Feist was a guest on Zane Lowe’s Beats 1 program today, discussing her upcoming album. When she recently shared the album’s title track, “Pleasure,” the musician gave listeners a dose of what to look forward to — and it was refreshingly charged, compared to the robust instrumentation yet overall mellowness of 2011’s Metals.
Since it’s been six years since we’ve last gotten a Feist album, Lowe asked why she decided that “Pleasure” should be the first material audiences would hear from her. She responded:
There’s 11 songs on the record; it’s like constructing a set list at a show. The first three songs should encapsulate everywhere we’re going to go in the next hour and a half…You set everyone’s minds at ease, show them the scope of it. This song is that [for] the record, indicating of the range that’s gonna happen over the next 11 songs.
She discussed having recorded with longtime collaborators Mocky and Renaud Letang, after first thinking she was going to make a solo album — having become entranced with the idea of going back to her roots as a musician.
“The whole record is pretty much Mocky and I—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,” she emphasized. “Doing a little solo tour, I re-inhabited doing things alone, and was intending to make a solo album, but Mocky being the brother that he is, and the songs being as bony as they are, it was natural to be like, ‘it’s a performance album.’ Renaud Letand produced with Mocky and I — and all of us kept that intention, that the songs should never get so arranged that they need more than me to hold them up — my musculature, my skeletal frame should be able to hold them up.”
Lowe also asked what a musician such as Feist might be up to in their life in the gaps between albums.
“There’s friends that have toured as long as I have, and we joked that it was like the Popeye arm — like one aspect of us has overgrown massively,” said Feist. “We got good at weird things, that don’t apply to normal life, and the other half of your body has kind of wasted away. That other half is remembering to be part of your friend’s lives, remembering to remind your family that you exist, how to cook a meal… I did a lot of normal living — I can tomatoes, I go to my aunt’s farm and press cider, and meet my friend’s kids that got born in all those years I was away.”
Pleasure will be out on April 28. Listen to the full interview:
[Via Pitchfork]