'Being a parent will incinerate you': Why Feist now writes about the little moments
The famed indie icon’s new album, Multitudes, is inspired by her life as a parent
Becoming a parent has changed Feist, she thinks, for the better.
In 2021, she put on a series of concerts called Multitudes that were intimate, owing to the COVID-19 restrictions that placed limitations on the number of attendees.
"It's kind of lovely to know that it was catching this rare moment when those types of rooms, beautiful grand opera houses, needed to have very few people in them," the singer-songwriter told Q's Tom Power.
"Four months before lockdown, I had become a mom — it was a particularly challenging time.… I felt unfamiliar to myself, and maybe songwriting being a way that I've used in the past to locate myself."
Like the 2021 concert series, Feist's new album is also called Multitudes. It's directly inspired by both her journey as a new parent and the sudden death of her father, visual artist Harold Feist, that same year. Before he passed away, he was able to watch his daughter become a mother.
"It was quite something to see him with my daughter," she said. "The pandemic being this double-edged sword: it offered me a stillness that I hadn't had in years, or hadn't wanted."
On motherhood
For Feist, becoming a mother has meant that life has become a collection of little moments from which to draw inspiration.
"Life is reduced — it's expanded, but it contracts down to these minutiae, these little doings," she said. "This endless nauseating freedom, and autonomy beyond measure, just like hours upon hours of time to sit around and wonder what's up inside of me, that is gone."
Despite not having as much time to ponder big ideas, write songs and be inspired, she said she likes the person she's transformed into.
"Being a parent will incinerate you," said Feist. "But the person who rises from those ashes is someone that you're going to be more interested to be for the rest of your life, she's going to serve you. Whatever happens, you just have to hand yourself over to this utter transformation."
"There's a relentlessness to the care of a being and I often have felt unqualified for it."
WATCH | Feist's interview with Tom Power:
Starting out
Even though being a parent means that Feist is focused on the future, she did reflect on her past — and how she came to such success.
Her career is littered with collaborative moments. For example, she was a member of the musical collective Broken Social Scene.
Before coming to Toronto, she was a mainstay in the smaller Calgary music scene of the '90s. She said leaving her musical home felt like "leaving the nest, the safety of that hermetically sealed unit."
But having moved to Toronto, hHead and Noah's Arkweld member Noah Mintz invited her to sing on a track.
He'd seen my band from Calgary and tracked me down by looking through the phonebook," she said. "He phoned my mom and said, 'Hey, I want to ask your daughter — do you know how I can track her down? I want to ask her to sing on a record.' I had already moved to Toronto."
Songwriting is aspiration
2004's Let It Die and 2007's The Reminder meant that Feist hit it big as a solo artist. But with fame came discomfort.
"It was sort of a G-force and not entirely pleasant," she said. "I made a shield around me that was incredible friends."
Feist hasn't lost sight of her artistry, and she says that continuing as a songwriter allows her to contend with the dynamism of the present.
"Songwriting is how to contain an aspiration," she said. "[Songs give me] the container of three and a half minutes … [to] find something a little more essential that will serve me later."
"It's like the least harmful selfish endeavor, I'd say."
Interview with Feist produced by Vanessa Nigro.
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