Leslie Feist on the risks of making your life an open book
“I think I learned years ago that you don’t get songs that have that long stride and that pivot-hinge ability if it’s too much diary entry.”
— Leslie Feist
Feist made this observation about her songwriting technique — moments before, she acknowledges “there is always an innate bit of autobiography there” — in a 2007 interview with the New York Times.
This was just before the release of her breakthrough album The Reminder, and indeed right as she was about to shoot the video of 1 2 3 4, the song that pushed Feist right smack into the mainstream.
Looking at Jon Pareles’s article again (that’s a gift link, btw), I’m not sure what to make of his opening, and whether it’s patronizing or a bit of rip on fizzy media profiles of poppier artists. Here it is:
On the way to the video shoot for a song named “1 2 3 4,” Leslie Feist called her father on her cellphone, urging him to drop by the studio. “I’m going to dance like in ‘Fame,’ ” bubbled Feist, a petite 31-year-old brunette who uses her last name for her solo recording career. “I’m going to be carried around on the shoulders of 50 people, like Madonna in ‘Material Girl,’ only minus the pearls and the back muscles.”
Ummm… well, I could rattle off a lot of adjectives to describe Leslie Feist, and “petite” and “brunette” would not among them.
Feist did of course have a hit with 1 2 3 4, and the video described in the piece — a single take of wildly coloured choreography that took two days to rehearse and a third to film — is below. (Oddly, only lower-res versions of it are available online.)
Feist performed the song six ways to Sunday on tours and media appearances, swept the Junos in 2008, helped sell a heap of Apple’s iPod Nanos, and according to recent setlists, she likes to close her shows with 1 2 3 4. Why not? It’s a champ of a singalong, and now it’s nostalgia, too.
There is nothing more charming than when she took it to Sesame Street:
Four monsters on the floor!
By the way, the Sesame Street video above has been streamed more than a billion times. Count to that, Elmo!
Almost two decades later, Feist is still a going concern, and her songwriting remains a subject of fascination and no doubt speculation to her fans. No wonder she guards her privacy.
This is from a 2023 profile:
Highly vulnerable in her first-person lyrics while maintaining a relatively private personal life, Feist —who has used her surname as a mononym since the ’90s— is both an open and mysterious book.
This seems to be a perennial challenge of songwriters, to find something vulnerable in a lyric that can move people, and yet maintain some kind of barrier or protection for your own life.