eslie Feist has not yet had a chance to furnish her new apartment, but could probably care less about the lack of decoration adorning her recently purchased Paris residence. By touring extensively throughout North America and Europe, thousands of fans have more than made her feel at home on the road. As a result her record, Let It Die has gone Gold in France and Canada and she recently finished a tour with Bright Eyes where she mesmerized fans across the U.S. Stylus was able to catch up with Feist at a recent stop in Philadelphia where she talked about plans for an upcoming album, life with Broken Social Scene and her impressions of Conan O’Brien.

You’ve been touring pretty steadily both with your solo act and Broken Social Scene. How much do you miss Canada, being where you’re from and also France where you live now?
Feist: Well Canada luckily has become portable because my new band that I’m working with are all Canadian. I brought the Canadian vibe out on the road and it’s [nearing] winter so we get to have that. So the scene is set in all these different towns we go to, we’ve got the accent and then the cold so it feels like Canada wherever we go. But France, it’s become like a summer romance with someone that, from a distance your heart always stays fond of them, but you don’t really remember the details or the expressions on their face or what exactly it was you talked about when you were in the middle of your romance, it’s sort of, this foggy distant thing. I’ve been there so little in the last year, like maybe two weeks total, but I have an apartment still there that’s just sitting empty right now.

Do you have any plans for a new solo album?
Feist: Yeah, I’m gonna start recording it in Berlin, and probably finish it in Paris. I found a big old manor house. The ballroom and the parlor and the dining room are all empty and you can wire up from the basement studio into the whole house and record anything in the middle of these spaces. So [around] February I’m gonna start making the new record

What kind of direction would you like to take with the new album?
Feist: Well Let it Die was made in a “vaccum” kind of, cause the studio was the first life that the songs had, I hadn’t been touring with them. Most of the songs for this next album have already been played live and they’re living every night in every city, they’re coming up against hurdles…they’ve been worked out, like physically worked out in so many different ways, so I think that they’ll have a little bit more of the live feeling on this next album.

What were some of the major differences in making your first album, Monarch, and Let It Die?
Feist: Well, I think Monarch was…you know the door opened before I was ready to go through it. It was a little premature to make an album when I did. But I applied for—I guess partially because I didn’t think I’d get it—but I applied for a grant from the Canadian government and then I got it! How can you say no to the chance to make an album? In retrospect, though, they were the first 10 songs that I had ever written by myself. So when I listen to it now it’s the equivalent of looking at an old high school photograph of myself…if somebody was like, “hey so what do you look like?” you wouldn’t give them your high school photo, you’d give them a recent one, so I wouldn’t give anyone Monarch…I mean I don’t know if I’d give them Let it Die, because at this point what I’m thinking about is only three more months until I start to get making a new one. So I’d probably say, “I’ll send you a ‘photo’ in three months.”

Can you talk a bit about being in Broken Social Scene and how long you’ve known the other members?
Feist: I’ve known some of the members for like up to over ten years and some for three or four. But the genesis, everybody has their own story of how it began depending on when they entered the scene, but I can only speak for myself, but it was a very small core, there were only five of us, it was myself, Brendan Canning who I’ve known for like 12 years now, and Kevin Drew, Andrew Whiteman, the guitarist of Apostle of Hustle and Justin Peroff the drummer, and we played a couple of shows, I guess it was the winter of like 2000, we played some shows and called it Broken Social Scene.

No two gigs were alike, we wrote the songs on the spot, it was mostly, well if we jammed that week, we would play those songs but we wouldn’t play them ever again. The point was just to have it be different every time, to wake ourselves up in this winter, so the story is hard to summarize cause it’s still going on and it will for the next 60 years, I’m sure.

What is the process of putting together a BSS album?
Feist: By virtue of the fact that half the members of the band don’t live in Toronto anymore or are touring all the time, like the members that are in Metric, the ones that are in Stars, [and] myself. Jay Collett who’s actually left the live band because he had a baby, we called him from the stage as his wife was in labor and 2,500 people in Montreal, we got them to yell, “Push! Push!” He was in the hospital and he put it on speaker phone for her (laughs).

But I think there are some core people that are always there and the only thing they do is Broken, like Kevin Drew, Brendan Canning, and Justin Peroff are the only three that really that’s all they do, cause we have people from Do Make Say Think, Apostle of Hustle, you know everybody’s got other projects. Those three are the guys that I think hold down the fort for everybody else to be able to come and play in the fort. It’s a blanket fort made of cushions from someone’s couch.

My part in the [latest] record was, there was already a lot of stuff laid down, I was only in Toronto for a few days all of last year so I would go straight into the studio and maybe nobody would be there but David Newfeld the producer and so I would just hear the tracks they’d done and it would be an advantage of being one of the few members that was hearing things fresh. You know I’d hear songs that we played live but never had heard them again and “oh I remember that one, oh they made it into a song,” and I would just get to sing anything I wanted over the top of it so then they’d come into the studio and I guess decide if they wanted to use it or not.

Did you come up with the choreography for One Evening?
Feist: Yeah, that’s the only video of mine that I’ve directed and it was actually Buck and I, Buck 65 is the guy in it with me and he lived in Paris at that time too…and I had seen him play a lot of times and I knew him from Canada. He always had this light on his feet, kinda like Fred Astaire, dandy rapper kind of thing happening so I called him and said, “you wanna come be in a dance video with me in Canada next week?” So we rented one of those studios with the mirror covering the whole wall in Paris and got some lunch and then [went] in there with our takeout and fooled around in front of this mirror making up these kinda cheesy dance moves and then we flew to Canada to shoot. It was three days in Paris and one day of shooting and we had the video.

You were able to perform on the Conan O’Brien show this year, what was that like?
Feist: When you’re there, the first thing you’re struck with is how it feels like a mini-golfing place. You know when they have the Taj Mahal but in miniature? I mean on TV it looks huge, but it’s tiny, it’s the smallest room ever! It’s the opposite of being intimidated, it’s like ‘oh, this is kind of like a Lego, Tonka Toy TV set,’ it’s just like everything’s in miniature, except for him, he’s enormous. It’s like he’s the friendly giant in his kingdom.

I [haven’t had] a TV since like ‘98 or something, so I don’t really have a sense of what space in the cultural sediment is occupied by Conan. I was pretty virgin walking in there and just played the song and took people at face value. He’s a really nice person.

What have been some of your most memorable moments performing live?
Feist: Geez, you know this was a conversation I had with one of my relatives recently when she asked me the same question, and I said, ‘I don’t know,’ and she said you know what, in two years you’re gonna know, [because] you’re gonna have had time away from it. [I’ve been] touring for two years now, so I think it would take some time away from it to have perspective.

How did you go about choosing which songs you wanted to cover on Let It Die?
Feist: Well the recording part of this album, it was really experimental. [Chilly] Gonzales and I, who is the co-producer of the record and [who] I had been on tour with as his sidekick, we took that live understanding of each other into the studio to record some of my songs. But going in, because we hadn’t played them live, it was all fresh and I think we had my songs as a subject matter to be recording, but I was a little, you know, holding them up close to my chest, not really sure of what we are gonna do.

So we began with covers and “Secret Heart” specifically because it was a song I loved almost as much as if it was my own. I was pretty protective of it. I wasn’t of course white knuckling quite as much cause Ron Sexsmith already did it so perfectly, so what harm could be done, you know? So we started with covers and then segued our way slowly into my own songs and then we slowly began to co-write as well. The covers were an icebreaker in a way, but then some of them suited the album in the end and we thought, ‘oh, we’ll put those on.’

Early on you were touring so much that you almost lost your voice. What kept you motivated during that time?
Feist: Well it happened once and I was 20, it was almost nine years ago. It was a dark time…being unsure of what’s going to happen is scary, but it motivated me in a way to learn guitar, because I had just been a singer up until then. I found a new way to understand [melodies] through playing guitar.

What are some of your favorite pieces of literature?
Feist: Ooh, good question. I just finished the Master and Margarita, by Mikhail Bulgakov, it’s a Russian book and it has been suggested to me by so many people I respect over the years and I just have never remembered, until once I was in an airport and there it was. I was about to do a Trans-Atlantic flight and I was like perfect and I grabbed it and now I’ve been seeking out all of Bulgakov’s other work.

I read a lot of autobiographies and memoirs. An amazing memoir is [from] Benvinudo Cellini, he was a [15th-16th century] goldsmith from Italy. I’ve [also] read all of Toni Morrison which I really love, I find really beautiful. There’s a Canadian author Ann-Marie MacDonald and all of E. Annie Proulx, like Accordian Crimes, The Shipping News, and Postcards are some of my favorites, that if I ever see a paperback copy, I’ll buy it just to be able to give it to someone to pass it on.

Have you ever read a book or picked up a passage or a quote that you think describes your life or defines what kind of person you are?
Feist: Yeah someone I forgot to mention in the literature that fits that is Anais Nin and there’s one quote, I’m paraphrasing in my head, but basically [Nin] says, ‘We see things as we are, not as they are,’ or another way of saying it is, ‘the way you look at a man, so he appears to you.’

It’s that sensation of the synergy of any contact, whether it’s on a stage with an audience…or reading something as two dimensional as a piece of paper, where someone is summarized in a short way that so much charm can be lost, but that it all depends on the amount of imagination you have going into whatever it is that you’re ‘intaking.’ It goes with interactions with people or if you were in a new city you’ve never been to before and it’s the amount of enthusiasm and the amount of curiosity you allow yourself that will make the city great or not.

If you were able to write a story about yourself, how would you portray Feist?
Feist: I’m actually about to do that cause I’ve been given a Polaroid camera, I’m supposed to do a piece on touring, for I don’t even know, could it be Jane Magazine or something like that, Bust maybe, I can’t remember, but they’ve given me a Polaroid to take around on tour and I’m supposed to kind of do a ‘what it’s like to be on tour’ thing and I was just thinking like, on tour I’m so invisible to myself, it’s just one task after another.

In a way as much as I love reading autobiographies, I’m fascinated with them partially because I would have no sense of how to talk about my own life with any perspective. Like half of what I like about autobiographies isn’t what happen in their lives, it’s the way…I’m so curious on how they remember things that happened. Then I think, oh maybe it’s not accurate, maybe it’s just the way they need to couch an event, they need to remember something that happened 30 years ago as a certain way in the present to make it, you know bearable, and so then half the adventure of reading an autobiography is thinking like, ‘oh, what does it say about them in the present that they need to think about the past like that,’ if they sound really altruistic or if they sound really benevolent and kind. Very seldom do you see someone say, ‘yeah, I was a real asshole,’ or if they do it’s a charming asshole, it’s not the mean spirited person, you know?

Gonzales, my oldest and greatest friend, he’s like, ‘you have such a bad memory and such a strange, skewed perspective on the present,’ so much so that he said he’s gonna end up writing my autobiography (laughs). Not a biography, like he’ll write it in my name with my pen and from my perspective, so I would probably just ask Gonzales to write it.

Do you keep a journal?
Feist: When the days moved a little slow, I was able to. I did for a while and it became kind of play-by-play, like I did this, went there, said that na, na, na…you know? 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.