Leslie Feist is bringing her ‘Multitudes’ tour to Philly. She may even sing ‘1234.’
The Canadian singer, known for hits like "Mushaboom," has an excellent new album that's her first in six years.
Leslie Feist has never been in a hurry.
“I usually take limitless time between records because I never want to feel that I’m disrespecting the muse by demanding that it show up,” said the Canadian singer who plays the Fillmore Philadelphia on Monday.
But the songs on Multitudes, Feist’s first album in six years and possibly her best yet, came in a rush, she said, via Zoom backstage before a show in Chicago.
The catalyst was the new person who entered Feist’s life shortly before the songwriting binge that resulted in such album highlights as the shuddering “In Lightning,” which opens Multitudes, and the soothing “Song for Sad Friends,” which closes it.
“My daughter could be given the credit for making me the most prolific I’ve ever been in my life,” Feist said. “I was deeply compelled to utilize what little time I had.”
Feist adopted her daughter, Tihui, in late 2019. “I was there at her birth,” she says, beaming.
Earlier that year at a retreat in northern Italy, she was introduced to a collective called People, whose weeklong workshops call on artists to deliver a new song every day.
The first workshop for Feist, 47, featured Mac DeMarco, Adam Cohen, and her friend Hayden, whose new song “On a Beach” Feist guests on. “There were a lot of intimidating people involved,” she says.
The basic rule of the game was clear: “You can’t bring an idea that you’ve been incubating for a while. It has to be born that day.” Feist ended up producing the bulk of Multitudes, which mixes becalmed songs like “Of Womankind” and “Become the Earth” with rowdier material such as “Borrow Trouble.”
“Some people have a recording studio in their house and they play every instrument. And other people like myself just had my phone acting as a Dictaphone and a nylon string guitar and an infant sleeping over there and maybe eight minutes before she was going to wake up,” she recalled. “So I would just stream-of-conscious something and get it to our captain Phil [Winerobe, a producer in New York] before he had his morning coffee.”
The exercise provided Feist with a bounty of new material — like the lilting lullaby “Forever Before,” written for her daughter — and helped her gain a renewed sense of self in the midst of the transformative experience of becoming a parent.
“It’s almost like when you drop something in water, and you reach down and try to catch the last little bit of it before it disappears into the abyss,” she said. “It was just so trippy to feel like I was losing grasp of my interior language and my own vocabulary and relationship with my self. So songwriting became, in those few moments I had, my compulsion. I became more prolific because of the need to remember who I was.”
Feist performed songs from Multitudes in reduced-capacity venues in 2021, first in Hamburg, Germany, and then Ottawa, Toronto, Seattle, and Los Angeles.
That same year, the album’s songs of rebirth became suffused with grief, after the death of her father, abstract expressionist painter Harold Feist. “Becoming a parent, I saw that I need to stay alive for this tiny being,” she said. “And then with the death of my father, it echoed forward until I saw my own end.”
Last year, Feist began a European opening for Arcade Fire, the Canadian indie rock band but quit the tour after Arcade Fire’s Win Butler was accused of sexual misconduct by four people.
Feist grew up in Calgary and now splits her time between Toronto and California, where Multitudes was recorded in a studio in a Redwood forest. “It’s so foreign,” she says of living in Los Angeles. “I’m a product of eternal winter. So every day I see a blue sky in January it’s a delight. It’s so strange to me.”
Since the “Multitudes” tour began in the U.S. this month, Feist has resumed performing “1234,” the hit from 2007′s The Reminder that first took off in an Apple Nano ad and then went viral when she performed it on Sesame Street in 2008 with rewritten lyrics.
These days, she’s on good terms with the ditty. ““At the time I might have been just confused. Wait, why does one song supernova all others? In a motherly, protective way I thought: What about all these other songs?” she said.
But 15 years later, she acknowledges that the song has “ grant me an autonomy that I don’t know that I would have gotten otherwise. And maybe it’s the reason that I now sit before you still having a career.”
Multitudes is so titled to reflect “the multitudinous ways of being here now and the multitudinous versions of myself through time,” Feist said. The album’s artwork reflects the concept, with bits of Feist trailing behind her as she moves through the world.
For the tour, Feist is embracing a spirit of adventure that reaches back to her beginnings as a punk rocker in the 1990s.
“They say that if someone falls off their bike when they’re drunk, they won’t break any bones. I want it to be loose that way. There’s no expectation of perfection. I really like a premise where I’m not expected to do it perfectly, or even right.”
The “Multitudes” tour. $45-$49.50, 8 p.m., May 15, Fillmore Philadelphia, 29 E. Allen St., thefillmorephilly.com.