When I did '1,2,3,4' on 'Sesame Street' they'd rewritten the song and made it about counting. At first, I balked. I was like, 'Counting to four? That's where we're going with this?' Then they sent me appearances by other people like James Blunt doing...
The idea of having one ensemble do everything is what was on 'Sea Lion' and that's what I tried to make happen for 'Metals,' which is having five people in the room and all of us contributing equally to every arrangement and every song.
There's nothing better than not knowing what's going to happen until you put the pieces together.
When you say something or sing something enough times, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's almost like casting spells. I don't mean necessarily in the flighty, 'I'm going to go buy a cloak with a hood now' way.
I need therapy after writing. It's like leaking blood from a stone. It's brutally difficult but worth it.
If you keep bashing your head against the same wall, at some point you're going to fall over and be still for awhile.
Commercialism isn't challenging creatively; it's only challenging in a stamina way.
When I wrote 'Mushaboom', I was living in the second verse, but I suddenly found myself in the first.
Since I was 19, I've always gone where there was a reason to be. Maybe I'll be lucky and there'll be a reason to go somewhere tropical for a while.
You're an enormous sponge and everything goes in there and you squeeze it out in songs, I guess. And if you're a painter, you squeeze them out on to a canvas.
I made the first Feist album in '98. So at that point, it was my nickname. It was as far as with my circle of friends, and just felt more accurate than two names.
I get really scared about how the Internet is shifting and changing everyone's minds, and the way we see ourselves and interact online. Everything is so diluted now.
I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'
There's no mystery any more. So my instinct is to show very little, because there's much too much information about everyone, everywhere right now. Reality TV is an example of that.
I'd been touring for so long, seven years. For a year and a half I'd just been curious about what it was like not to tour. It's like if you were to lift a 100-pound barbell with your right arm for seven years, eventually you'd get really curious abou...
The group-effort sound in recording of 'Sea Lion' is like, you really hear all the people in the room and hear them interlocking. There's a real freight-train energy of all these people at the same time playing.
I've not really spent much time in proper studios. The room itself where you're recording, and how you live while you're there is what appeals to me.
'Metals' has partly been about me regaining my self respect and I feel like I'm growing the muscles I want to grow again.
I was a bar-back, which is the person who cleans the bathrooms at the end of the night in the bar, and a cook. I had kind of given up. I was into backing other people up. Music was something I just did on the side and I don't think I had the energy t...
And of course, pop music is all about memorability and simplicity and positive messages and a little dash of joy.
Music is pretty intimate stuff and I can only work with very few people: Gonzalez being one, Mocky being another and, on a completely different level, Broken Social Scene. With Broken Social Scene it's not one-on-one, it's a one-on-12. It's very heal...
