Many artists awoke this morning to excited phone calls or text messages from friends and associates, offering congratulations on Grammy nominations.
But singer/songwriter Leslie Feist had a much more formidable route to good news: she was driving through a Canadian blizzard when word of Grammy glory started pouring in.
“I got a text saying I’d been nominated for one,” she tells Billboard.com. “I was driving along in absolute shock in the middle of this blizzard, trying not to run off the road. Then I lost cell phone range. When I got to my house, my tour manager called me. He said, ‘One would be crazy but four … and I said, ‘What do you mean, four!’ I had only gotten the one text. It has been that kind of day.”
Feist’s nominations are for best new artist, best female pop vocal performance and best short form music video (for “1234”) and best pop vocal album for “The Reminder” (Cherry Tree/Interscope).
And although she’s been an indie darling since the 2004 release of her album “Let It Die,” the artist broke through to a mainstream audience in recent weeks thanks to an iPod commercial featuring “1234.”
“I did have my life flash before my eyes when this first happened, because it was all anybody wanted to talk about,” she admits. “I didn’t get to talk about music anymore.”
But at Feist’s concerts, “all of the sudden people were singing along more so than before. I realized, it’s five minutes out of an hour-and-a-half. If they leave and never come back, that’s fine. But hopefully it shows them some other dimensions.”
Now on a break from extensive touring in support of “The Reminder,” Feist is looking ahead to a jam-packed 2008 schedule, which she says was already set before today’s news. “I’ve done all this touring because I want to,” she says. “We’re on a roll. We’ve caught a whiff of what we’ve wanted to be doing.”
