Feist's upcoming album Metals is not a reaction to her previous effort The Reminder, but Feist did learn a few lessons playing her acclaimed album’s songs night after night. “On The Reminder’s ‘I Feel It All,’ to have a chorus, ‘Ooh I’ll be the one who’ll break my heart/I’ll be the one to hold the gun’— you sing that 300 times and eventually the universe listens. Okay, sure, we can do that for you. So this time I wanted to cast the spell 300 times saying something that’s more of an observation, or adages and morales that you find embroidered in junk shops. ‘A stitch in time saves nine’ or ‘pretty is as pretty does’. Good people can act badly. You can get things right after getting them very, very wrong. Maybe there’s a reason those things are chosen to pass down as a sort of folk wisdom…. they’re just the truths that people noted long enough to get out their embroidery needles.”

Metals’ songs range from low rumbling and moody ambiences to brutal and intense, as if it sonically maps the fog rolling in and the resulting cracking of thunder. “There’s a lot more chaos and movement and noise than I’ve had before,” Feist says. “I allowed for mistakes more than I ever have, which end up not being mistakes when you open things up and make room for them. It was about un-simplifying things and leaning on these masterful minds I have so much respect for."

Some of the results wound up being more intimate portraits of relationships, like “Get It Wrong, Get It Right,” which Feist describes as “a slideshow of a season in a place and the seasons between two people.” But more often she found herself gravitating to the universal. “It’s a calm declaration, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident…’” she muses. “After everything settles there’s really no blame to be laid in a lot of these situations. People are being their true selves, everybody is in their story trying to get to the next chapter. There are good times that are as good as the bad times are bad.”

Ultimately, Metals’ aesthetic has a deliberate patience, elemental wildness and natural beauty that echoes Feist’s new found observations on time. “I read a National Geographic article about soil and modern farming,” she says. “The point is for food to grow, the point isn’t for it to grow all at once and never grow again. Soil does its job, but unless you let it rest it can’t regenerate its own minerals and do the same thing again. You just have to let it lay there under the sun, dry out, get rained on and be still a little while.”



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US Tour Dates
Nov. 2nd - Brooklyn, NY - Howard Gilman Opera House @ BAM
Nov 4th- Chicago, IL - Riviera Theatre
Nov 6th - Atlanta, GA - Tabernacle
Nov 8th - Dallas, TX - Majestic Theatre
Nov 12th - Los Angeles, CA - The Wiltern
Nov 14th - San Francisco, CA - Warfield Theatre
Nov 16th - Portland, OR - Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall
Nov 17th - Seattle, WA - Moore Theatre