Feist
The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a wave of indie pop and indie rock artists carve out space between mainstream pop and more experimental sounds, blending folk sensibilities with rock energy in ways that didn't fit neatly into any single category. Leslie Feist, born on February 13, 1976, in Amherst, Canada, emerged from that moment as a singer-songwriter and recording artist whose work drew from indie pop, indie rock, pop rock, indie folk, and anti-folk traditions.
Feist attended Bishop Carroll High School and later studied at Mount Royal University before building a career as a singer, musician, and actor working across those overlapping genres. What she brought to the indie landscape wasn't something the era already had in abundance — a voice and approach that moved comfortably between the raw edges of anti-folk and the more polished textures of pop rock, without fully settling into either. Her work as a recording artist reflects that range, sitting across genre lines rather than committing to just one.
Recognition for her recordings came in the form of several notable honors. She received the Shortlist Music Prize, which is awarded to albums that achieve artistic merit outside the mainstream commercial chart system. She also took home the Juno Award for Album of the Year and the Juno Award for Single of the Year, two of the most prominent honors in Canadian music. Those Juno wins mark concrete high points in a recording career that has consistently moved between indie and pop territory.
Quotes by Feist
Feist's insights on:
Surreal can be exciting and good, and it can be like living inside an alien landscape, and it can be completely interesting, or you can be alienated from your own life - inside your own life, it doesn't feel familiar any more.
Music is pretty intimate stuff and I can only work with very few people: Gonzalez being one, Mocky being another and, on a completely different level, Broken Social Scene. With Broken Social Scene it's not one-on-one, it's a one-on-12. It's very healthy, very comfortable, like a big pot luck supper among old friends.
I’ve always been a bit wary of keyboards because there’s an invisibility to it – you’re not really hitting anything.
Musically, I didn’t relate to Berlin. There seemed to be a lot of machine music made there – I don’t think I saw a stringed instrument in two years.
I guess there are a lot of people out there that think they’re supposed to define themselves in isolation, but that’s not necessarily the case.
Because there’s just so much in a day now, I keep writing in much more abstract terms, like I don’t try to write about what happened anymore. It would be impossible.
I said I’d stop for a year, which was inconceivable to me and everyone around me. It seemed like so long. But then, after that year, I looked up and I still hadn’t gotten my land legs back at all.
I don’t think that village idea of actually knowing what you’re contributing to the whole exists anymore.