Feist: New album “Multitudes” – being sad is explicitly allowed

album review

“multitudes”
Feist became a mother and lost her father. Being sad is explicitly allowed on her new album

by Catherine Brenner Meyer

04/19/2023, 16:58

2 mins

Feist has released a new album. The Canadian singer faces grief and loss and her new life – with a daughter but without her own father. “Multitudes” invites you not to simply push your own worries away.

Feist appears as a distorted image on the cover of her new album “Multitudes”. The musician is shown side by side several times, only once her face can be seen reasonably clearly. She looks downright defiantly at the viewer from beneath her bangs. This album is only for the brave. Because it gets down to business. It’s about dealing with your own problems. “Everybody’s got their shit / But who’s got the guts to sit with it?” Feist sings to calm guitar music on “Hiding Out in the Open.” We all struggle with our crap, but who faces it? Who stays seated, stay tuned?

Feist’s voice can also be heard slightly distorted in the songs, some accompanied by background noise. Lines repeat, words reverberate. Just as memories, conversations and feelings reverberate. The sound of this album remains mellow, due in part to Leslie Feist’s unmistakably beautiful voice, yet it’s rawer, more abrupt than previous years. Less easy too.

“In Lightning” is the name of the first song, it’s the loudest and one of the more electronic. “And in lightning I can see / Just as well in the dark”. I can see in flashes just as well as in the dark. As if this album were a bolt of lightning itself, shedding light on places that hurt and that sometimes you’d rather keep hidden. Leslie Feist looks.

Feist became a mother and shortly thereafter lost her father

It’s been five years since Feist released her last album. A lot has happened in her life since then. She adopted a daughter. Shortly thereafter, her father, the painter Harold Feist, died, with whom she was very close.

“At that time I almost lost myself through being a mother, I was almost burned. And then it was as if I was being wiped out even further by the grief for my father,” says the singer in an interview with the Swiss online magazine “Republik”. . The new album has become a mixture of what happened in her life and the only way she could have endured it all – writing. That might sound a bit dramatic, but it was also quite dramatic.

Feist is now 47 and lives in Toronto. She has remained the singer-songwriter her fans love her for. Many of them may have gotten older with her and thus also matured with a few worries. The singer treats those who are sad with empathy. “Songs for Sad Friends” is the name of the last song on the album.

It sounds a bit like a lullaby and anyone who hears it can easily imagine how Feist sings her child to sleep and how much security there must be in this voice. The lyrics are by no means a request not to be sad, as the title might initially suggest, but the exact opposite:

“Don’t be sad my friend / Is the last thing I’d say / If you’re sad my friend / Why would I take that away?” Feist sings over her guitar. Don’t be sad my friend is the last thing I would say. If you’re sad my friend why would I take that away?

Sources: republic