Feist launches new storytelling podcast called Pleasure Studies
'It's a little experimental, it's a little intuitive, it's meant to just speak to your intuition'
When Feist released her 2017 Polaris longlisted album, Pleasure, she came armed with 16 emotional prompts: the Pleasure Questionnaire, which asked her interviewers things like "Do you feel your memory is accurate, and if not, describe the direction it leans" and "What are 10 words to describe the way you experience joy?" But the project was bigger than that pre-interview connection.
Now Feist is launching a podcast series called Pleasure Studies based on that questionnaire, built on what she describes as an "overwhelming opportunity to have that bird's eye view at the interior world of so many people." In a candid video posted to Twitter, we learn more about the genesis of that questionnaire.
"When I was making the last album, I'd been going through something really tough that I wasn't at the time very comfortable talking about. I'm still — I keep it pretty tight," she explains. "But I was feeling like I wondered if anyone else went through those types of disorienting, difficult, interior scaffolding's crumbling like the tower in the tarot deck kind of dismantling of yourself. And I wondered if people had been going through that, what are they doing to deal with it ... so what I did was make a questionnaire called the Pleasure Questionnaire, and I got really remarkable and brave responses from 63 countries and was able to learn that yeah, I was right, everybody's going through this stuff."
The storytelling series will premiere July 9, and you can listen to the 30-second trailer below.
"It's not an interview series," Feist clarifies at the end of the trailer. "I handed the mic over to people. We found them from all walks of life to talk about the places where they face themselves. Hard times are made harder by hiding out in that feeling that we're alone. This podcast seeks to look at how we're not."