If you know Feist's music at all, even if only from her "1234" turn on Sesame Street or her early earworm about walking in knee-deep snow," Mushaboom," you will immediately recognize her on any of Multitudes' dozen tracks. The 200 Greatest Songs By 21st Century Women+ The 200 Greatest Songs By 21st Century Women+ On her sixth album, her barely adorned honesty - with her age and experience, her voice and faults, her letdowns and hopes - is consummate, the result of someone who has lived enough to have a story and worked enough to set it brilliantly to song. On just five albums since 1999, she has repeatedly tilled that terrain, looking for another way to sing some complicated emotional truth with admittedly mixed results. It is unequivocally the best album of her career, because it so clearly collects and examines the hardships, joys and takeaways of her 47 years, then shares them in ineffable songs stripped very nearly to their magnetic center.įeist long ago went through her artistic reinvention, stepping through a past of free-wheeling punk and transgressive chicanery (alongside her former roommate Peaches) into intimate acoustic eccentricity, like Laurel Canyon retrofit for some contemporary art museum. So it is for Leslie Feist, the Canadian singer-songwriter who has been making quizzical and inquisitive solo albums for a full quarter-century but has now arrived at her apogee, Multitudes. This remains especially true for women in a biz that often treats its artists like produce, marked with unwavering expiration dates. (The third common option for the truly old? The legacy assessment, reserved for someone we fear may not last much longer.) But a methodical refinement of what you've been doing for decades and are now doing better than ever is not exactly sexy and, in turn, not easily sellable. These are reminders that we might still become something else ourselves. Youth titillates, reminding us of something we might have been but can now only witness.Īfter all, if and when we praise artists who have aged out of the music industry's laughably tiny window of mainstream viability to reach, say, 40 or perhaps even 30, it is often because of some unseen stylistic reinvention or perhaps a comeback after a supposed senescence. Yes, it is totally intoxicating to believe you are experiencing culture's bleeding edge with every incoming tide pool of best new artists it is demoralizing, however, to remember that an entire industry exists to present them this way - the fresh and unblemished face of a still-innocent future - for someone else's profit. Consider the constant chatter about what is young and novel, as if real excitement, engagement and even insight can flow only from the hitherto unknown. The commercial machinations of the music industry detest stepwise maturation. Sara Melvin & Colby Richardson/Courtesy of the artist On her sixth album, Feist's barely adorned honesty is consummate, the result of someone who has lived enough to have a story and worked enough to set it brilliantly to song.
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