t yet scaled to the heights of Celine Dion, her music career was a real, ongoing, functional concern. “These Juno Awards [are as] ‘topside’ as you can get in Canada. It’s kinda like the Grammys of Canada, but, of course, it’s Canada so it’s not like the Grammys at all,” she says with a laugh. “As everyone I know who’s won or been nominated or performed, we all say the Junos are for the parents. When I won, I just gave them my mom’s address and I didn’t even see them until I went to visit my mom a year later and saw them on the mantel. She has the mantelpiece; I’ve got the suitcase.”

When it finally came time to record the follow-up, Feist had clear ideas not of what she wanted but how she wanted it. “I couldn’t close my eyes and hear the record or imagine what I wanted it to sound like,” she says. “I just knew how I wanted to make it and the resultant sound would be no bells or whistles and nothing—just having the song be the point. I knew I wanted us to be in a living space where we didn’t have to travel to the studio every morning.”

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.”

Feist has announced plans to tour throughout much of June in support of The Reminder, her second U.S. album released May 1. Currently on tour throughout Canada, next month she’ll work her way all the way from Massachusetts to California. In between, she’ll stop in New York City for two nights at Town Hall (the first date sold out in four hours, prompting the addition of a second show) and in Manchester, Tenn., for a performance at Bonnaroo.

The Reminder was recorded on the outskirts of Paris at La Frette, a two-centuries old manor house where Feist and her musical compadres took up residence last year.

U.S. tour dates include:

June:
8 - Northampton, Mass. @ Calvin Theatre *
9 - Boston, Mass. @ Berkelee Performance Center *
11 - New York, N.Y. @ Town Hall (sold out)
12 - New York, N.Y. @ Town Hall
13 - Washington, D.C. @ 9:30 Club *
14 - Greensboro, N.C. @ Carolina Theatre *
15 - Atlanta, Ga. @ Variety Playhouse *
17 - Manchester, Tenn. @ Bonaroo Music Festival
19 - Chicago, Ill. @ The Vic
20 - Minneapolis, Minn. @ Pantages Theatre *
22 - Boulder, Colo. @ Boulder Theatre *
24 - Seattle, Wash. @ Moore Theatre *
25 - Portland, Ore. @ TBD *
27 - San Francisco, Calif. @ The Fillmore *
29 - Los Angeles, Calif. @ The Wiltern *
30 - Solana Beach, Calif. @ Belly Up *
* with Grizzly Bear

Be sure to check out Paste’s feature on Feist in our upcoming June issue.

Related links:
Feist’s official website
Feist on MySpace
AllThingsFeist.com, the "un-official Feist news, music & photo blog"

Sometime Broken Social Scenester drops impressive breakout album

Feist makes her entry into the much-ballyhooed “Canadian Invasion” with this cozy and concertedly atmospheric major-label debut (the album was originally released in 2004 on Arts & Crafts). Tapping a fertile market with her pseudo-jazzy spare/lavish stylings, the re-release reeks of cynicism but admittedly exposes a genuine talent to the wider herds. In the end, it’s the little touches that make this record stand out from the Nic Harcourt-approved female-crooner clutter—the kiss of nylon guitar strings on “Mushaboom,” the deftly doubled vocals on “One Evening” and the cute little finger snaps and koto twang on the aptly titled “Leisure Suite.” In a genre where it’s hard to escape producing mere sonic wallpaper, Feist has generated a dazzling interior constellation for your candlelit, post-midnight ceiling-gazing needs.