Singer Feist brings a concert like no other to Stanford
Singer-songwriter Feist's immersive new show 'Multitudes' seeks to transform the relationship between performer and audience.
Every crisis is also an opportunity. For Leslie Feist the pandemic offered an opening to reshape the terrain on which audiences encounter musicians.
The Canadian singer/songwriter, who performs and records solely under her last name, has long struggled with the strange isolation of the spotlight. Rather than feeling liberated on stage, she’s often had to fight through the conventions that shape nightclub, theater and concert hall performances in order to connect with her listeners.
When the spread of COVID-19 shut down venues around the world, Feist already had a sketchbook thick with ideas about changing the artist/audience equation. In the winter of 2021, with the pandemic conflagration still raging, the offer of a month-long residency at Hamburg’s leading independent theater proved irresistible. Rather than dismantling the transparent wall, “Multitudes,” the immersive production she developed in Germany, slips the audience around it and invites them on stage too.
“It did feel like a chance to rethink what I had been doing since I was 16, the audience versus the person on stage with all the fixings of a normal concert,” said Feist, 46, who concludes her U.S. tour premiering “Multitudes” with six Stanford Live performances over three nights at Memorial Auditorium, May 5-7. “Something about this moment was asking for some new approach and provided a chance to reconsider all those assumptions.”
Working with a creative team that includes designer Rob Sinclair, who devised the striking lighting for David Byrne’s stage show “American Utopia” (drawn from his album of the same name), Feist developed an intimate, in-the-round production. Accompanied by multi-instrumentalists Todd Dahlhoff and Amir Yaghmai, she performs in the midst of the audience, a configuration that embodies that circle-of-life themes running through much of the new music she composed for the show.
The baby daughter she adopted was born at the end of 2019, and in the spring of 2021 she lost her father, the noted abstract expressionist painter Harold Feist. “In my subjective way I found myself reflecting the tumult of the world,” she said. “Becoming a parent you have to burn off a former self, and feeling the death of a parent there’s the burning off of yourself as a child, and the songs reflect that very much.”
Feist pretty much grew up on stage after she plunged into the Calgary punk rock scene in her mid-teens, joining a succession of bands. She earned widespread acclaim with her second album, 2004’s “Let It Die,” an alluring blend of jazz chords, indie rock and supple bossa nova grooves. The project won the Canadian Juno Award for best alternative rock album and earned Feist the Juno for best new artist.
Shortlisted for the prestigious Polaris Music Prize, her 2007 follow up, “The Reminder,” received a similarly enthusiastic reception, garnering Feist another pair of Juno Awards. The album also spawned the popular single “1234,” which she reprised on a memorable “Sesame Street” guest appearance streamed more than 900 million times on YouTube.
Her 2011 album “Metals,” which she recorded in Big Sur, made brilliant use of Berkeley violinist Irene Sazer’s Real Vocal String Quartet. The project won the Polaris Music Prize, the first time the honor went to a female artist.
By the end of the decade, however, Feist had stepped off what she called “the conveyor belt” of touring and recording, coming to a place where concerns about death and life and community and connection rose to the fore. “Multitudes” seeks to put those questions into play in a several ways, including a roving video camera that projects the audience onto giant screens in real time.
At first the concept was that camera would collapse space between people still wary of crowds as they came out of pandemic isolation. But in the hands of Winnipeg video artist Colby Richardson the camera takes on a personality of its own, while flipping the usual concert dynamic “so that I’m the music and they’re the show,” Feist said.
This isn’t a ballgame jumbotron capturing people unawares to elicit a smile or a wave. In Richardson’s hands the camera takes on the persona of a guileless individual, “getting close to people, curious and shy, not invasive,” she said. “Colby is playing with some senses of illusion, swiping between the real and surreal.”
The show concludes with another radical shift in perspective, but there’s no need for spoilers. For Feist, the point is that “Multitudes” creates an environment in which interacting directly with audiences is almost unavoidable.
Removing boundaries starts with her songs, “illusions that I put a frame around, some elusive smoke put into a form that will keep its shape,” she said. “They’re clues about how to manage, and the craftsmanship involves removing many of my specifics, so others maybe can see themselves in the song.”
Contact Andrew Gilbert at jazzscribe@aol.com.
FEIST
Presents “Multitudes”
When: 7 and 9 p.m. May 5-7
Where: Memorial Auditorium, Stanford University
Tickets: $99-$200, live.stanford.edu