NEW ALBUMS
Q&A
INTERVIEW: JASON ANDERSON
Feist, at L’Olympia in Paris, September 5, 2018
Leslie Feist “I wanted to shake the soft lens”
Your daughter’s birth and your father’s passing clearly had a profound effect on your life in countless respects. What was it like coming back to making music?
Songwriting felt simultaneously superfluous but also necessary. The times were so tight, with a new infant in my arms and lockdown all around us. The idea that music would be shared or a communal experience again felt very faint, so writing became an even more inward-facing task – it gave me somewhere to go with my mind when I couldn’t go anywhere with my body. It was a relief to focus on something ephemeral, maybe a bit escapist. The paradox in speaking about my dad is that my dad was an extremely private person. All I can really say about losing him is that writing songs also felt like a way to continue our conversations, which were always searching and curious and filled with laymen’s metaphysics, history and family lore. My dad was a painter and had a primary and private vocabulary he continued to develop until the day he died – when paintings were still drying on the floor, so to speak. To look for him in my own practice was to find only myself, and in that way force my heart to grow a few sizes. Love gained and love lost is an imperfect equation and only adds up to a million more questions no-one will ever be able to answer. But it gave me a heightened sense of gratitude.