Feist had always had plans to add strings to her new album Metals. So when she and her three co-producers (Gonzalez, Mocky and Valgeir Sigurðsson) finished the basic tracks at Big Sur, they went looking for a California string quartet. Mocky called someone he knew who recommended someone else, who recommended the Bay Area’s Real Vocal String Quartet. The studio’s remote location meant that it took three hours to download a YouTube video of the band at the Berkeley nightclub Freight and Savage, but that was enough for Feist to extend an invitation.
What she saw in the video were four women in a semi-circle (cellist Jessica Ivry sitting on a riser; violist Dina Maccabee and violinists Alisa Rose and Irene Sazer standing) playing a classical piece based on Brazilian folk tunes with great precision before breaking into lively dance rhythms and even some improvisation. The RVSQ was founded in 2003 by Sazer, who’d been an original member of the trailblazing Turtle Island String Quartet, which still pursues a similar mix of classical, jazz and world music. But while the TISQ is a purely instrumental group, Sazer wanted to create an ensemble where singing was as important as bowing.
“Driving down the coast to Big Sur,” Sazer recalls, “we were hoping in our wildest dreams that they’d realize we were creative artists and weren’t just another typical classical string quartet that you use as a sweetener. Little did we know then, but they were hoping in their wildest dreams that we were creative musicians who could do more than play written parts. When we got there and they discovered we could improvise, they said, ‘Ooh, we can use you on this track and that track.’ When they discovered we could sing harmony, they said, “Ooh, and also this track and that track.’”
“We hadn’t written any arrangements down,” Feist adds “but we had them mapped out in our minds. So when the quartet got here, we’d say things like, ‘Play arpeggios in this scale with only two-thirds as many notes as you’d want to play, but don’t play the G because that will resolve the chord.’ And they would just go with it. We brought them in for strings, but what a happy accident that they were also singers. The five of us would gather around the mics in the studio, and I was like the choir director, but they picked up things so fast I didn’t have to explain much.”
Brought in for just a few songs, the RVSQ ended up on more than half of the album’s tracks. On “Caught a Long Wind,” a reverie about flying through the sky like a bird, the quartet makes the fantasy credible by improvising vertigo-inducing string parts against the guitar and keyboard arpeggios. The album’s best track, “The Circle Married the Line,” describes getting away from troubled relationships and exhausting work schedules by going to a coast where one can stare out across the circular ocean to the horizon line. The therapeutic qualities of such a view are made audible not only by the best melodic hook of Feist’s career but also by RVSQ’s wave after wave of string harmonies and by the reassuring hush of the group’s vocals.