Feist: 2007 Artist Of The Year

12/17/08 1:39pm

by Noah Love (CHARTattack)

Before this spring, it always felt like Leslie Feist was still mostly just ours. Sure, she was popular, but she was a superstar here and a well-liked, but bubbling under chanteuse everywhere else.

Then came the release of The Reminder and, more notably, the video for its the single "1234." One Perez Hilton plug and an iPod commercial later, and there was only one word to describe Feist in 2007: ubiquitous.

Given the volume of success she's had in the past six months, it's not hard to believe Feist has barely processed the whirlwind she's been caught up in.

"It's not that hard to keep your eyes laying on whatever's right in front of you and keep things down to earth because the people around me, we're all a bunch of hosers, except for a couple of Yanks," Feist says with a laugh over the phone from San Francisco, where she'll perform later in the night. "Touring is really the only indication I have of what's going on — I guess what's going on being the bigger picture, the statistical side, the pie chart of record sales, radio stuff, video stuff and any of the other part of the equation. But the only part of the equation that I see is really just touring.

"So it really just turns out to be a succession of rooms filled with people, and it's just about the types of rooms and how they're changing. But the people, at the end of the day, they're just in larger quantities. It just stays pretty real."

What was pretty unreal was seeing the same woman who eats breakfast on Toronto's College Street and who started out as a rocker in Calgary alternative group Placebo suddenly on every late night talk show, often flanked by a choir of indie rock elite.

Case in point: Feist's Letterman appearance in August, where the "1234" vocal orchestra included Broken Social Scene's central members (including her boyfriend Kevin Drew), New Pornographers frontman Carl Newman, Mates Of State and Grizzly Bear. It was one of the few talk show musical performances that got media attention before and after it was televised.

"We did '1234' on Leno and it just felt really flaccid to me because that song is like Fraggle Rock. It needs the Fraggle gang and it needs the choir," Feist explains. "In the studio, we had all of us and overdubbed it until it felt like there was enough people clapping and singing. So live, it just doesn't work with just us.

"So we did the choir on Conan; I think we had 10 people. I just had different friends I'd been working with. Like, the photographer Mary Rozzi, who took the cover [of The Reminder], and Patrick Daughters, who directed the videos, people who were around. So for Letterman it was like, 'OK, I want a bigger choir.' [laughs] They need to be Americans or Canadians with work permits. It gets really sticky with the unions."

The lynchpin for Feist's year, however (besides the Perez plug), was the iPod Nano commercial, which launched the singer-songwriter and her album in to the stratosphere. To this point, the iPod commercials have had a spotty record of picking winning emerging artists for their campaigns (Jet, Caesars).
Feist's appearance, on the other hand, may prove to be a turning point. Her enduring popularity following the ad indicates she's going to stick. For some artists, having their music become synonymous with a product is a dicey proposition. Feist didn't hesitate.

"It was a really easy decision," she says. "It was, artistically speaking, as far as commercials go, very clean. Not to mention, it's not like I'm going to go waving a flag with an Apple logo on it or something.

"There was no overdubbed voice. The way they edited it was really intelligent. The context was really clean and so, to me, it just felt like an amplification of something that already existed. The video was something that I made that turned out to be a real dark horse as far as fun times that you have in your life. All of us who worked on it, we got to be kids again, but with all the wiles of working for years in whatever your field is.

"So to have that and just get a chance to be seen like the Little Engine That Could, it was a no-brainer. To consider not letting Apple use that — would you tell MTV or MuchMusic not to play the video? It wasn't really attaching itself to a scary product or a product I don't relate my life to or have had a personal boycott with or anything like that."

Maybe the most remarkable thing about Feist's year is that, despite her consistently increasing international popularity, she's decided to come home. After spending most of the new millennium in France, and with other major cities calling on a regular basis, she's settled in the Toronto area and it looks like it could be for good.

"I kept my flat in Paris," she says, "just because I couldn't really tie a bow on the end of that four-year jaunt. I just have an apartment full of stuff and memories. I joke now that I have an apartment in the most useless city on Earth just because I have no reason to be going back there except for the pleasure of it. But these days I just spend so much more time in London or New York, so it would make more sense that if I was footing the bill on rent somewhere it would be there. But, yeah, I ended up back in Canada and I'm very happy about it.

"I just went to France because there was more of a reason to be there than in Canada at that point. And now there's just much more reason to be back again."
And we're more than happy to have her.

Feist's album of the year:
NEW BUFFALO Somewhere, Anywhere

Chart Magazine declared Feist our Artist Of The Year in our December 2007 issue. To purchase the issue, head on over to the Chart Shop.