With her new album The Reminder, Canadian singer Leslie Feist is coming of age, she tells Jim Carroll
Never work with children or animals - or, as Leslie Feist would surely add given the chance to rewrite that showbiz saw, sock puppets. Many years ago, long before the Canadian's sleek, elegant, quirky pop found favour with the masses, Feist performed on stages as Bitch Lap Lap. Part of the act involved her rapping with sock puppets. The actual puppets may be long gone, but their memory still lingers.
Such "antics", as Feist now terms them, are just one small part of a hugely colourful career to date. While her latest album The Reminder may have been the one to alert the mainstream to her charms, Feist has put in the hours plying her trade.
After graduating from school choirs, the teenage Feist began writing songs and playing in a punk band in her native Calgary. A move to Toronto led first to a solo album, Monarch (largely funded by the Canadian government), and then some defining meetings with underground stars Peaches and Gonzales.
Her entry into that pair's world of electro cabaret coincided with her joining Canadian indie supergroup Broken Social Scene. It meant that Feist was having the best of all worlds.
"I guess it was the winter of 2000 and we played some shows and called it Broken Social Scene," she remembers. "No two gigs were alike. We wrote the songs on the spot. Sometimes, we would play songs but would never play them again. The point was just to be different every time."
That desire to buck the norm was what led her to follow Gonzales and Peaches to Berlin. There, in between working with them, she began to write songs which were hugely different to anything she'd turned her hands to before.
These songs led to the 2004 album Let It Die. A triumph of ideas and imagination, it was a minor-key classic which owed a little to a lot of influences and kick-started Feist's solo innings.
"That album was an important experiment because it taught me a lot," she says. "I found my own voice for a start because of the songs I was singing. In many cases, the first time those songs were played was when we went to record them.
"It was very subtle and quiet and, I suppose, grown up. It was certainly different to what I had done before and I think it probably surprised a lot of people who perhaps had me boxed off as one thing. I think of it now as an accidental album, but I'm happy I had that accident!"
INTENSIVE TOURING FOLLOWED as Feist went about the task of making sense of what was going on. The constant round of live shows and the growing critical and commercial regard for Let It Die also helped to put some distance between her and the fashionista tag she'd picked up. She also began to appreciate what she could do when she didn't have to hustle for work as a waitress.
On tour, she took the chance whenever she could to write and perform new songs. "I think I had three years of touring pretty much without a break so the songs were written on the go in a bit of a blur sometimes. Compared to what I'd written before, they're a little more tough-skinned and have their own sonic shape."
When it came to record these tunes for The Reminder, Feist had very clear ideas about what would be in and what would be out. "I wanted to bring everything together that I'd done to date," she explains. "I wanted to pick stuff from all the different things I'd done. At least, that was the plan when we started."
That process began in a large house outside Paris where she worked with her crew (including Gonzales and Jamie Lidell) on simply playing to her strengths. "I knew who I wanted to make it with, I knew the kind of place where I wanted to make it and I had the skeletons of the songs in my mind, but I couldn't quite hear what it was all going to sound like. Once we started working, we connected the dots and it was a very natural, very simple process."
THE REMINDER IS an album with a surplus of boho ideas, sharp turns and smart, agile, heartfelt songs. While she showed she could still have her way with a cover version (Nina Simone's Sea Lion Woman is all a-swagger in Feist's hands), it's the dusty, sepia soul of 1234 (for which Apple paid handsomely to soundtrack an iPod ad), the beautiful lilt and lift of Honey Honey and the bittersweet drag of The Water which underpin Feist's coming of age as an artist.
Her timing was also exquisite, with the album released at a time when more and more attention is focused on the dozens of musicians from her homeland making a splash internationally. With nearly every other member of the Broken Social Scene collective also involved in side projects, Feist found that there was an audience this time out who actively sought her out.
"That kind of buzz I experienced when the record came out first was weird," she says. "You've absolutely no control over that. You just have to dive right on in and hope that there's someone there to catch you."
Feist has spent the last couple of months playing those songs from The Reminder in front of audiences who, unlike on previous tours, are actually there to hear her and appreciate her sound. It makes a pleasant change, she says.
"All those tours I did before now were really trials by fire, you know. People didn't know what to expect from me and I suppose I didn't really know what I was doing either. But it was good for me because now I can face any kind of crowd."
Feist plays a sold out Tripod, Dublin, on Tuesday. The Reminder is now on release