Feist Quotes
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Music is pretty intimate stuff and I can only work with very few people: Gonzalez being one, Mocky being another and, on a completely different level, Broken Social Scene. With Broken Social Scene its not one-on-one, its a one-on-12. Its very healthy, very comfortable, like a big pot luck supper among old friends.
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I had a guitar leaning against the wall and I'd squint at it. It was almost like a dog that had been kicked - I didn't think I had anything to offer it.
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When I'm in a city that's just clean, concrete lines, I get really short of breath and confused. It's much more interesting to me when nature is creeping back and tearing the mortar apart between the bricks.
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When I stopped touring, it was like trying to stop a bullet train or a giant lead ball falling from a 100 stories up - it's momentum and it doesn't just stop. I drew a line in the calendar and made it a brick wall and just stopped dead. There was no other way. It would've taken another 100 years to slow down slowly. I had to let myself imagine a calendar with no lines; when every single day is being predetermined six months in advance, there's no more fluidity to time.
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I've always been a bit wary of keyboards because there's an invisibility to it - you're not really hitting anything.
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I don't want to take photographs that I won't recognize as myself, and myself isn't necessarily just blankly staring at the lens.
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Be alone even when there's a million people around, because tomorrow it will be a different million people.
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I spent some time in France, visited Egypt and Mexico City. I hung out, biked around, planted some tomatoes. I did everything except wake up in a new town everyday. It was really boring. It's just life.
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I just went to Europe, spent a year traveling, and then I came home with a finished album and said, "Hey everyone I'm back!" I gave everyone their lighters from Luxembourg, gave them the postcards from Italy and Rome, then said, "Hey look, I made a record, too" and played it for them. The general reaction was shock, because it was so different from what they've known me to do.
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I was in a crazy, private, awesome bubble again, and that's when I started to write.
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I like being swept up in weather and observing it as something beautiful and giant.
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Musically, I didn't relate to Berlin. There seemed to be a lot of machine music made there - I don't think I saw a stringed instrument in two years.
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But that constant adjustment and adaptation to your new environment, all the variables are the same. There's always a promoter, there's always a rider, there's always a shower, and there's always a stage.
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You hit a guitar, you hit a note, you hit a drum, you hit an organ. Meat and potatoes. Simplicity. Not getting too caught up in little tweezers of perfection.
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You just never set roots; you take pleasure in simple conversations, because you know you're not going to have much more than that. It's very isolating, and that can be a good thing.
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I guess there are a lot of people out there that think they're supposed to define themselves in isolation, but that's not necessarily the case.
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Instead of just looking back, whiplash-style, I can assume there's something else coming. Time just folds over itself, like origami.
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Gatekeeper was sort of my first attempt to put a little bit of a frame and boundaries around songwriting, and try to figure out a way to approach it that had a sort of end result in mind. I havent written many like that.
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There are certain parts of chords that resolve things and tie a bow, and others that keep things open and unanswered.
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I was grateful to be away from all that familiarity, to have a chance to do something anonymously.
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I love storms and how the whole house shakes. When I was a kid, there would be lots of thunder and lightning storms, and they would knock the electricity out. We had this oil lantern that had been in my grandfather's homestead at the turn of the century, before there even was electricity. He'd bring it down off the top shelf, and we'd always play cards.
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The group-effort sound in recording of Sea Lion is like, you really hear all the people in the room and hear them interlocking. Theres a real freight-train energy of all these people at the same time playing.
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Well, there's just some universal truths in a way that I've just observed to be true. You read Voltaire. You read modern literature. Anywhere you go, there's these observations about romantic love and what it does people, and these rotten feelings that rarely are people meaning to do that to each other.
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If you calculate every single thing you could possibly need in your life, you would need no more than 200 people to keep all that afloat: a doctor, food, wine, cheese-eating friends, the person who makes paper, the shoemaker.
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Songwriting is a really fortunate skill to have to frame living and to find new ways to observe things you're going through.
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With music, I wasn't curious anymore. There was no dialogue. By the time I stopped, I knew it wasn't going to be gone forever, but it just wasn't the right time for me to care about that.
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I think I prefer the constant renewal. It's almost like sandpapering down any details or any contour of familiarities.
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I've never been drawn to concert DVDs because they take away the part of the equation that's most important to seeing a live show: getting jostled around and feeling the energy in the room. I definitely didn't want to make one of those.
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When you say something or sing something enough times, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It's almost like casting spells. I don't mean necessarily in the flighty, 'I'm going to go buy a cloak with a hood now' way.
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I would try to pick the guitar up sometimes, like, "Hey, remember me?" It was like reintroducing yourself to someone who's got a grudge.
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