‘My heart, being bigger, is that much more tender’: Feist on motherhood and new album ‘Multitudes’

Four years ago, Leslie Feist adopted a baby girl. As the Canadian art-pop chanteuse spent the liminal hours of the night with her newborn, she began tapping into what she describes as something altogether “more ancient” than she had expected. It was an instinct that bubbled from her very core.

She needed to sing.

Feist had anticipated singing to her child, of course. She is, after all, a Grammy-nominated artist, known for soothing melodies that have the power to move hearts and shift iPods. But when she opened her mouth, something new came out.

“It wasn’t like the person who had done this for 20 years, touring and making records,” she recalled. “It was something so primary and immediate and naturally occurring.”

Obliterated by exhaustion, her brain had shut itself off to influence and reference. New melodies came spilling out, little streams of consciousness arriving in lullaby form. She had, in essence, discovered a new artist, hidden beneath the weight of her life.

“I was singing words that I was aware (my daughter) didn’t know yet and there was something so fresh about hearing myself singing,” said Feist in an interview. “I felt these words were so important, but I was the only consciousness in the room really hearing them; she was hearing the intention inside them. There was an exchange happening.”

Of that formative experience, Feist said, “In that moment I felt pretty unfamiliar to myself: the person who decides to be a parent and isn’t that useful at being a parent. Becoming a parent only shows you what you don’t know.”

These ultraprivate moments have “unfolded” into “Multitudes,” Feist’s sixth album and her first in as many years. As its title suggests, the album is a reset for Feist. She calls it “a scattering of bread crumbs.”

That’s the genesis of “Multitudes.” Then came the pandemic and the grief.

With the onset of COVID-19, Feist moved her nascent family from L.A. — where she had bought a house to escape the frigid Ontario winter — to a countryside estate near Toronto, where she sheltered with her daughter and her dad, the artist Harold Feist.

Free from the demands of the music industry, she had the opportunity to experience the joy of her father, then in his 70s, holding her baby. “I saw him see her,” she said.

Her new surroundings inspired her to keep working on her lullabies. Feist began seeing the songs as musical ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response), giving dynamic prominence to the balance of breath, the elongation of words. Where previously she would temper her mellifluous tenor with jagged instrumentation, she now turned to a simple nylon string guitar; where lyrics were previously opaque, they were now deeply personal.

“I was considering my own place in the authorship of my optimism,” she said. “I was working to locate the woman I needed to metamorphosis into to become the mother of this person.”

Then, in the spring of 2021, Harold died. By that point, Feist had written almost all of “Multitudes” and she had begun working on how to bring an early version of the album to audiences through a series of unconventional residencies. It was intended as a public workshopping but ended up being what she calls “a grief ritual.”

“I’ve seen it bandied about in a way that makes me feel uncomfortable that this album was me writing about losing my dad,” said Feist, referring to early media coverage. “That’s not true in the sense that the songs were written before I had lost him.”

She concedes that the songs, bound to the experience of re-examining the self and the passage of time, gained a further gravitas after her loss.

“My heart grew 100 sizes when (my daughter) arrived,” she continued. “But my heart being that much bigger was more tender. The show was where my grief went to resolve itself.”

All these experiences are present on the 12 songs of “Multitudes,” where weighted moments run scattershot throughout. On album standout “Forever Before,” Feist meditates on the self incinerated by motherhood, evoking the line between fear and fearlessness by stretching the words to their very base elements. She takes to primal yelps over a shock of sonic vastitude on “Borrow Trouble” and, on the sprawling elegy “Become the Earth,” a choral of Feists calmly wrap the listener in an immersive blanket of comfort.

The effect lends “Multitudes” its own brand of empathy — as if filling the gaps where words were too simple to convey such deep emotions.

Last fall, Feist began preparing for a European tour as an opening act for Montreal band Arcade Fire. Days before the tour began, Arcade Fire band leader Win Butler faced multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. (He has denied the accusations.) Two shows later, Feist pulled out of the tour.

“The last two nights onstage, my songs made this decision for me,” she wrote in a statement. “Hearing them through this lens was incongruous with what I’ve worked to clarify for myself through my whole career. I’ve always written songs to name my own subtle difficulties, aspire to my best self and claim responsibility when I need to. And I’m claiming my responsibility now and going home.”

For our interview, she requested not to speak further about the situation. Instead, she suggested audiences take “Multitudes” with them out into the world: “In a perfect world, I hope they’re listening to it while taking their dog for a walk.”

In considering “Multitudes,” Feist said she’s not dismissing her pre-kid self. Instead, she’s found comfort in being able to reassess things she may have taken for granted, like her appearance on “Sesame Street,” which featured a reimagining of her hit, “I, 2, 3, 4.” On YouTube, the appearance has racked up a staggering 946 million views.

“For years, I had people tell me how much that song means (to them and their kids) and, as a person without a child, I’d always think, ‘Oh, that’s cute,’” she said. “Now I can appreciate it in a new way.”

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