Growing tomatoes and learning how to make apple cider – Feist has been enjoying the fruits of a well-earned break. Now back with new album Metals, the elusive songstress talks to VOLUME about getting back together with her guitar.
If this is how hard it is to get hold of Leslie Feist these days, you'd hate to be waiting to interview her when she was blowing up in 2007. After burning through five promises of a phone interview with the Canadian songstress, VOLUME finally got an interview with her a month later than planned. But as she talks about the schedule grind which led her to take time out from music, it's hard to be mad.
"I'd been on tour for two albums in a row, which added up to about six or seven years, and I wanted to go home."
That's a lot of mileage. To recap, following an eventful 16 years playing music in Canada, including opening for The Ramones with her high school band, touring with By Divine Right opening for The Tragically Hip, flatting/recording/touring with Peaches and joining eventual indie rock institution Broken Social Scene, the ride only got crazier when she started making solo records. The high point came in 2007 with the release of The Reminder, which hit number 16 on the mainstream US Billboard chart, yet seemed to reside smack bang in the middle of the zeitgeist, soundtracking summer holidays and delighting advertising creatives looking for their next TV commercial soundtrack. As you can imagine, once that kind of momentum starts it's hard to stop.
"I had to draw a brick wall in the calendar and say I was going to stop after this line in the sand, because it could have gone on forever. I started to really get the impression that it could have gone on forever - unless we stopped. When we hit the seven-year mark of touring, at that point you can't really remember life before touring. I like to call it my sabbatical; it makes it sound a bit more official and professor-ly."
