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When singer-songwriter Leslie Feist appears onscreen, my eye is immediately drawn to the painting behind her.
Its a violent agglomeration of primary colors deep impastoed blues and glazes of red competing for the center.
I ask whether the piece is one of her fathers, the late abstract artist Harold Feist.
No, she says with a smile, this is my 2-year-olds.
Two years ago,Feistfaced one of the greatest challenges she has ever had.
Feists voice sounds direct and new here, as though it were giving birth to itself.
I was just reading some interviews with your dad.
It was always really helpful and interesting.
Plus I witnessed him facing the blank canvas my entire life until the day he died.
The last two weeks of his life were spent with his work hung in a gallery.
It was an ongoing commitment to that conversation.
I feel like what Ive been writing is starting to refer to its own vocabulary.
It has become a large enough body of work.
It has become safety in numbers.
You see it seasonally.
I had never considered myself on a parallel path to nature.
I wouldnt have known in my early 20s that I was in the spring of life.
The letter explained why I knew the circle was the mnemonic of my life.
Id begun to realize that nothing was permanent.
I felt the high-low of social pressure and feeling kind of alpha, then feeling super under someones heel.
In high school, Id see that the fates were always shifting.
My safety and standing were always changing.
But then you lose sight of the circle, like the dark side of the moon.
Everything has come back.
That circle anecdote makes me think of a lot of your songs.
There is a kind of word magic or aspirational future self.
Someone recently told me, Write songs that you feel youll need to grow into.
Dont write about the past.
That was running in the background of my subconscious the whole time I was writing this record.
It became a bigger container.
I was with a growing infant while I was writing these songs.
Lets carry on the circle analogy here.
I understood she was listening to my presence, the quality of my warmth.
I was the only one in the room listening to my words.
Ill give you it all!
Just let me work on this song for a second!
So I hadnt written quite so quickly or quite so much in such a short amount of time.
Usually, it takes me … whats the right word?
When you give endless permissiveness?
I would give myself the luxury of endless time.
So, almost every song has some kind of alternate tuning, as a way to trick my hands.
Id say the person that I needed to be to write those songs was very much a future self.
To the open heart, I received the blunt-force trauma of losing my dad.
Its not a place to put the solutions.
Its a way to phrase a question so that I can keep learning what the answer might be.
Theres a kind of yearning for the collective across the album.
We were like, Okay, the glockenspiel is maybe responsible for this twee moment.
So we moved toward baritone saxophone and synthesizers.
Maybe it was a little feeling like a pisshead.
Even the song 1234 felt conceptually radical, because it was so direct and unapologetically a Muppet-style sing-along.
So the wordtwee I retro-realized that was what was happening.
But I appreciate that moment.
It was a Zeitgeist of people feeling safety in primary colors or something.
I feel like Ive decided that I wanna get a little subterranean and maybe acknowledge my shadow self.
Last year, you departed a tour alongside Arcade Fire whenallegations concerning Win Butlerbegan to surface.
My team just said, Whatever you decide.
Were with you 100 percent.
What do you mean?!
I would say that moment might have been my boot camp for personal responsibility.
This interview has been edited and condensed
