Listen to Feist’s First Interview About New Album Pleasure
Feist has a new album, Pleasure, coming April 28 (via Interscope). Today, she was on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 show for an interview about the record—her first since 2011’s Polaris Prize-winning Metals. They discussed lead single “Pleasure,” song sequencing, her collaborators, the return of Broken Social Scene, and more. Check out the audio, as well as excerpts, below.
On the tracklist and leading with “Pleasure”:
Well, there’s 11 songs on the record and I guess it’s sort of like constructing a setlist at a show. You want to sort of—the first three songs should encapsulate everywhere we’re gonna go in the next hour and a half. So everyone can relax. It’s not all gonna be ballads; it’s not all gonna be party, no fist pumping for two hours, don’t worry. Sort of like you said, everyone’s mind’s at ease, you sort of show them the scope of it. This song is kind of that of the record. It’s sort of the indication of the range that is going to happen over the 11 songs.
That kind of storytelling is—I like that it still valued because I am an album listener. When I want to hear what someone’s up to I will dive into the headphones for the hour that they’ve laid out for me for the complete thought. And sort of magpie plucking songs out of their context before you’ve actually understood where it’s coming from—I always feel a little bit nasty if I do that.
On “Pleasure”:
There’s something about just letting one string do its thing. I mean it’s a bar chord but if you just let it restrain itself from the full bar there is something kinda super binary about it just a little laser beam of simplicity. Mocky is the drummer on that track and it’s only the two of us on that track and we were saying it’s just a couple of human bodies just moving, bashing things. The whole record is pretty much Mocky and I in that face-to-face of—it’s pretty stark instrumentally. It’s the two of us and at the end of the day our motto is kind of “how to hit what and how hard,” that’s the motto. You have to attribute it to Mocky.
On a memorable moment while making Pleasure:
I read a great Tom Waits quote, which I will get wrong, but it’s along the lines of “writing is kind of like birds that gather on a wire and when the first one comes then the second one will join it and then a third and fourth—eventually they all are.” So songs are a bit like that where when the first one comes it kind of introduces itself to you as, here is what the tone is gonna be here’s what the feeling is.
That first few months of sort of deciding to actually put my body in the little coach house kind of jam space that I’ve got and actually go there and see what happens, there was a little collection, there was a smattering and they were of the feeling that I felt, “OK, understand what’s going on.”
On the return of Broken Social Scene:
It’s sort of the five core, at this point, the five core guys who have been holding it up all these years so the rest of us could come and go. And, yeah, it just bizarrely worked out that the whole original family were all able to come and be a part of the record. I haven’t quite stenciled the schedules together to see if there’s going to be windows where I can join Broken on the road but there’s no doubt I’m really excited about that coming together again.
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