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.
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