‘Multitudes’ by Feist Review: An Intimate, Intricate Album

Canadian singer-songwriter Leslie Feist —she performs under her surname alone—has built a remarkable career on patience, consistency and creative freedom. Though she has experienced mainstream success, she never seemed like she was pursuing it, so her records are both timeless and personal. Since the 2004 release of her second album, “Let It Die,” which had a mix of originals and covers that ranged from indie rock to French pop to bossa nova to disco, she’s issued a new LP every few years, and all are at least very good.

In 2007, the buoyant singalong single “1234,” taken from “The Reminder,” was used in an iPod advertisement and became a Top 10 hit—this was the download era, and the album was the best-selling release on iTunes that year. But rather than follow that breakthrough with a soundalike single, she continued on her idiosyncratic path. Ms. Feist’s next two LPs, “Metals” (2011) and “Pleasure” (2017), sprinkled in lush orchestrations and intricate song structures and put slightly less emphasis on her voice, which moves easily between a whispered flutter and a cracked wail. Six years on, she returns with an exceptional new album, “Multitudes” (Interscope/Polydor), out now, which pivots sharply from the thicker production of its two predecessors and finds her uncovering an extra layer of intimacy.

The new record was born out of personal turmoil. Ms. Feist adopted a baby in 2019 and lived with her father and her child in a country home in Ontario. Two years later, her father died, and these events, along with the global upheaval of the Covid-19 pandemic, shaped the songs. She developed the new work further during a series of experimental shows in 2021 and 2022, some of which were tiny gatherings where the audience sat beside her on stage. That feeling of closeness defines “Multitudes”: She often sounds as though she’s singing inches away from the listener, and you can hear buzzes and squeaks as she frets her guitar.

The lyrics, many of which use the rhythms of the natural world to muse on human life and death, build on this feeling of shared space. The opening “In Lightning” finds her awed by the power of electricity flashing in the sky, and realizing that its animating force courses through her: “And if I’m frightened it’s just because / Of the power vested in me.” It begins the record on an explosive note, with a flash of layered voices and clattering drums that bring to mind Fiona Apple’s album “Fetch the Bolt Cutters,” but through most of the record volume is used as punctuation after extended passages of quiet.

“Forever Before,” the second track, like a great deal of “Multitudes,” is built mostly from just Ms. Feist’s voice and guitar. She contemplates the fact that we all ultimately face life alone—“Another day to be alone in / Another lake to throw a stone in”—and “Fear. . . . fearless. . . . oh fear. . . . fearlessness” constitutes the entire chorus. While her warm and conversational voice keeps the music accessible, the song structures are unusual and unfold with their own logic. Her acoustic-guitar style finds her seamlessly moving between fingerpicking and strumming, and she used unusual tunings when writing to free herself from familiarity, as if she were learning the instrument for the first time.

This is an unplugged record at its core, but the subtle production touches add a great deal. “Hiding Out in the Open” is a lovely ballad about all the ways we run from facing the truth about ourselves, including by making a life in performance. “But the mirror in another’s eyes / That’ll get you every time / There are a thousand different ways to hide,” she sings. It’s a gentle acoustic song filled with subtle touches—a distant synth hum, Ms. Feist’s voice multitracked to sound like an instrument—that lend a tint of emotion to specific phrases.

At times, Ms. Feist’s braided guitar lines, steeped in folk but inflected with jazz, recall the progressive work of Joni Mitchell in the late 1970s, when the elder singer set aside pop to pursue new avenues of expression. The lyrics of “I Took All of My Rings Off” have the quality of a parable—Ms. Feist removes the jewelry from her body and buries it in the ground, only to dig the adornments up and notice their elemental composition and the circle-of-life symbolism of their shape. She has a distinctive mode of vocal phrasing for each step in the song’s journey of discovery, and her singing is augmented with a gradually accruing production density—woodblock percussion, electric piano—as if to illustrate the
epiphany.

A couple of songs later in the record are more conventional. “Borrow Trouble” is a grand chamber-pop production with violin and saxophone helping to drive the simple chorus home, while “Martyr Moves” is more traditionally folky, with flute and recorder helping to outline the melody. But these more immediate songs are the exception on a record that is challenging and rewarding in equal measure. By the time we get to the closing “Song for Sad Friends,” Ms. Feist seems to have found a place of peace and acceptance. It’s a gorgeous exhale of a song that encourages us to carry on, and it ends “Multitudes” on a hopeful note. This deep into her life in music, Ms. Feist continues to develop and grow, and this record ranks as one of her best.

—Mr. Richardson is the Journal’s rock and pop music critic. Follow him on Twitter @MarkRichardson.