GRAINS OF TRUTH Feist
With Multitudes, Marks a Trail for Her Future Self
“EVEN BEFORE YOUR EYES ARE OPEN / The plot has thickened ’round your fears,” Leslie Feist sings on “Borrow Trouble,” before a flock of strings comes swinging down from overhead, a flurry of keening gulls above the waves.
The line wouldn’t be out of place in a Dávila short story, the kind of evocation that cracks the shell of reality in an instant — how many times are we terrorized by our first waking thought?
“I think about this stuff a lot now, because I have a daughter,” Feist tells Exclaim! over the phone. “I’m trying to make sure I can do my best to feed into her experience, [to have her] believing things that are useful truths.”
Multitudes, Feist’s quietly thunderous new record, is rich with useful truths. Or, at the very least, it’s rich with the hunt for them; it finds Feist in constant search for a place unburned by depressive resignation and apathy. The album is a meditative space, a structure that acts as both a monument to death and to everything that death is not. Its myriad doorways — built from some of the most curious, texturally rich music of Feist’s career — are opening continually to new ways of thinking. As Feist explains it, it’s a rejection of the kind of gnawing certainties that we let govern our lives.
“It’s like a lake, where a wave rises and it brings all your thoughts to a point of complete certainty,” she explains, describing the swells of negativity that once swallowed her mind. “And then, if you wait it out and don’t act on it and let it fall — to understand that, ‘Oh my god, every .01 seconds, there’s another absolute knife-like sabre of certainty that rises in my mind, and none of them are binding, they’re all passing.’”
Multitudes, which Feist premiered through an immersive live show, finds the songwriter working through those instincts in real time, its shapeshifting song forms and impressionistic lyrics mirroring the patience required to unburden oneself from the patterns that bind us. In some ways, it’s a roadmap for her young daughter — in others, it’s a reminder to Feist herself, a letter to the future.
“I’ve planted ideas like that throughout the album because these songs, selfishly, I know if I’m lucky enough to live that long, I’ll be singing them in my 70s and 80s,” she says. “And I hope to get a kick out of these crumbs I’ve left in the forest for myself.”