Canadian-born singer/songwriter Feist has been one of the most dynamic indie voices of the last two decades. Last month she released her sixth album, Multitudes. She recorded it in the aftermath of tremendous personal loss and change. In late 2019 Feist adopted a baby just months before the pandemic started. About a year later, her father died suddenly. Multitudes is a raw, intimate look at how she grappled with deep-seated grief and a new kind of love.
On today’s episode Leah Rose talks with Feist about how being assaulted in high school ultimately led to her gaining resilience. Feist also remembers the day her music career began when was asked to front a hardcore punk band, and how screaming on stage–and ultimately blowing out her voice–forced her to develop her intimate, career-defining singing style.
You can hear a playlist of some of our favorite Feist songs HERE.
Pushkin. Canadian born singer songwriter Feist has been one of the most dynamic indie voices of the last two decades. She scored international fame early in her career, thanks in part to a nano iPod commercial featuring the song one, two, three four, But for fans of Feist, her appeal lies in how she mines her complex emotional life. Just last month, Feist released her sixth album, Multitudes. She recorded it in the aftermath of tremendous personal loss and change. In late twenty nineteen, Feist adopted a baby just months before the pandemic started. About a year later, her father died suddenly. Multitudes is a raw and intimate look at how she grappled with deep seated grief and a new kind of love. On today's episode, Lea Rose time with Feist about how being assaulted in high school ultimately led to her gaining resilience. Feist also remembers the day her music career began when she was asked to front a hardcore band, and how screaming on stage and ultimately blowing out her voice forced her to develop her intimate, career defining singing style. This is broken record liner notes for the digital Age. I'm justin Mitchman. Here's Lea Rose with Feist.
I have read the PR blurb about the new album, but I would love to hear in your words, just talk about how the project started to come together.
Yes, well, everything was pretty topsy turvy, there wasn't it. I mean, there was a complete reframe. There was no presumption of the way things used to be is the way they're.
Going to be.
And interestingly, the outside world was sort of echoing what was going on for me in my side world, which was that nothing was to be presumed, nothing that had been was going to be.
Because I had just become a mother right four months.
Before the pandemic started, so it was sort of a double down of complete reassessment. And you know, a friend of mine said something that has become unfortunately so true. I mean, fortunately unfortunately that to become a parent is to be incinerated and so true. But who rises from the ashes is a more interesting person to be for the rest of your life And I'm still working on that.
I'm trying to figure out if this is more interesting.
Yeah, but that I know, it's like I just feel like a like depleted version. But hopefully eventually more interesting.
Well, the way I've been looking at it is the person who decided to the person who felt capable of being a mother to decided to become a mother, she was actually not.
Very useful and not very helpful a monther.
So you know, that was then echoed by the whole world kind of being uncomfortable with their former selves that didn't serve them anymore in this new context. And every I felt like everywhere I looked, anyone close to me, let alone kind of collectively, there was just this crucible that was just incinerating every presumption that came from a previous time, you know. And so songs kind of they became what they're they always have been to me, but like they certainly were even more so a kind of a habit that I returned to that brought me comfort or like a it might be in that incineration, some last living arm lunged out of the quicksand like ah and grabbed it a little filament of a former self or something, because I found it really helped me to use some of those wee hours and those sort of that liminal state of pure exhaustion and to open myself to that and a lot of new things and new parts of me were very slowly given a little a place to you know, work out.
What that was going to look like in the form of songs.
So it was, you know, kind of like a like some people return to hiking, or they get they go swimming, clear their head, they you know, whatever they've done their whole life to return to a kind of a privacy that is going to maybe help them like untangle something. In my very fortunate case, I've always found that in writing a song over the years, like I can put almost every one of my songs has in some way been my attempt to understand some unknowable moments.
Are there any songs on the new album that directly relate to being a new parent that helped you articulate something that you couldn't quite grasp before.
Well, I would say the only song that you know, she will I was about her is the song Forever Before, which I think might be the second song I think. And it came from this idea that to commit so intentionally, to walk so directly right towards the precipice of complete vulnerability, is to become a mother.
And I had never begun a forever before.
I mean, that was sort of there was no sidling out of that commitment.
It was a true commitment.
And you know, as much as I feel that I have been committed to things in my life before, I've shown all the way up to different things and different relationships and different ways of thinking or ways of being, the ways of relating, I had never done something that could not be undone or that I hope will never be undone.
It is.
It's the first one hundred percent, just like dive Dive in, you know. And so that song kind of helped in a way. It chronologically over the three verses, it's sort of it's like a little parenthesis around maybe the years leading up to understanding the basis of my life and how it was no longer enough or something, and how that I wanted to expand and make myself prone to the unknown.
Yeah.
On your song Borrow Trouble, there's some lyrics that talk about picturing a life that you are left out of and how that is maybe different than what you imagined. And it seems to me like you're now trying to appreciate a life that you've created for yourself.
Yeah, I would say I found the idea years ago that like, if I can't make it better, if it's out of with it, not within my power to make it better, it being what, you know, whatever I'm in the midst of trying to face or solve like psychicalge break equation of like solve for X.
It's like the X is.
Ever changing and it is ever present, and it's just going to shape shift and always be something to me to solve. And if I can't make it better, at least I can learn how to not make it worse. And to not make it worse means to not spin my wheels in and concretized thinking or learning actually what the mechanics of passive aggressivity is and what it is to And that's another thing about to commit to the words that come out of your mouth. It's sort of bootcamp for committing to the steps you take towards in which directions and all of that, I guess is it's sort of been the quiet background of all the work I've done in my life and my mind. And as art imitates life, songs the songs these songs in particular have taken the form of like a roadmap or as we all self mythologize, you know, in our you don't. And as friends who work very different they have different jobs. Me friends who don't get a response from the world about what their work is. They say, Hey, don't kid yourself. I have the exact same self mythologizing. I invest in the lore of my life. What is you know, the background of my childhood and what it did to me and how it created the expectations that I then had to fight to.
You know, It's just that in my case, I work it out in this way that can then be like a.
Silly, petty puzzle piece that someone people can take it and then reform it to fit the puzzle that they're trying to solve. You know.
Yeah, I'm curious, like, what were you like in high school? What were you into?
Like?
What kind of kid were you in high school?
Well? I suppose I was probably kind of shy, but I also had started to go to all the punk shows in my town, and I had assumed the exterior of looking other than what I was on the inside. And I was sort of you know, I had piercings and shaved my head and it was manic. Panic was and I went to a pretty conservative high school, and maybe in the first couple of maybe the first month or two or something of my first year of high school, I was attacked by a group of guys, not like I mean here I am making excuses for them, like not violently, but come on.
Like I was.
Lifted up and slammed into a wall and handcuffed to a door. And then I've actually never told this story except to friends, but at this point I kind of understand how this was. All The adversity I was against was like ultimately helpful but very difficult.
But the whole student body, you know, no one came to my aid. They created kind of like a.
Giant school size semi circle around me, and you know, laughed and jeered and snickered, and then we're shoed into the cafeteria. And then the vice principal, I guess, after like half an hour or something, I got un handcuffed and was completely in shock. And then he he was like, who did this? And I said, I don't know. They came up from behind me, and he said, that's why we don't want kids like you here. And then he made me walk through the entire cafeteria in front of him while he walked behind me through a dead silent cafeteria TI so that I would tell him who had done this, and up and down the rows of the different seats while the only sound in the cafeteria was my own crying because I was, you know, choking in my like and I was being marched up and down these aisles. And then you know, in the silence, someone screamed freak, and then the and then twelve hundred people laughed. And I'd say that was the basis of my high school. And I started skipping, and I started going to like more and more shows and not really knowing where to go and what to be and what to do. And luckily these girls came up to me in the hallway and they were like, hey, you go to all those shows, right, but aren't you in the choir because I had found the choir at that school. And I was like, yeah, I'm in the choir and I go to all the shows. And they're like, well, we need a singer for our band. Do you wanna Do you want to join our band? And I was like, without that, I have no idea where I would have ended up. And then I transferred myself to an alternative school, and I didn't tell my mom didn't even know. You know, it was like maybe many months in the school contacted her and said, Leslie's expelled. She hasn't shown up, And my mom was like assumed I was just completely and I was like, no, no, no, I just didn't tell you because I knew you.
Would probably make it even harder for me to just pull this off. So I just did it. And I was at this.
Alternative school and I was in this band and like, you know, kind of turned that frown upside down sort of thing through the support of like genuine community.
Did you tell your parents about the incident with the being handcuffed?
Yes, my mom.
I didn't live with my dad was across the country, but yeah, I told my mom. And I think that, you know, she had just watched her daughter change so radically that she might have just been so frustrated that like she you know, let's just say that in recent years, I've recontextualized hey ps. Nowadays, luckily there's language to meet this type of moment that at the time there was no language for. And I can say that I'm grateful that now, like, you know, the gradations of experience that any single word can carry within it is now at least available to be evoked when it needs to be because that principle. You know, like I can still get angry. I can still think I need to find out who that was. I need to write an open letter to that school letting them know how.
You know, they might be like, ooh, will you come speak at our graduation.
It's like, well, I might have something to say that you don't necessarily want to hear. But it was a different time, and not to excuse it, but I can say that like it just we all.
Know it to be true. It was a different time.
There was no vocabulary around this, and without that, I don't know where I would be. And so it's like anything that helps you grow or causes you to have to unavoidably find some interior basis for understanding, and you can cave into bitterness or you can, you know, And I'm sure I had many years of caving into bitterness. But something else rose from it that I'm grateful for.
When did you start writing songs?
Well, in that band, I suppose was the beginning of songwriting, even though we were doing it together. It was baby steps in lyrics, and you know, who's the narrator, is this first person, is this dream sequence, is this stream of consciousness?
Or just you know, melody.
But it was a hardcore band, so ultimately our main asset was volume and.
Yeah, and melody came a lot later.
I mean there was melody, I suppose at that time, but it was mostly I didn't play guitar. I just was the front person and I and volume was you know, kind of where what I leaned on. And Yeah, so many years later, after I blew my voice out on tour with that band, like just from screaming, I ended up kind of under doctor's orders to you know, stay silent.
I had nodes. I had the whole that period of regenerating and I learned.
I kind of taught myself to begin to play guitar at that time when I when I was in this sort of imposed silence and I'd had to quit the band. I'd moved to Toronto. I you know, I was living in my dad's basement and just like kind of dealing with my first dose of isolation, and what I found there was you know, melody essentially.
Do you remember some of the first songs you wrote once you started playing guitar.
Yeah, I also had this thing called a melodica, which is kind of like a wooden boxed miniature xylophone that I was really and also had a four track. My dad had given me a cassette four track a task am and I had started with layers and singing harmonies and making these long overtones with the metallophone, and I kind of maybe something like sound sculptures using the radio, using interference and just kind of playing with the form, and like maybe the first songs I wrote the kind of clunky first, you know, broad strokes attempts were you know, it's like now I listened to them and it's like the touching yearbook photo kind of thing.
Where do you identify with any of the lyrics?
Still, maybe there was a there was a kind of a sensibility and interest in metaphor already. Was there a kind of wordplay you know, I can hear now the kind of grandfathered in sort of tendencies to like how to speak around a subject rather than directly to it. Yeah, I guess I wouldn't like sit and probably cover any of I would say. And see I'm even calling it covering, like as if it's not my own.
That's so interesting a former self, Yeah exactly.
Yeah, probably wouldn't cover her songs, but I can, but I can appreciate that there's some DNA there.
We're going to take a quick break and then come back with more from Leo Rose and Feist. We're back with Leo Rose and Feist.
What do you think that you do as a songwriter as a performer, What do you think you do especially well or what are you the best at?
That's a nice question. I don't know that I can really characterize it in words. It's a there's like a location in me that is interested in all sorts of variables and how they how they cross over, and maybe I on this record in particular, I was interested in kind of unseating some of my tendencies and seeing what.
Might might be behind them.
And there's, maybe for the first time in my life, an awareness that there's a kind of a rigor and a craft and an interest in craft that I wouldn't have known with my frontal lobe previously, I wouldn't have really thought that's what I'm doing.
But I'm kind of I continue to learn from what came before.
Like everything I've done previously is sort of composted into the new body of work, and I can say to people I'm working with, like, this feels a little bit like mush of Boom's great granddaughter or something like there's some there's some DNA. There's something in here that is or like if Century and Sea Lion had had a love child, that might be you know, bort of Trouble or something like that. Or but yeah, there's a lineage maybe in what I've made so far that that makes me curious about what will come next or how the perspective will continue to be interesting.
Do you feel like the character that you've created or do you feel like there even is a character that you've created through your work? And if so, is that person you or is it similar to you? Or does that make sense?
It does? It does? It makes more sense now than ever.
I feel like an alignment has occurred where I now know I owe nothing to the avatar. You know, the thing that is refracted by this particular light that's shined on this thing I do, that society that our society shines this particular timbre of light is quality of light on what I do, and it refracts out beyond me, and in some cases maybe leans a little bit too much importance on it in a way that is on the surface. I've learned that my investment in this very private conversation with myself, yeah, and my voice being like literally and then part of my anatomy that over many years I learned to listen to from the inside rather than from the outside.
And so it's kind.
Of like I've never thought about this before, but imagine like a you know, like how a door knob reaches through a door, and on one side you can turn it to go in, and on the other side you can turn it to go out, and those are two different gestures, but there is the same portal. It's the same desire to move through. And so my voice or the way I've chosen to try to formulate not this not only the sound or the expression of it, but the words that it's encants I now acknowledge and I feel comfortable in knowing that that part is it's as much me as it is what it becomes in someone else's listening, you know.
So it's and.
That's the part that I feel doesn't get refracted and like it's not like a house of mirrors where that can't be changed by the perception of it, because if my privacy goes into someone else's privacy, there it's like a you know, it's like hermetically sealed.
It's safe. Yeah, it's kind of there is a safety to it.
And I feel as I lean deeper into myself, into the discomfort of my like continual daily misunderstanding of myself and just trying to align to some personal responsibility, that's kind of a north star that is looking for different these dimensions. I'm hoping to find out how to be fed by them because I'm increasingly depleted and I'm realizing my like psychic organism cannot sustain often how much I'm attempting to be and do into how many people into It's like I'm never quite so for X. It's just like every single day I'm like, I can't find X. I can't solve for X. And yet then these songs weirdly are a place where I think I can because I can pause time and I can give myself just like a little a little navigation somehow.
Is there anything on the album that you feel like you did solve, Like any feelings that you either came to terms with or you were able to articulate.
There was sort of like a secondary you know, because I somehow wrote these songs through like this really difficult time, and I think I managed in that time to kind of make myself evoke or lean into also the responsibility to find the joy or to you know, like be a little bit of a solar panel and face the light and be energized by these things that I'm learning or the relationships that you know, just help me keep the horizon insight and not get.
Completely lost, you know.
Yeah, And so weirdly, you know, you'd think songs are you're saying something out loud as if you know something.
And so I.
Once the record was kind of you know, no longer just in my within my reach, like I'm still changing it, I'm still mixing it, I'm still working on it. And now it's like at once, you know, from one day to the next. Now it's it's out, or at least it's out of my it's it's sealed.
It's done. It's like with a wax seal is like boop.
And there was sort of the secondary wave of a discomfort and a kind of grief because I'm like oh my God, Like I don't feel any better. It's like maybe I could have well, I mean not to say I mean every day I feel a range of reality. But maybe even I thought that these songs could solve something for me, or they could make something a little easier or something. But the problems remain very much a lot I've you know, the kind of shape shifting required, like the woman who became a mother wasn't useful as a mother, and now I need to become someone else to be able to be that mother.
It's also the daughter who lost your father.
Like these things are the adultification is ongoing. And so to answer your question, maybe I think I caught a kind of hope, you know, like it's there is some optimism. I learned years ago that whatever I sing, and in the repetition of it, I can find myself making it true and truer, like whatever you look at becomes.
You see it.
And so if I'm looking to see more hope or more optimism or more like I'm trying to like collect the little crumbs of clarity put my puzzle together, that maybe is what I think I found Indie songs. And even as I say all this, I feel a bit absurd because this is that self mythologizing I was talking about.
But it's important to me.
I'd say, it's more important to me than anyone else, because this is what I this is the form I used to try to unpack and understand what's going.
On in there.
Right, And just speaking of having the feeling that nothing has changed after accomplishing something, have you had the experience of, like, as you've gotten more successful or as you've experienced success over the course of your career, did you ever have the thought that when you reached a certain place of success or fame or whatever it is, that some of those problems would go away.
I don't think that I ever had a fixed destination in mind or edward or was it within you know, maybe the illusion that I could make anything easier. But I will say that something, something that led to some of this cracking open was precipitated by going to that People festival. I don't know if you've heard about it, but it was a festival in Berlin that was curated or the context of it, which was created by Justin Vernon and the Desert Brothers of the National Era, Aaron and Bryce, and they created a festival and it invited me to it, and they kind of tried. I think they invited me a few years and I didn't quite have the ears to hear what they were saying until I was ready to hear what they were saying, which is, we really want to create a situation where people step outside of their own expectations of themselves and find something new. What they do is they invite, like in this one in Berlin, there was like three hundred people, and in each case it was someone they kind of knew. Concentric circle like you know, a few radiations out from them, or old friends, like we're old friends, and Justin and I are old friends.
And they take people out of their comfort.
Zone in sense like not you and your drummer and your bass player and your tour manager and you're in your monitors person or or something. It's just you or the bass player from that band, or the drummer from that band, or the guy who wrote the libretto for that opera, that poet or that choreographer or that the trumpet player musical director for Paul Simon's band. You know, just all these individuals who possibly have knit themselves very closely with the people that they've been in collaboration with for many, many years, and.
As I had done with my immediate family.
And then they just put us all in a hotel in Berlin with food and drinks, kind of like we were joking, it's like being at a really nice wedding.
And then they took over this campus called the.
Funk House, which is an old radio kind of a Soviet era giant radio station with many studios in it, and we would go between the campus and the hotel and the ideas everyone's supposed to for five days cultivate.
Kind of like I don't have an idea, do you do?
You?
What should we do?
But tickets have already been sold for Saturday Sunday to thousands of people coming who don't know who's there. They didn't buy the tickets knowing who's going to be at the festival. They just know that this people festival invites people and then something will occur.
As a result. And it was just the most remarkable thing.
It was just I reconnected with the Kings of Convenience there who I hadn't played with for years. I created an improvisation project with Todd Dhlhoff and Shazzad is Maley based upon Emily Wilson's translation of the Odyssey.
I mean just literally.
Because I had it at dinner one night, the book that I was reading, and shaza said, what's that?
And I was like, you wouldn't believe this book.
You just flip it open in any phrase from this ancient Greek.
This woman made it read.
So readable, so relatable, and anything could be sung.
And he's like, hey, well then let's do that.
Let's ask Mary the creative director, Mary Hickson, to give us space and give us an hour.
And that's what she did. She would she would have kind.
Of and this enormous spreadsheet the size of a room. She was moving people's names around through the rooms available and helping people find ways to incubate new projects. And then programmed this entire festival on the fly, so that when the audience came, they all each member, each person who came, I think they divided these thousands of people up into ten groups. They all got wristbands it said number one, number two, number three, and there was a different itinerary for each group of people. So they would be brought from room to room to room in twenty minute to forty minute increments and see these projects that were just being.
Born on the fly, and that is so cool. It was so cool.
And I guess what I'm saying is that that was to answer your question with the longest answer of all time through history, is it was a kind of a I called it like a mid career detox or something, because it was it was a way to strip myself of all of the rules that I'd come up with that they were like collated over invisibly over time. I'm like, Okay, I shouldn't do that anymore because that didn't work. Okay, so now I have rule number one. Now I shouldn't play multiple shows in the same city because it seems that by the third show it's change and it doesn't feel right.
So okay, no more multiples.
Or like, technically I should use my pedal chain this way because that's the way that seems to work best. I should use my And I had kind of collected this armature of all of these things that I knew in air quotes, because what it was was I was just limiting myself. I created all these conditions that kind of disempowered me.
At the core where I thought that I.
Could only be what I am and do what I do if these conditions were in place. And so slowly, slowly, slowly, I lost my scissor kicking punk clarity, a vision, and I became like a professional who in that transition kind of lost access to like the primary energetic truth surge that it makes sound out of my body, you know, and that people festival. Really it just gave me this feeling of being like at Summer Camp, like.
You know every single person there, and these are people.
Who have achieved tenure, Like we've all been touring for twenty years, and everyone's walking into the cafeteria equivalent and being like, I don't know anyone.
Here, like who it must be so humbling.
Yeah, can I sit with you guys?
Like that kind of thing, And everyone was feeling that, and yeah, it was a really remarkable experience.
It really changed everything for me.
We're taking one last quick break and then coming back with more from Leo Rose and Feist. We're back with the rest of Leo Rose's interview with Feist.
There's a certain threshold that all of us have for letting something new in. When you're listening to new music or a new artist or a new genre or whatever it is. Does that happen for you with your own music?
How so like, do.
You have to hear something maybe like ten times, or sing something a bunch of times, or hear even if it's just a track here it a bunch of times before it sticks. You know.
It's funny because I.
Just listened last night on a long nighttime drive to pod.
I love on being. I'm sure you say it.
Yeah, well, oh yeah, I love it. She'stipic, she's wonderful and she's so great.
Yeah, I'm sure it is doing what you do.
You must feel like you identify with her or something that it's to conduct an interview, you know, which, by the way, you're doing really beautifully.
So oh thank you.
But but she interviewed Rick Rubin. I don't know if you heard that one that is, I did it. It's like it's recent and it's not often that she interviews anybody from anywhere close to I mean, not that i'd say I'm close to anywhere close to what Rick Ruben's accomplished, but in the sense that I don't really hear her speaking to people who make art. It's more people whose life as they live it is in a way way art or writers or you know, theologians, or I mean just people from all walks of life, but not often like a record producer or a musician, you know, because we were kind of like the low art on the art spectrum or something.
You know.
Yeah, but he really he said something that I really liked, which was she was admitting that though she speaks with writers all the time and she's trying to cultivate her own practice of writing and make space for that, and that it's that when she sits in front of the page, she's kind of just tortured and having such a difficult time. And I found that so touching, because that's I don't know that anyone gets to bypass that part of it, the self loath, the self loathing, the you know, impostures syndrome sort of thing. But he said, well, it's because if you're the writer and the reader in the same instant, there's a cognitive dissonance between the doing.
And the absorbing. So you've you've squeezed.
It out of you and you're now you're immediately absorbing it, and you're gonna you're going to taint the reading with the writing of it because you're going to be the writer reading it, and that's that.
Those are two different roles. And so he gave great.
Advice, which was to just create a buffer and separation between those two halves of yourself and right right, right, right right, as if it's a muscle you're exercising, and don't read anything. And then maybe way later, when you're absolutely certain you have no idea what's in that book, open it again, and then you can be the reader, and then you can judge truly. So in writing, you know, in writing these songs, what he said, I recognize it as something I do. My mind is maybe not interested or patient enough to really like no melody can survive my scrutiny. Basically, if I work on something too much on Tuesday, it's sort of like dead to me by Wednesday, and I don't care about it anymore because I feel like the muse didn't play ball or something. Yea, So the song a day thing, you know, I don't think. I don't think we spoke about that, but did we?
No, I want to ask you about that. I've heard Maggie Rodgers talk about that about the group. Is that what you're talking about? The writing group sort of like workshopping, yes, songs and there was an assignment.
That's right. Yes.
The Song and Day group is led by our intrepid Captain phil Winrobe who's a producer out of New York and he created this game I think with Damien Rice. I think it was Damien and him that first thought of it. So in that Rick Ruben advice way of be the maker and then later be the listener. I the Song of Day was this repetition of like you have to to qualify kind of in a good natured way to stay in to not get booted, because the consequence of not showing up on Monday is like, okay, well then you're out. You know. Good, we all love you, like we all raise a toast to you, but you're out, you know.
But it's like all warm and good nature y.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, But it's good though, because it sounds like with the people festival. Yeah, And that was sort of an assignment. The song a Day is sort of an assignment.
Yes, And because of the need to keep going, there would be kind of at the end of the seven days, I would maybe be aware that I caught a little a few messages in a bottle, like something just came clearly through arrived intact. I managed to like lob it out into the song a day community and then and then I would kind of know that if I listen back to these right now, I'm going to I'm going to make them worse, I'm gonna pick them apart, whatever. But if I just wait a few months, like let the compost start to regenerate the soil, like Liz let it sit. It was really amazing because I did four or five of these, and the group changed each time. There was kind of like a few of us that did everyone, and by the end there was you know, twenty something songs from which this record was essentially born. But I gave myself the distance between the doing and the beginning to I don't know understand what amount of reformulation any of them needed. I waited there was a window between the doing and the and the and the kind of working on them.
Are you working on any new music?
No, But I've had that kind of inclination, you know, like a craving almost.
It's it's sort of you know, it's sort of like.
You never know that you're in an epoch until you're out of it. Like I didn't know in my twenties that moment was like actually a thing, like it was a time I will be able to remember.
I never you never know when you're in the moment of writing.
It's kind of like until you notice, oh, I haven't haven't felt that craving, haven't been in that mind frame.
I haven't like been receptive to that for a while, you know.
But honestly, finishing a record is so obliteratingly like.
It's such a task that there wasn't a lot of room.
But maybe because it's done now, I'm already starting to feel that. Yeah, so I did ask Phil for another song a day because now I feel I like being inside that it's a phantom community.
There's yeah. You know, one time in.
The pandemic, Adam had everybody to his yard for a very distant you know, everyone had a picnic blanket like thirty feet from each other, and it was Amelia Meath from Silvaneso and Beck and Maggie was there that time, and Adam Cohen and you know, it's just like a mac DeMarco. He did that one and it was the first time we'd all you know, been together. To say is that was pretty that's pretty cool that we get to do that together but alone, you.
Know, so people like sitting on their blanket and singing their song.
No, not at all.
We were just hanging like it was song a day had happened, and it's such a commitment and it's such a you know, our whole week is pointed at this like very private exercise that we know other people are having the same private exercise, you know, maybe like cramming for an exam, like everyone in your class.
Totally, That's what I just thought of too.
Yeah, it's like no one can get that information into your brain but you.
But you know everyone's also doing it, you.
Know, right, so it feels a little better in solidarity.
But I requested another one and for my birthday this year. Hilariously because on Valentine's Day, which is the day after my birthday, the first songs came out. And then I wrote Phil and said, hey, ps, these songs, for the most part on this record came from what the opportunity you gave me to like find them, so you're kind of the godfather of this record. And he's like, okay, well then happy birthday, Let's do another week and it can be any week you want. So I picked the week when I know I'm not on tour, when I know I can get quiet, and we're going to do another one in June.
So that's that's awesome.
Yeah, Yeah, we've already started to like send out the invites, justin Vernon wanted to do it, kind of think of some other friends who have expressed interest and said, like, tell me next time it's happening, and yeah, to get out of our own way at this point and have Phil and Damien create that context, it's such a gift totally.
Do you need to hear feedback from people when you play something new.
No, I usually feel I'm better served to keep it real tight.
Until I'm pretty sure about where I'm going with it.
The development of those initial little embryos that were found in song a day, it happened like in an isolation beyond even usually I kind of self isolate through the writing process.
But I would show MOCKI or Gonzo.
I would show certain friends, my really dear friend in Toronto named Adriann, like she's just sort of always been a witness. I kind of like she's always like I believe you or I don't know if I believe you in this case, the closest collaborator, I would say through the writing process besides Song a Day was I became pen pals with the director Mike Mills through the Pandemic and we were just sort of like this epistolary ping pong game that was all about craft and it was all about He was in the middle of editing his new film Coman Come On that's since come out, and I was in you know, kind of isolation Song a Day and like, it's really strange, but this friendship bloomed right at the beginning of the Pandemic and it became kind of this like I don't know what accountability centrifugue or something, because there was someone curious listening, he for whatever reason, got he received energy from other people's problems, like he from solving kind of a problem other than his edit. It seemed to always he'd bring something back with him from coming into my little laboratory, and then he'd leave and go back to what he was working on. And similarly he'd send me screen grabs or little bits of dialogue or something, and you know, it was sort of we were activated by each other's different form like I don't know.
I don't know anything about film, and he can.
He considered music to be like this playground that was not responsible to like a two hour arc and character development and all of this arduousness that comes with filmmaking.
Yeah, he gave me a lot of really cool homework too.
I'd very cool.
I'd send him an early song and you know he would or like a song a day the day I wrote it. I'd say, I'd lob it over to him and say, like, this was my offering today, I feel particularly good about it. And then he'd he'd have like he was the only person I felt interested in cross talk from or in like input from.
What would he say, Like what sort of feedback would he give you?
He'd often say, can you put that in plain language?
Like write your lyrics out and then underneath verse fyve verse line by line, or just like kind of summarize each verse and what you're trying to what you're what are you saying with that? Like what do you what is the concrete thing you're you're getting at? Because you part of my thing is I like speaking around a thing. I like creating the the image of what's inside in relief kind of and it's sort of like in the in like casting ceramics or something. You make a mold and then you pour something inside it, and when you crack the mold off.
There's the shape.
Like in a way lyrically, I like doing I like finding a shape in relief, you know. So he would say, Okay, I get that you're you're creating a shape and relief, but now just describe to me what that shape is and then go back and see if you can put a little bit more of the clarity of what that shape is inside. You know, this is a man who's very, very good at narrative.
You know.
It was just so helpful because I think I was also just trying to find a way to be a little bit closer to the quick and I'd say that that influence from Mike really found I found him in my mind's eye kind of, you know, he's a little angel on my shoulder or saying that, is there another way to say.
That, you know, yeah, yeah, I was going to ask you if there's somebody in your mind while you're writing, But it sounds like he was the little angel. He made that wonderful movie with the film that he made for the National Yes, and I think he got them unstuck as well.
Yes, exactly, And that's how we met, ironically because Aaron and brace After people now we've all joined the same cult essentially because of what that festival did for me, and they asked if I would come and do the Q and A for screening for that film in Toronto. So that's how I met Mike Goes through that film, which I found.
Incredibly powerful, so powerful, and I hate.
To say it, but at this point I think I'm incredibly late and I have to go on a motherly errand to pick someone up, if you know.
What I'm saying.
Yes, yes, yes, yes. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk today. It was so much fun. I'm loving your album.
Thank you.
This has been such an interesting conversation and it was really really nice to talk to you.
I appreciate it.
Thanks Device for talking through the inspiration for her new album Multitudes. You can hear all of our favorite five songs on a playlist at brokenrecord podcast dot com. You can subscribe to our YouTube channel at YouTube dot com slash broken record Podcast, where can find all of our new episodes. You can follow us on Twitter at Broken Record. Broken Record is produced with help from Leah Rose, Jason Gambrel, Vantalliday, and Eric sam Our. Editor is Sophie Crane. Broken Record is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you love this show and others from Pushkin, consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus. Pushkin Plus is a podcast subscription that offers bonus content an uninterrupted ad free listening for four ninety nine a month. Look for Pushkin Plus on Apple podcast subscriptions, and if you like the show, please remember to share, rate, and review us on your podcast app. My theme musics by Kenny Beats. I'm justin Richmond.