How to Become a Certified Pop Diva Without Losing Your Indie Boyfriend
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m Drea Olivia Stren By Girl How to become a certified pop diva without losing your indie boyfriend. by Davida Nemeroff The unstoppablePhotography ambition of Feist eslie feist is sitting quietly in a booth at the Rivoli. She has a soft spot for the restaurant, since she used to work here as a bartender, before she had to worry about major-label record deals and fanatically coordinated PR campaigns. Her hair is tied up in a schoolgirl ponytail, lips smudged L with cherry gloss, nails dressed in chipping remnants of last week’s scarlet polish. She is busy assembling a care package of miniature ’70s vintage clothes (picked up on a recent trip through London’s Portobello market) for a friend’s new baby. Even her baby presents are perfectly indie. The 31-year-old singer is pale and looks a bit tired, which gives her a dreamy, hard-living alt-rock sex appeal. If her tight pale-blue jeans and well-pilled woollen sweater look like they’ve spent the better part of their nomadic lives heaped on hotel room floors, it’s because they have. Feist is Canada’s reigning indie-music princess, but she’s wooing a broader audience. Let It Die, her last album, sold over 100,000 copies in Canada and another 400,000 worldwide, earn- ing her a Juno for best new artist and best alternative album. Her 58 ToronTo Life | torontolife.com | july 2007 new album, The Reminder, came out in May and is being treated unpretentious, it’s pretentious). But where BSS is deemed hugely she was born. But her parents divorced when she was young, It wasn’t drive but random circumstances that prompted her to an aggressive marketing push. It debuted in second place on successful by indie standards (You Forgot It in People sold 90,000 and she and Ben moved with their mother to their grandparents’ move to Toronto at 20. During a Placebo tour, she lost her voice. Canadian album charts, at first place in iTunes downloads, and worldwide), Feist is in the stratosphere, and her commercial suc- hometown of Regina and later to Calgary. “We were in Winnipeg and we were playing in some horrible base- seems to be playing in Starbucks the world over (her label, Arts cess threatens her mystique. You can’t be indie and sing for soccer Mocky, another musician friend, believes that Feist’s early years ment pub, and I remember starting to bleed out of my throat. My & Crafts/EMI, arranged a distribution deal with the coffee chain). moms on 97.3 EZ Rock. in Saskatchewan gave her the clear-skied prairie-girl sensibility throat had blistered.” Exhausted, painfully laryngitic and poor The Reminder meanders from bossa nova to folk rock, lilting bal- Success requires determination, but in these circles admitting to that sweetens her music: “I recognized in her a prairie attitude (the band only ever made enough money for gas to wheel them lads and an exuberant cover of “Sealion Woman,” most famously ambition is verboten. “I didn’t want to do anything half-assed,” she reminiscent of Neil Young or Joni Mitchell. There’s a loneliness to their next show), Feist heard about a musical injuries special- performed by Nina Simone (her idol, she says). Feist co-produced says, casting her pursuits in a more forgivable light. Her long-time and open-road mentality, a folky mood in her music. I can feel that ist in Toronto. By this point, she was literally mute, and her bass The Reminder and laboured over the lyrics. Marked by grown-up friend, musician and producer Chilly Gonzales (née Jason Beck), yearning and longing.” player had to book her flight and appointment. The break was regret and little-girl idealism, it’s just mild enough to secure huge who helped produce the new album, doesn’t buy her casual, seat- As a kid, she thought she wanted to be a journalist. She liked timely: Feist was growing bored of punky, aggressive vocals, and commercial success. of-my-pants posturing. “She’s probably the most ambitious person writing short stories, and journalism seemed the most plausible the Placebo teen-spirit moment had expired. Our meeting is the long-awaited result of a series of ludicrous- I know,” he says over the phone from his studio in Berlin. “What career choice. But she also loved to sing (she sang around the house She’d spent summer vacations with her dad in Toronto, where ly complex exchanges with her publicist, detailing the frenzy of makes Feist such a good performer is that she wants it. She needs it. and in local choirs) and started a rock band called Placebo with fel- he’d settled to work as a painter, and that year she moved into the Feist’s schedule and the virtual impossibility of meeting with her It’s Darwinian, in my view—the one who wants it the most gets it.” low students when she was 15. “I didn’t have an incredible voice,” basement of his Annex house. She focused on healing her voice for more than 15 minutes. Feist is furiously busy at the moment, she says, “so I yarled.” She’d vaguely planned to go to university, holistically: she swam, did Tai Chi and avoided singing, even talk- I’m told with irritation. She’s rehearsing her new album, embark- eist tends to speak in fanciful tangents. On but a year later, her band won in their first high school battle of the ing. Eventually she started playing guitar and writing songs (her ing on a frantic interview schedule with the international press writing music, she muses as if the subject were bands; the prize was a mainstage gig in a festival outside Calgary first was called “Liza,” an eight-verse country tune about a girl (including Vogue, The New York Times, the International Herald unicorns or shooting stars. “It’s never happened headlined by the Ramones, the Violent Femmes and Bad Brains. who leaves the small town for the big city). After six months of Tribune), heading on her next tour and shooting videos for two of the same way twice,” she says. “How many great “The band was occupying all my time—and passion and excite- downtime, her voice healed and she leaped into a compensatory The Reminder’s leading tracks. She’s also singing on a soundtrack loves do you get? Do you get one great love? More ment,” she says. frenzy of activity: she took a job bartending and booking acts at the for the upcoming Ethan Hawke–directed film The Hottest State, than one? How many songs do you get in your She moved out of her Rivoli and another waitressing at College Street’s Lava Lounge. alongside Emmylou Harris and Willie Nelson. My expectations—to F life? I’m not hungry to write songs for the mom’s house when she was Revealing a talent for charming the right people, she landed a plum speak not only with Feist, but with some of her closest friends and sake of writing songs. They’ll come when 17, took a job as a cook, and gig assisting the manager of the Rheostatics. She played bass for relatives—are apparently hopelessly naive. You’d think I was plan- it’s the season. You don’t with the help of Book Your a friend’s band, Noah’s Arkweld, organized cabaret nights at the ning a coffee date with Barbra Streisand. write in your daytimer, Own Fuckin’ Life, a punk now-defunct Weave, which was on Dundas across from the AGO, Her battalion of handlers seems to have I’m going to have my first resource that lists North and eventually landed a job singing with local indie rock institu- a better sense of her burgeoning celeb- kiss on Tuesday at 4. You American venues, she and tion By Divine Right. rity than she does—or than she’ll admit just wait and see when her band found ways of She left her dad’s basement for what she proudly deems a “leg- to. When Feist and I finally chat over chai renting community halls endary apartment called the 701” above Queen West sex shop tea lattes (she asks for hers sweetened with and clubs, and played to Come As You Are. Merrill Nisker, a friend of a friend, moved in maple syrup), all signs of divadom are well any falafel-eating local with her, and that year began to perform as the bawdy electro- hidden. She talks about how she doesn’t who’d listen. “I was young punk musician Peaches. Feist, in a pink leotard and brandishing even own a proper stereo and how she’s and I’m so glad I schooled a sock puppet, would work the back of the stage at Peaches’ early considering investing in an iPod dock. And myself in the ridiculous shows in art galleries, Kensington Market lofts and bars. “I was when I ask about her two upcoming concerts school of the rock-and- her B-Girl, her Flavor Flav,” she says. “It was what we did in our at Massey Hall, she plays the guileless-girl- roll tour party,” she says. living room—playing dress-up, jumping on the couch rapping to in-a-big-city card to charming effect, explain- “We were drinking and other records—but we were onstage.” ing with wide eyes how she’s never been to having a great time, That was around the time she met Gonzales. What struck him the venue and how she’s confused it with you know? We’d take was her readiness and an almost over-the-top enthusiasm.