Song Exploder - Feist - In Lightning

Episode Date: May 31, 2023

Feist is a singer/songwriter from Canada. She put out her first solo album in 1999. She’s won 11 Juno awards, including two for Artist of the Year, and she has four Grammy nominations. She���s also been a member of the band Broken Social Scene since 2001. In April 2023, Feist put out her sixth album, Multitudes. And for this episode, I talked to her about how she made the opening song from that album, called “In Lightning.” For more, visit songexploder.net/feist.

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirwe. Feist is a singer and songwriter from Canada. She put out her first solo album in 1999. She's won 11 Juno Awards, including two for Artist of the Year, and she has four Grammy nominations. She's also been a member of the band Broken Social Scene since 2001. In April 2023, she put out her sixth album, Multitudes. And for this episode, I talked to her about how she made the opening song from that album.

It's called Inlightening. I'm Leslie Feist. Just inside the Rockies, there's a place called Banff. And there's a huge center for the arts there. And there's this artist residency program where they'll just give you a cabin in the middle of the woods. And I was offered one of those retreats, which was 10 days. And I thought, oh, this is fantastic. I'm going to just try to get my wits about me in terms of what I was working on.

but there were plenty of hours in the day where I was faced with these uncomfortable thoughts. I started to feel that there was just a tendency that I would receive a curveball, some sort of input from a relationship or from a circumstance. And no matter what came at me, I tended to essentially absorb it as negative information instead of positive,

like as if I'm playing defense my whole life instead of offense, instead of initiating anything. When you have a realization like that, like it shakes the foundation because you start to realize, oh, wait, I am the author here. And then I started to be interested in the way that I was thinking about my own role in my own life, making my own truth. And that began by trying to watch myself interpret something that was benign as negative or watching myself fall into patterns of communication

where I would essentially be on my back foot or something. So it was kind of the beginning of me learning that I can make this better. So I was in this little cabin, and I'd brought a guitar, my pedal board, and yeah, I was just spinning for 10 days trying to find something. I'm breaking out in a sweat that I'm revealing this to the world, but it's like the most private moment ever. I mean, I had fun going through my phone looking at voice memos, trying to understand how it happened. My old friend Mocky, who's made every record with me, we have this sort of stream of consciousness game called songing.

And the way I frame it years later to people I try to teach the game to is write a song right now, stream of consciousness. And pretend you wrote it five years ago and now you're just trying to remember it. So there's not the pressure of coming up with something brand new. like it's way less pressure. It's like I'm just going to try to remember something that already exists. And so it's almost like now there's some sense of collaboration with who, with what, I don't know, but now there's something that I'm not alone in this room all of a sudden. There's an idea that's sort of waving at me from an oasis way in the distance.

And so in that one of those initial songings I said in Lightning. And I mean, Lightning is something that strikes. It happens in a split second. The idea of being in it, like a flash of inspiration, a blast of complete illumination and seeing was in and around you. If you could sustain the being inside of a bolt of lightning, what is in there? I completed a whole demo of the song,

and then I took the solo sketch version of it to Todd Dolhoff and Amir Yagmai, who are two of my live bandmates, I wanted to do sort of a very, very tiny small show in the round. And then a lot of the tone was found in that live show, which we did something like 100 times. So I was the only rhythm in the live show, you know, acoustic guitar. And the song was sort of glued to that form. So, you know, basically we recorded a version of it

that was very much like the live show had been. But then it felt like, okay, we're making a record now, and it can be anything. We tracked the bulk of the record, I'd say 90% of it, at a house way up in Yucaya in Northern California in the Redwoods. We just cleared out the furniture and built a studio there. And we lived out there for about two weeks. Robbie Lackard's, Michael Harris, our engineer,

Maki, who co-produced with Robbie and myself, Todd Dahlhof, who plays bass and a lot of other instruments. Amir Yigmai, he plays violin and a lot of other instruments. That would be the core group of us. Also, through the pandemic, Mike Mills, the film director, we call ourselves art pen pals. You know, I'd send them early demos, and he'd send me sort of art prompts.

And I asked him to come into the studio and hear where we were at. Mike said, there's something feral that's missing. He said, hey, look, you're not a drummer. Go over there and just blast your body at the drums as if you're playing a guitar, but with some sticks in your hand, but don't try to do it perfectly. Just you want the electricity, you want the jolt of it. A few weeks after that, just by accident, Michael Harris, our engineer who tracked the record, he opened the session and pressed the space bar, and then there was a perfect glitch where Instead of boo,

ca, cac, cah, cah, boo, it went. Our heads swung around to look at each other, like our eyes were wide because what the hell was going on. And we only heard it for about three seconds or something, but we both understood what we just heard. And so then we recreated it, and that's what became the ultimate finished version of the drums. I'd say the song was found

through basically muting and muting and combing away as much as we could until what was left was boiled down to its essence. As soon as we muted the guitar, all of a sudden there was this new sort of space. There's just such a built-in idea of, especially for women, reaching a certain age, that there's a diminishment that's just innately bound to happen. There's like a devaluing culturally or something like that. But that's just so messed up, you know, in the sense that like our value is mounting up and we're learning so much more about ourselves. And yet there is a battle, even in my own mind, there's a battle to try to claim the natural age.

You know, the more time that's passed through me, the more I have the capacity to understand the things that I'm trying to figure out. And it's natural. It's okay. We invited Shazade Asmaili and Gabe Noel, who are two. We were calling them wild cards. They're just incredible players, and we could just unleash them on the tracks and see whatever they wanted to find, you know. Shazad carries around his Moog, rogue, with them all the time.

A little synthesizer. And so what you hear is like a single note that kind of opens up and becomes two notes, and that's him. And so that's Gabe Noel. I mean, honestly, every instrument that Gabe played on this record, I don't know what they are. I don't know what anything is.

He invented a new type of guitar called a cellar that is strong like a cello, but he plays it almost like a giant bass mandolin. And he runs it through his pedal board. He did a lot of that, and we drained most of it away, and just left these things that didn't sound exactly like an instrument. I mean, that was sort of the point was to take away any signifiers of live band setup. Instead, we're just finding these essential electric shocks. all of us have associations with that word like capital G god

but there's something so mysterious and incredible about the unlikeliness of us being here at all in a lyrical sense it becomes an opening you know in a way that word is usually not associated to like a 47 year old Canadian woman or something got you know but it's possible it's possible to just name it claim it just make it as simple as that. I think that backups can serve to just fortify a single subjective thought.

And other times it can split the idea into, this is an idea held by many. It's kind of like a call and response in a way. It becomes like a single voice multiplies itself to be many voices. And if I'm frightened, it's just because of the power vested in me. I had always been particularly drawn to the string arrangements on Mocki's record key change, and that arranger is Miguel Outwood Ferguson, so Mokx suggested that we bring him in. The key change was discovered live at the show.

I discovered if I played the song on the fifth fret in this open tuning, and then immediately put the capo on the third. fret in time for the solo. It became like a very angular key change. It was really difficult to try to find the tone of the guitar because I didn't really want it to sound like classic distorted electric guitar solo. Like it just feels a bit sort of norm core. And so I'm not an engineer on Pro Tools, but I sat down and I understood at least enough how to do hard cuts. I would just watch the sign wave until it was the end of the note and then I would cut it like boopoo bo bo bo bo bo bo bo like just put like hard cuts in there and then we come back to the

original key I saw that as the the calm after the storm you know the raindrops are dripping off of the tree and there's this moment of is the storm done did it pass I don't know why I love an alto recorder if you just blow into them very, very gently, they just sound very beautiful. I can't play a woodwind or a read instrument, but I can play a recorder. All the lyrics, they're speaking about electricity, but they're kind of speaking about owning of my own power in any given moment. This song is in a way, it's like a manifesto or a declaration to try to situate myself inside power. I haven't necessarily gotten there, but there's something in my arsenal now or something

where I've turned an intangible into something more understandable for myself. If I can just hear myself enchant these thoughts again and again over the years, some perspective shift will happen eventually. Coming up, you'll hear how all these ideas and elements came together in the full song. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out of full length. And this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishikesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career.

And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists. And it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Weinrobe. I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album

with a different amazing guest moderator in each city. Like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzuchas, Josh Malina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage. and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light, and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music

and get tickets for the shows on my website, rishikash.co, or just go to songexploder.net slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. And now here's In Lightning by Feist in its entirety. Visit songexplore.net slash Feist to learn more. You'll find links to buy or stream

in Lightning, and you can watch the music video. This episode of Song Exploder was produced by me, Craig Ely, Kathleen Smith, and Mary Dolan. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a SongExploder t-shirt at SongExploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi K. Sherway. Thanks for listening.

Radio Topia. If you like this episode and you're looking for another Song Exploder episode to listen to after this, check out Laura Marling's episode from May of 2020. I put Feist and Laura Marling back-to-back on a mixtape, and they both talked about some similar themes. You can find that episode and all the other episodes of the podcast at SongExploder. or on whatever podcast app you use.