Alexis Petridis wrote a substantial (tip top, blue ribbon, top drawer) article about Feist in a recent edition of The Guardian. She does a great job covering the last many years—touching on the Olympics, her parents, bad jobs and past bands—all the while titularly nodding to the calendar ahead. The only thing she doesn't mention was the bowling alley and the party times which danced in the background for much of the interview. Perhaps some scores just weren't fit to print?
I've posted an excerpt from the story next paragraph; follow this leader to a link below for the unabridged edition.
"Tonight, Feist stands silhouetted behind a paper screen, singing unaccompanied into a microphone, then crouches down to fiddle with an electronic device, looping her voice until it forms a gorgeous, ethereal chorus. She makes up an impromptu song about St Louis' landmarks - no mean feat given that the area isn't exactly overburdened with places of interest - and gets the audience to sing in harmony, assigning a different note to each of the theatre's tiers. She then sings 1-2-3-4, the single that has made her a star in America, thanks in no small part to its inclusion on an advert for the iPod Nano: even stripped of its startling video, featuring Feist in blue sequins leading a vast troupe of dancers through a complicated and slightly shambolic Busby Berkeley-ish routine, its nursery-rhyme simplicity is about as captivating as pop music can get. Alone on stage with an electric guitar, she then does a jagged, sad, slightly disturbing song called Fucked Up Kid, which plunges the venue into rapt silence. Even will-you-marry-me guy gives it a rest.
I saw Feist do something similar a year ago in a Brighton club a fraction of the Pageant's size: in Britain, thanks to her music's ubiquity on TV ads - where it has been used to sell perfume, mattresses and mobile phones - she's currently an artist more heard than heard of, a state of affairs that you can't imagine is going to last much longer. The audience was heavy on hipsters, presumably lured by Feist's long-standing associations with a succession of achingly trendy cult artists - she has sung with sprawling Canadian art-rock collective Broken Social Scene and ironic white rappers Peaches and Gonzales. There was an almost tangible air of come-on-impress-us about the audience, their cynicism perhaps compounded by the ads. But Feist was witty, charismatic and so obviously laden down with fantastic songs that they were utterly disarmed. By the end, they were virtually rolling on their backs and asking her to tickle their bellies: clapping along and happily acceding when she asked them to hum a note to which she could tune her guitar..."
Read more of Alexis' interview with Feist here.
