THE EDITED PRESS RELEASE: “Award-winning, hugely influential musician Feist has returned with Multitudes, her sixth solo album and first since 2017’s Pleasure. Multitudes was produced by Feist with longtime collaborators Robbie Lackritz (Weather Station, Bahamas, Robbie Robertson) and Mocky (Jamie Lidell, Vulfpeck, Kelela), with additional production from Blake Mills (Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple, Perfume Genius).
In Lightning opens the album with its glorious collision of clattering percussion, explosive guitar and brightly fluttering strings (courtesy of string arranger Miguel Atwood-Ferguson). Feist shuts out the modern world’s incessant buzz to charge the listener with the electrifying dare to look themselves straight in the eye to find something infinitely more elemental and personal than what the mirror reveals (“And in lighting flashes flash to show our natural age / And the lightning lights me up to be as God as I say”).
Far more fragile in delivery but no less powerful in impact is the ageless sentiment of Love Who We Are Meant To, which, with its cascading pattern of solo nylon string guitar against lush orchestral swells, conveys a jazz standard’s wide-angle lens on a delicate quagmire and presents Feist’s heavy-hearted revelation (“We will struggle with the truth / That sometimes we don’t get to / Love who we are meant to”).
On Hiding Out In The Open, Feist’s hypnotically layered vocals sing in the round, presenting another piece of incandescent wisdom (“Love is not a thing you try to do / It wants to be the thing compelling you / To be you”) with the simple and openhearted cadence of a campfire sing along.
Multitudes took shape soon after the birth of her daughter and sudden death of her father, a back-to-back convergence of life-altering events that left the Canadian singer-songwriter with “nothing performative in me anymore.” As she cleansed her songwriting of any tendency to obscure unwanted truths, Feist slowly made her way toward a batch of songs rooted in a raw and potent realism which is touched with otherworldly beauty.
“The last few years were such a period of confrontation for me, and perhaps it felt that way to some degree for everyone,” explains Feist. “We confronted ourselves as much as our relationships confronted us. It felt like our relational ecosystems were clearer than ever and so whatever was normally obscured — like a certain way of avoiding conflict or a certain way of talking around the subject — were thrust into an unavoidable light. It became a chance to find footing on more honest ground when the effort to maintain altitude actually took more effort than just handing ourselves over to the truth.”
Largely written and workshopped during an intensely communal experimental show of the same name through 2021 and 2022, the songs on Multitudes developed in parallel with and were deeply influenced by the mutuality of the unconventional experience. The production, developed by Feist with legendary designer Rob Sinclair (David Byrne’s American Utopia, Peter Gabriel, Tame Impala) was formulated to bring people together as they re-emerged from lockdown while providing an outlet for connection between artist, art, and community.
For the recording, Feist returned to her 2011 collaboration with Lackritz and Mocky, who made her third album Metals in a converted barn in Big Sur. This time, Lackritz and engineer Michael Harris (Haim, Lana Del Rey, Vampire Weekend) built a studio in Northern California next to the redwood forest, where Feist was joined by multi-instrumentalists Gabe Noel (Kendrick Lamar, Harry Styles, Kamasi Washington), Shahzad Ismaily (Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed, Tom Waits), and the cast who toured Multitudes — Todd Dahlhoff (woodwinds, synths, bass) and Amir Yaghmai (strings, guitars) — plus a cameo from longtime collaborator Chilly Gonzales.
Over the course of its 12 songs, Multitudes affirms Leslie Feist’s ability to construct elaborate sonic worlds by following her singular songwriting to its most poetic yet unbridled expression. Born in Nova Scotia but mostly raised in Calgary, she first explored her idiosyncratic musicality by playing in a local punk band as a teenager and later made her debut with 1999’s Monarch (Lay Your Jewelled Head Down), an independent release primarily sold at merch tables.
Along with co-founding Juno-winning indie-rock collective Broken Social Scene, Feist next achieved breakout success with her full-length sophomore effort Let It Die (winner of Alternative Album of the Year at the 2004 Juno Awards). Released in 2007, The Reminder earned international acclaim and landed on best-of-the-year lists, in addition to winning Feist the 2007 Shortlist Music Prize and garnering four Grammy Award nominations. Now certified gold, the album features her iconic smash single 1234, a Billboard Hot 100-charting hit that paved the way for appearances on Saturday Night Live and Sesame Street.
In 2011, Feist returned with the Polaris Music Prize-winning Metals, followed by 2017’s Pleasure. Feist went on to premiere the Pleasure Studies podcast in 2019 and soon began developing the Multitudes live show, a boundary-pushing collaboration conceived by Feist and Lackritz, and developed with artist/filmmaker Colby Richardson, artist Heather Goodchild and artistic producer Mary Hickson.”
