As Feist celebrated her 35th birthday earlier this year with an intimate dinner among friends, she was momentarily distracted by the intense flickering of a television in a nearby room. The images were bizarre — motorbikes on a stage accompanied by pyrotechnics and music. Whatever it was seemed outlandish and jarring. What, she wondered, could be the spectacle?
It wasn’t until she got closer to the television that the frenetic, choreographed commotion made sense. It was the telecast of the Grammy Awards. Only three years earlier, she was part of that scene, performing “1234,” the song that would make the former indie artist a global sensation — in a different out-of-context performance.
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| ‘Metals’ |
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Now, watching the awards, the images she saw confirmed how surreal that experience had been — and how she just doesn’t fit into that poppy, musical world.
“The Grammys, and the magnitude of that spotlight, it wasn’t a place where I felt at home. Like what I do doesn’t really happen there,” Feist said during a recent interview as she sat on a quiet patio at her downtown Manhattan hotel. “It’s such a potent and brief moment, and it doesn’t really speak to the truth of what touring and being a musician is. It’s mostly fanfare, inflated and very intense. I wasn’t feeling very comfortable in that kind of setting.”
Now that Feist is releasing “Metals,” the follow-up to her breakthrough, heralded 2007 album, “The Reminder,” she’s back in her comfort zone. Her fourth album has a darker tone, but still has that otherworldly, mystical quality that has made her one of music’s more original voices.
While the Canadian singer already had a name and critical acclaim, it wasn’t until she decided to let Apple use a clip of her video for the whimsical “1234” for an iPod Nano commercial that the mainstream public became fascinated with Feist. The clip, which featured dancers in brightly colored outfits, swaying with a sparkly dressed Feist as if it were a scene from a Broadway musical, entranced millions. From “The Colbert Report” to “Sesame Street,” Feist and her video made the rounds, and the song became a pop hit.
Looking back, Feist isn’t sure she would agree to let her video be used in such a commercial way.
“When I made that decision, I was in a really different place and I really didn’t know; like, no one could imagine that would happen. It was incredible in a lot of ways as well, but it’s put me in circumstances now where I wouldn’t necessarily feel that that is something that could be helpful,” she said. “I landed somewhere different than I started, so now I would have very different perspectives on all of that, for sure.”
