By Stevie Connor.
Hugely influential Canadian musician Feist has released her critically acclaimed new album Multitudes.
The album comes with a beautiful live session released on YouTube on April 14th: “Multitudes Mini Concert” including "The Redwing", "Hiding Out In The Open” and “Love Who We Are Meant To”.
Recorded in a bespoke residential studio in the California Redwoods, Multitudes was produced by Feist with longtime collaborators Robbie Lackritz (The Weather Station, Bahamas, Robbie Robertson) and Mocky (Jamie Lidell, Vulfpeck, Kelela), with additional production by Blake Mills (Bob Dylan, Fiona Apple, Perfume Genius) on "Borrow Trouble", “I Took All My Rings Off”, “Of Womankind”, and “Become the Earth”.
Feist’s sixth full-length and first release since 2017’s critically lauded Pleasure, Multitudes took shape soon after the birth of her daughter and sudden death of her father, a back-to-back convergence of life-altering events that left the Canadian singer-songwriter with “nothing performative in me anymore.” As she cleansed her songwriting of any tendency to obscure unwanted truths, Feist slowly made her way toward a batch of songs rooted in a raw and potent realism which is touched with otherworldly beauty.
Largely written and workshopped during an intensely communal experimental show of the same name through 2021 and 2022, the songs developed in parallel with and were deeply influenced by the mutuality of the unconventional experience. The Multitudes production, developed by Feist with legendary designer Rob Sinclair (David Byrne’s American Utopia, Peter Gabriel, Tame Impala) involved a subtle disarming of normalized conventions between performer and observer.
Multitudes was the first live show to be designed with 360-degree immersive sound incorporated into the production. The album was also recorded with immersive sound designed into its production - in pristine audiophile grade Dolby ATMOS - by multi-Grammy nominated producer-engineer Robbie Lackritz.
Born in Nova Scotia but mostly raised in Calgary, Feist first explored her idiosyncratic musicality by playing in a local punk band as a teenager and later made her debut with 1999’s Monarch (Lay Your Jewelled Head Down) (an independent release primarily sold at merch tables). Along with co-founding Juno Award-winning indie-rock collective Broken Social Scene, Feist next achieved breakout success with her full-length sophomore effort Let It Die (winner of Alternative Album of the Year at the 2004 Juno Awards). Released in 2007, The Reminder earned international acclaim and landed on best-of-the-year lists from outlets like Pitchfork, NPR, Spin, and Rolling Stone, in addition to winning Feist the 2007 Shortlist Music Prize and garnering four Grammy Award nominations. Now certified gold, the album features her iconic smash single “1234,” a Billboard Hot 100-charting hit that paved the way for Feist’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live” and “Sesame Street.”
In 2011, Feist returned with the Polaris Music Prize-winning Metals, named the best album of the year by New York Times chief popular music critic Jon Pareles. With AV Club hailing 2017’s Pleasure as her “most daring work to date” and NPR praising the album as “wrenching in its honesty,” Feist went on to premiere the Pleasure Studies podcast in 2019 - awarded “Podcast of the Year” by Apple Podcasts - and soon began developing the Multitudes live show, a boundary-pushing collaboration conceived by Feist and Robbie Lackritz and developed with artist/filmmaker Colby Richardson, artist Heather Goodchild and Artistic Producer Mary Hickson.
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