Feist's first album in six years, Multitudes, is full of negative spaces, but don't mistake that for vacancy. The implications are massive, but they're just that — implications. Something profound is brewing just out of frame.
"The last few years were such a period of confrontation for me, and it feels like it was at least to some degree for everyone," the mononymous singer said in a press release. "We confronted ourselves as much as our relationships confronted us… whatever was normally obscured — like a certain way of avoiding conflict or a certain way of talking around the subject — [was] all of a sudden thrust into the light."
Yet to look Multitudes in the face would be to do it a disservice. Take "I Took All of My Rings Off" — its central image of a wedding ring seems to suggest an unshackling from so many constructs and boxes. But when the song's meaning is broached, Feist demurs.
"I can't unpack that for you, because songs are very delicate mobiles that dangle to hold their own concept and interior logic," Feist tells GRAMMY.com. "While they spin in your ears, they come near, then swing away far and stay in a self-evident logic that can hopefully become familiar and your own — as long as someone doesn't try and break the spell by explaining them."
Perhaps hushed yet potent tunes like "I Took All of My Rings Off" — as well as "Love Who We Are Meant To," "Of Womankind" and other highlights — are best listened to rather than dissected or psychoanalyzed.
For Multitudes, Feist has some of the best and brightest in her corner, like multi-instrumentalists Blake Mills and Shahzad Ismaily. Best of all, she's matured immeasurably — if you're unfamiliar with her trajectory, and your image of the happy-go-lucky "1234" singer on "Sesame Street" remains, Multitudes is the timely update you need.
Read on for an interview with Feist about her thinking behind — and execution of — Multitudes, which spins off into themes of family, loss and creating with intentional limitations.
This interview has been edited for clarity.
I love the negative space on Multitudes. Even when very little is happening, a massive expanse is implied. Can you talk about how you achieved, or landed on this feeling?
It's easy to be tempted to evoke the idea that I knew exactly what I was going for, but so much of the process is a kind of pure-instinct decision making. So much of what works or doesn't, or belongs — or is clearly going to need to get muted — is clear as day in an instant, and self-defining.
Slowly, it evolves to become an atmosphere that knows its own laws. So, in that way, the process is guided as much by out-the-gate production plans, like microphone choices and where and with who to work, as are these ever-evolving, rolling decisions.
Tell me all about Multitudes’ "intensely communal experimental show of the same name."
Well, yeah there's a record called Multitudes now, but that project has been a few things along the way.
To build a show that lifted out of the assumed constructs of touring was something I'd wanted to do for a long time. Not to assume a bigger experience can only be found with bigger production, but to see what could be found by pulling down some of the baked-in walls that exist between the watcher and the do-er.
Like, how to really meet this unprecedented moment where a concert was a radical idea. It turned out to be a lot of people's first show back, and how many times will we get to feel a first again of something that used to be so familiar?
The feeling I was hoping to have shift under people was that after a global event like that, nothing that any one person has to say, or sing, is any more important than what anyone else would have to say. Except maybe someone who worked in an emergency room.
The above aspect, along with the caliber of out-there musicians who accompany you on the record, like Blake Mills and Shahzad Ismaily, suggests to me that you're advancing precipitously lately, from a conceptual standpoint. Can you talk about the juncture you're at in your evolution?
I'm not sure I have perspective on myself from the outside per se, but I've certainly admired Blake and Shahzad, as well as Mocky and Todd Dahlhoff and Amir Yaghmai and Gabe Noel — all of whom I've gotten musically obsessed with and in some cases played with over the years.
These songs were written in a lockdown level of solitude, I was taking real pleasure and care in finding new hand shapes, interior narrators, ways to spend the three to five minutes that this form called song usually fits into… but in making them bigger, I got a lot out of hearing where their hands took things.
In almost all cases, it was about the player even more than what instrument they played; we weren't in a "Now we add the drums, now we add the bass" mindset. Like, I'd say "Let's get Gabe to do a pass on this one," and he'd walk in and pick up any amount of instruments and just free-associate.
You made this music after losing a parent and having a child. Can you talk about what you drew from these twin experiences?
Birth and death are two sides of the same coin. And though it seems radical to my Western-raised mind, one doesn't exist without the other.
I happened to stand at the juncture of those two in quick succession, like a lot of people do. The way they converged gave me a pretty undeniable sense of the continuum of time — the great unknown that precedes us getting to be alive and what happens after.
I'd need to be an animator to illustrate the way it's all appeared to me since then. Our roles are interchangeable — the babies and parents and grandparents and ancestors and the stardust that begins the cycle again, the orbiting lives that touch each other like solar systems and time as the most abstract but binding force of all.
It's breathtaking and yet so deeply normal, I just had no choice but to look really closely at it.
I love your harmonies on "Hiding Out in the Open"; they feel companionable. Tell me what that song means to you, and how you executed it — along with that radiant harmony stack. How did that one grow?
I was playing a game with some friends called "Song A Day," where we dare each other to wrote a song a day for seven days.
It's captained by a producer in NYC named Phil Weinrobe, and "companionable" would be the right word to describe this ultra-positive peer pressure, and the momentum that starts to build up after a few days.
Sometimes, it's terrible, and sometimes, it's like an aperture opens on the top of my head and a song just arrives instant, mercifully, because their muse somehow knows I'm taxed and its day six and I don't have anything left — so instead of laboring over a phrase or a pattern, it just shows up.
That's how "Hiding Out" arrived. I use a little digital eight-track called the Spire that's very useful and very simple. It's essentially a toy and has many limitations, but what it can do is help me take an initial aperture arrival and expand upon it.
Your concept of "womankind" in "Of Womankind" is fascinating; in the press release, it's said to encompass "any adaptive and intelligent strength." How has your concept of womankind shifted amid shifting the cultural sands of sex and gender?
The umbrella of "mankind" had traditionally encapsulated everyone, a grandfathered in — there's another one — use of language that isn't often scrutinized.
Womankind is a provocative work because it's shaped in a similar presumption what would imply it encapsulates all of humanity within it, something that wouldn't be so easily adapted to, I believe.
Without knocking the mobile off its axis, I can say that this song showed up and felt to be a sort of collective conversation with myself at 23, 43 and 93. Cross-generational women discussing the background noise. \
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Finally, what is Multitudes a launching pad to? Where do you see yourself going now that you've rounded this corner and made this particular, highly personal statement?
I can't say. I suppose I'm looking forward to living, which leads to writing, which leads to recording — which usually surprises me with an album I couldn't have planned to make.
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