Leslie Feist, better known as Feist, was raised in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan and later Alberta. Playing in bands from the age of 15, she released her solo debut, Monarch, in 1999 and soon after began collaborating with her then-flatmate Peaches. Feist gained recognition in her home country around the release of her 2004 album, Let It Die, and internationally when her track 1234 from 2007’s The Reminder appeared in an iPod advert. The following year she received four Grammy nominations and five prizes at the Juno awards in Canada. Her fifth album, Pleasure, is out now on Polydor, and she has recently appeared with former bandmates Broken Social Scene on their new album, Hug of Thunder.
1 | Book
My Apprenticeships, by Colette
I lived in Paris for five or six years about 10 years ago, and a friend of mine recently gave me this. I’d always heard of Colette but never read her, and this was the perfect entry point. It’s an autobiography of her early life, written from the perspective of maybe her 40s or 50s. She has such a beautiful, keen eye on all of these people that she encountered in her early 20s, who were stumbling and knocking into her at a time when she was so influenceable, and discovering her own skill and love of being a writer – and she does it with such tenderness. It’s a beautiful book and I’d suggest it to anyone.
2 | Podcast
I discovered podcasts in the last few years, when someone on a road trip put on Radiolab and it sucked up four hours – but the one I’ve since discovered is this. It’s a dive bomb into the inner mechanisms of people finding their work through their spiritual lives. Often Tippett is speaking with writers and authors, but also monks and priests and people we would just never encounter in the normal pedestrian life, but here we’re given access to their thoughts and the way they approach things. It’s as if they’re sitting having a cup of tea, talking about philosophy, so it feels accessible and deep at the same time.
3 | Food
I’ve been on tour for the last few months and good food on the road can be difficult to find, so my band and I have been making an effort in tracking down things that are made with care, and supporting any kind of farm-to-table produce. Recently in Chicago we went to this place and it was fantastic – we had a beautiful meal prepared in a wood oven with local produce. It’s very grounding to have any kind of properly sought-out food – it can be kind of a ritual of taking care of yourself. My bass player just made a reservation for [Yotam Ottolenghi’s] Nopi for one of our days in London, so we’re thinking ahead.
4 | Music
I started following this small label called Sahel Sounds, and they released this album by two women from Niger. It’s in the Tuareg tradition of nomadic desert blues, and it’s beautiful. One of them plays guitar and they both sing and there’s some percussion. But I’ve read it’s really uncommon and almost taboo for a Tuareg woman to play guitar in Niger – she’s one of only two known women in the country who do. Men held that position traditionally, so the fact that this woman is such a slayer is really rare. I ordered the vinyl and it’s sitting in front of me. They’ve been touring but I’ve been missing them – I wish I could cross paths with them.
5 | Film
This documentary is about the Dune that Alejandro Jodorowsky was destined to make but didn’t. I’ve showed it to multiple friends who’ve struggled with projects not coming to fruition. Jodorowsky’s ambition was of epic proportions: he got Salvador Dalí involved, and Moebius, the French cartoonist, was going to draw the storyboard. He cast the film, including his own son – he was 12 at the time and spent three years in martial arts training. And essentially it falls flat. I found it so touching. Dune did eventually get made [by David Lynch]. There’s a great scene where Jodorowsky stands up in the theatre with a big grin on his face and says: “It’s terrible!” He’s so happy that it’s terrible, because if it was good it would add insult to injury, you know?
6 | Theatre
The Antipodes, Signature Theatre, NY
I saw this a couple of weeks ago. It’s by a playwright named Annie Baker, who won a Pulitzer prize for a different play [The Flick, in 2014], and my friend Josh Charles was in it, so he invited me. It seemed to be an exercise in the importance of storytelling and the crack between the narrative and the truth, or how we get attached to the narratives that we tell ourselves. It was nine actors who are on stage at all times, brainstorming ideas for a TV series. It was a deep exploration of trying to find meaning and mining memories, and by the end your mind feels bruised by the endless storytelling. You were fortified and depleted at the same time.
7 | Art
This is an artist from Toronto that I love, and I’ve just bought a painting from her. She works in textile installation art – like rug hooking, or mosaics with felt that she dyes – but the portraiture ends up almost looking like Soviet propaganda posters. The rug hooking usually feels biblical, although it’s as if she’s evoking societies that seem historical but she has invented them. She’s commentating on the way we congregate and the way our ideas pool together to become schools of thought. Recently she switched to paintings and they’re almost photo-real, they’re so beautiful. They create a sense of space and time and domesticity.
