The Argument: Feist’s singing is her not-so-secret weapon, and worthy of obsessing over

By Alec Scott | Photography by Jimmy Turrell

Just after Feist’s 2007 album The Reminder came out, I found myself driving to a weekend house party in Prince Edward County, accompanied by a friend with a sense of direction as unreliable as my own. No surprise: we got desperately lost. My friend turned the map around and around under the light like she’d never used one before.

“Let’s see what the next crossing is,” I said, irritation abundant in my voice.

As we drove on, the stereo started playing “The Limit to Your Love.” She turned it up. After a dramatic piano set-up, Feist began to sing: “There’s a limit to your love, like a waterfall in slow motion…” The eyes of some cows lit up as we rounded a curve. There were umpteen stars above us. And just like that, we forgot we were lost. Feist was singing to us—not about a minor trauma like arriving late for dinner, but about a real one: loving someone more, far more, than he or she loves you. It was sweet and clear and sad, and whenever I hear her sing it, I am back there in that car with my good friend.

What is it about her? Feist possesses an ethereal, intimate, listen-to-me voice. So do many of her indie rock colleagues. Unlike them, though, she hits the notes, never embroidering around them, never swooping into them. Her perfect pitch has helped her cross over from alt songstress to bona fide star.

But there’s more to it. Hers is a voice you root for: she injured it severely belting out punk songs early on in her career, and suffered from laryngitis for months. Sometimes you can hear that damage lurking. When her voice overcomes old wounds, when she moves from a wispy, diffident and not-trying-too-hard tone into undeniable richness—these are the moments that provide the double-take all good art should.

Her pipes can have an unsettling effect on veteran music writers. The Guardian’s Alexis Petridis once wrote that Feist was “blessed with a strange ability to sound cooingly seductive and oddly tough at the same time, [and] her voice has provoked a competition to see which rock critic can come up with the most purple description.” (He noted the efforts of two worthy contestants: one who described her voice as “carved steam,” and another who wrote that when she sings it sounds like “a satin bag full of crushed mirrors.”)

That was nearly four years ago, and the giddy words reflected the giddy times Feist was living through. The iPod campaign that featured her song “1234” had propelled her into the mainstream; The Reminder had landed four Grammy nominations and was on its way to a reported million-plus in sales around the world; she was making appearances on Saturday Night Live, the Late Show With David Letterman, The View and even Sesame Street, where she helped a group of fuzzy young monsters with their counting.

By the end of almost a year and a half of touring, however, Feist’s voice was starting to sound frayed, with far more rasp to it than usual. And the rest of her was showing signs of strain, too: the brightness to her persona, the adorably un-bohemian enthusiasm displayed in that Sesame Street cameo and in the choreography of her videos (in which she often comes off like someone performing at a high school assembly), her ability to get otherwise blasé hipsters to clap along and sing at her concerts—all of it seemed to be fading. Onstage, she became atypically drab, just another performer going through the motions of promoting an album.

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