For more than two years, Calgary native/Paris resident Leslie Feist has been touring behind her debut Cherry Tree/Interscope album, “Let It Die.” The artist, who also moonlights in Broken Social Scene, will kick off a fresh round of dates tonight (Jan. 24) in Ann Arbor, Mich., with support from Jason Collett.
“I guess it keeps renewing itself in the way that I’m living it because I’ve been on tour for so long and go from being in a country where it’s been out for a long time to a country where it’s brand new,” the artist tells Billboard.com. “It’s kind of interesting. It’s like dating your husband.”
First released in France in early 2004 before hitting stores in Canada a few months later and eventually in the United States nearly a year after its debut, “Let It Die” is a modern amalgamation of folk and indie rock with elements of jazz, pop and bossa nova mixed in.
For most of 2005, Feist has been touring the States as a solo artist opening for Rilo Kiley, Kings Of Convenience and British Sea Power. She also drafted a backing band for an opening stint with Broken Social Scene, with whom she performed this past weekend in Toronto. The group also shot a video with director Micah Meisner for its single “7/4 (Shoreline),” which prominently features Feist.
After this new round of touring, the artist will head to Berlin and Paris to begin recording her next album, which could be out by the end of the year. Work will continue while she’s on he road in March, amid festival appearances at Los Angeles’ Everything Becomes Eclectic and San Francisco’s Noise Pop.
Plenty of new tracks are already in the mix, including “Brandy Alexander,” which was co-written with Ron Sexsmith (Feist covered Sexsmith’s “Secret Heart” on “Let It Die”). Feist says more than half of her current set features new material that most likely will end up on the new album. Songs such as “Intuition” and “Anti-Pioneer” define the musical direction in which she’s headed, acting more as the completion of “Let It Die” than a digression.
“By a fluke of circumstances, ‘Let It Die’ ended up being half originals and half covers,” Feist says. “And the originals are the ones I found some real threads to hold onto over the last two years of touring and they have never fallen off by the wayside and ended up on the set list floor. And so probably songs like ‘Let It Die’ and ‘Gatekeeper’ and ‘Mushaboom’ — the ones that I wrote — I think have similarities with what is destined to come for the next record.”
