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Feist
From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist
Leslie Feist, known as Feist, is a Canadian indie pop singer and songwriter, born in Amherst, Nova Scotia, in 1976. Her parents were both artists: her father was an abstract expressionist painter, her mother studied ceramics. After their divorce she moved with her mother and brother to Regina and later to Calgary. She wanted to be a writer and sang a lot in choirs. At the age of twelve she danced in the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics in Calgary, which later inspired the video for 1234. In 1991, at fifteen, she founded the punk band Placebo in Calgary, of which she was the singer.
Music and breakthrough
Her solo career began in 1999 with Monarch: Lay Your Jewelled Head Down. She also plays in the indie rock group Broken Social Scene. The records Let It Die from 2004 and The Reminder from 2007 were acclaimed and together sold more than two and a half million copies. The Reminder earned four Grammy nominations, including for best new artist. Metals in 2011, Pleasure in 2017 and Multitudes in 2023 followed. In 2012 she made a split EP with the metal group Mastodon. She won eleven Juno Awards, including two for artist of the year.
Influence
Feist's music is intimate and acoustic, with a warm, sometimes raw voice, and a preference for simple instrumentation. In this way she belongs to the Canadian indie wave of the beginning of this century and showed that a singer-songwriter could exist both in the indie scene and in the big charts.
Listening
Discography
Studio albums
- 1999Monarch: Lay Your Jewelled Head Down
- 2004Let It Die
- 2007The Reminder
- 2011Metals
- 2017Pleasure
- 2023Multitudes
Mentioned in other articles
- iPod and the iTunes Store Technology
Apple's adverts, with silhouettes dancing to music by bands such as Jet and Feist, became a way of making a hit in themselves.