There is a version of Feist" class="artist-link">Leslie Feist that the rest of the world discovered through an iPod commercial, counting to four in a yellow dress, and there is the version that was always there — patient, strange, unhurried — waiting on The Reminder.
The album arrived in May 2007, and if you were paying attention, it felt less like a release than a slow burn. Feist had been orbiting the edges of something great for years: touring with Broken Social Scene, recording Let It Die in Paris with Gonzales, building a reputation as a performer who could make a room go very quiet. The Reminder is what happens when that reputation is finally earned in full.
The Room It Was Made In
Recording happened primarily at Hotel2Tango in Montréal, with Chilly Gonzales and Mocky producing alongside Feist herself. Hotel2Tango is the kind of studio where the room sounds like something — wood and plaster and the particular warmth of analogue gear that's been loved and used. Engineer Robbie Lackritz, who would become a long collaborator, had a hand in shaping the sound here: close-miked, present, never glossy.
The band tracked largely live off the floor. Jim Guthrie contributed. Members of Broken Social Scene drifted through. There's a reason the rhythm section breathes the way it does — these weren't session mercenaries brought in to fill parts. They were friends who knew when to stay out of the way.
Gonzales played piano throughout, and you can hear his classical training functioning as a kind of negative space — he plays fewer notes than you expect, which is the harder choice.
What the Songs Do
"My Moon My Man" opens the record and makes its intentions known immediately: a hand-clap groove borrowed from somewhere ancient, a melody that climbs without straining, Feist's voice sitting right up front in the mix with no place to hide. It's one of the best album openers of that decade. I'll stand behind that.
"1234" is not a lesser song because it sold. It's a remarkable piece of craft — the brass arrangement warm and slightly ramshackle, the lyric so simply constructed it sounds inevitable. The iPod ad didn't ruin it. If anything it funded the rest of her career, and we're better for it.
But the album earns its quiet moments too. "The Park" is essentially a conversation with an empty room. "Intuition" has a looseness to it, a willingness to let the arrangement wander, that feels genuinely risky in retrospect.
"Honey Honey" is the record at its most playful — a three-minute thing that sounds like it was recorded on a summer afternoon and didn't take long, which probably means it took forever to get right.
The final stretch, "The Limit to Your Love" into "Brandy Alexander" into the closing "How My Heart Behaves," settles into something close to melancholy without ever tipping into self-pity. Feist has always understood that emotional restraint is not emotional absence.
After the Kid Is in Bed
This is a late-night record. Not a dark-of-night record — not Nico or Nick Cave — but the kind that works best when the house has gone quiet and you've got something warm to drink and nowhere to be for a while.
Play it at moderate volume. Give it the whole room. The low end on "My Moon My Man" deserves to breathe. Lackritz mixed it to feel like something physical, not just something heard.
Feist made two albums after this one that I think are undervalued, but The Reminder is where she stood completely still and let everything come to her. That takes a kind of confidence that most people spend their whole careers trying to locate.