It’s not the most obvious starting point for a career characterised by folky indie – although the album does pay tribute to her teenage tastes. Growing up in Canada, she became deeply involved in the hardcore scene (“I’m in England here so I can’t really claim punk if it was the 90s in Calgary,” she laughs), where she spent her time playing in a band called Placebo (not that one), writing lyrics about her dreams, and singing so fiercely that at 18 she “blew pipes out” and was forced to take a break from performing. It’s not hard to imagine why the teen Feist may have disapproved – hers was a life spent in pursuit of extreme kicks. Photograph: Simone Cecchetti - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images ‘In my teens, I would have thought what a sellout to want a middle road’ … Feist. In my teens I would have thought what a sellout to want a middle road, but the middle road is a deeper road, because when you’re high and then you’re low and then you’re high and then you’re low, you’re just dipping your toe in each, you’re not ever really invested in either.” “Maybe that was on one of the days of I can’t be that low any more but I also don’t want to be high. “The high of falling in love with someone isn’t a desirable state for me any more”, she says – a development that inspired Pleasure’s stability anthem Get Not High, Get Not Low. This new mindset led her to stop pursuing pleasure in conventional ways. So the album in a way was me putting a pin in that pivot, this parallel positive and negative.” There’s going to be difficulties and victories every day. At the end of every day you talk about the highlight and the lowlight, the idea being that there’s both in every day. “I have good friends who play a game with their kids called highlights/lowlights. There’s some fantasy that’s implanted in us, for happiness or foreverness or togetherness.” Instead of life being a skywards trajectory towards everlasting joy, Feist realised that happiness was no longer a goal, but something that ebbed and flowed on a daily basis. “There’s a promise, if you achieve dot dot dot, then you will have dot dot dot. “When you’re younger, you just assume there’s a golden door that will open, and there’s some type of shining eternity,” she says of the mirage-like salvation society taunts us with. Yet Feist is more enlightening when she eventually opens up about the themes of happiness and fulfilment that informed Pleasure. “I have never heard the term noughties!” she grins. I ask whether she appreciates how evocative of the previous decade the likes of 1234 and Mushaboom sound now, but in true question-dodging style she responds with thoughts on my terminology. After she was propelled into ubiquity by her 2007 single 1234 – which famously soundtracked an iPod advert – she became the ultimate manic pixie dream girl of indie pop, musical shorthand for everything that was breathily twee about the mid-noughties: in interviews she was vague and giddy, in videos she did whimsical dance routines. Such gnomic behaviour is at least a fitting accompaniment to Feist’s kooky, beguiling and free-spirited music.
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