Feist Quotes

#1. For me, the best part is people who watch the movie and tell me it inspired them to collaborate with their friend who's a photographer or filmmaker.

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#2. Be alone even when there's a million people around, because tomorrow it will be a different million people.

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#3. I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'

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#4. I'm a nostalgic person and I really like rehashing and digging around the mental trunks.

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#5. 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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#6. On the videos for '1234' and 'My Moon My Man' I wanted to make the songs visible. And, really, what way can you make sound visible other than good old naive dancing? I was working with a choreographer, but I'm not a dancer. Any notion of elegance is impossible with me.

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#7. Because there's just so much in a day now, I keep writing in much more abstract terms, like I don't try to write about what happened anymore. It would be impossible.

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#8. I haven't been living anywhere because I've been on tour for the past two years.

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#9. '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 haven't written many like that.

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#10. I live and die by puns.

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#11. I think that's more a reflection of the fact I've never been a student of any particular school of writing, or even listening.

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#12. I didn't really get London until I read Dickens. Then I was charmed to death by it.

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#13. I'd been touring for so long, seven years. For a year and a half I'd just been curious about what it was like not to tour. It's like if you were to lift a 100-pound barbell with your right arm for seven years, eventually you'd get really curious about what your left arm was capable of.

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#14. Something that I think I figured out slowly was if you're playing a show and there's a chatter or there is, you know, a lot of noise - people talking or something - I was never the one whose instinct was to try to be louder than them.

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#15. When I first played '1234' it was on stage in San Francisco at some kind of, like, sticky-floored club. And it felt like a punk song. I mean it's ridiculous to say that now, but it had that kind of, like, piercing straight melody. And then this fist-pumping ending, you know that pa-dap-pada.

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#16. 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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#17. There's real potency in metal. Metal fans love metal as if it's a nation they would fight for. It's not diluted by pop culture.

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#18. A year's a long time, but it also flickers past in no time at all.

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#19. You're an enormous sponge and everything goes in there and you squeeze it out in songs, I guess. And if you're a painter, you squeeze them out on to a canvas.

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#20. All the girls who have photos of them at parties, like, "Woo!" - that's what someone's going to see of their grandma.

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#21. Probably, on some subconscious level, I was motivated by not wanting to spoon-feed any similar flavors.

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#22. I need therapy after writing. It's like leaking blood from a stone. It's brutally difficult but worth it.

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#23. I remember doing my mosaics or being in my little hiding place behind the couch snooping. I'd get bored sometimes, of course, but I think that's good for a kid, because it forces you to be creative.

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#24. 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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#25. 'Metals' has partly been about me regaining my self respect and I feel like I'm growing the muscles I want to grow again.

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#26. Now, there's just so much imagery. Imagine what our grandkids are going to be able to see of us?

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#27. You can get anywhere on earth by falling asleep.

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#28. 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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#29. I once looked over the shoulder of a friend on Facebook and it looked like hieroglyphs to me. There's merit online, of course, but social media gets super freaky. Imagine if three generations from now, people online have forgotten what date or day of the week it is.

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#30. I get really scared about how the Internet is shifting and changing everyone's minds, and the way we see ourselves and interact online. Everything is so diluted now.

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#31. Since I was 19, I've always gone where there was a reason to be. Maybe I'll be lucky and there'll be a reason to go somewhere tropical for a while.

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#32. There's no mystery any more. So my instinct is to show very little, because there's much too much information about everyone, everywhere right now. Reality TV is an example of that.

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#33. The group-effort sound in recording of 'Sea Lion' is like, you really hear all the people in the room and hear them interlocking. There's a real freight-train energy of all these people at the same time playing.

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#34. I know I'm sane I don't give a care for the crown or the shield I will not protect you or happily yield To the one who makes me come undone

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#35. For me, music is in the choice of what not to play as much as in what you've chosen to play.

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#36. Commercialism isn't challenging creatively; it's only challenging in a stamina way.

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#37. I made the first Feist album in '98. So at that point, it was my nickname. It was as far as with my circle of friends, and just felt more accurate than two names.

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#38. 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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#39. I'm a Canadian. Outside Canada I carry the flag. Canadian nationalism isn't as insidious as American nationalism, though. It's good natured. It's all about maple syrup, not war.

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#40. If you keep bashing your head against the same wall, at some point you're going to fall over and be still for awhile.

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#41. When I wrote 'Mushaboom', I was living in the second verse, but I suddenly found myself in the first.

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#42. 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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#43. 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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#44. 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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#45. 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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#46. I never really lived outside of the city growing up, but I'm always looking in between the lines of the city, and I magnetize over to the green spots.

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#47. 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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#48. Surreal can be exciting and good, and it can be like living inside an alien landscape, and it can be completely interesting, or you can be alienated from your own life - inside your own life, it doesn't feel familiar any more.

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#49. I think I prefer the constant renewal. It's almost like sandpapering down any details or any contour of familiarities.

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#50. 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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#51. 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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#52. You never know what's going to play into what's worthy of getting encapsulated into a song.

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#53. I like being swept up in weather and observing it as something beautiful and giant.

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#54. The idea of having one ensemble do everything is what was on 'Sea Lion' and that's what I tried to make happen for 'Metals,' which is having five people in the room and all of us contributing equally to every arrangement and every song.

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#55. Everything becomes closer once you realize that the world is only as far away as a nap and a meal.

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#56. 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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#57. I wrote the album in the fall. In about four months, I went from zero to finished. It usually takes forever.

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#58. When I did '1,2,3,4' on 'Sesame Street' they'd rewritten the song and made it about counting. At first, I balked. I was like, 'Counting to four? That's where we're going with this?' Then they sent me appearances by other people like James Blunt doing 'You're Beautiful' as 'My Triangle.'

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#59. I said I'd stop for a year, which was inconceivable to me and everyone around me. It seemed like so long. But then, after that year, I looked up and I still hadn't gotten my land legs back at all.

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#60. After 'Sesame Street,' it's a hyper-familiar world to me and I have this childlike ability to ignore the fact that I'm talking to scraps of cloth. Every country I go to, I see posters promoting the film in different languages. 'Los Muppets' - I love that!

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#61. There's a crazy amount of goodwill, and I don't know where it came from, and I don't understand, but the more I pay attention to it, the more it's going to sting when it flips, so I think I'm almost subconsciously cultivating this naivety to it all.

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#62. 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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#63. 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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#64. I've not really spent much time in proper studios. The room itself where you're recording, and how you live while you're there is what appeals to me.

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#65. And of course, pop music is all about memorability and simplicity and positive messages and a little dash of joy.

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#66. It may be years until the day
My dreams will match up with my pay.

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#67. 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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#68. 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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#69. Opinions are like snowflakes, you know what I'm saying?

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#70. Any kind of anthemic song, for the most part, they're on the positive side of things. It's not hard to identify when a melody is just one degree too complicated or one degree too simple and where that line of pop memorability lies.

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#71. I was grateful to be away from all that familiarity, to have a chance to do something anonymously.

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#72. I really love watching the 70s live performance TV series "The Midnight Special" and "The Old Grey Whistle Test". Those are the best performances you've ever seen, and they sound incredible.

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#73. I find it pretty fascinating how humans keep gravitating towards these giant centers. I went to this walled medieval village in France this year, and it was truly the most crazy, beautiful, bizarre place I've ever been.

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#74. I was in a crazy, private, awesome bubble again, and that's when I started to write.

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#75. There's something about live recordings now that's too hi-fi.

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#76. As I get older, the present and the past shift and become the past and the future ... A lot of it is a new awareness of time and life and the wheel of fortune crushing you and lifting you and crushing you and lifting you.

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#77. You realize time isn't just a period that you tell a story within - it becomes a major character in the film. There is no beginning, middle, end because there is always stuff beginning and ending simultaneously.

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#78. There's nothing better than not knowing what's going to happen until you put the pieces together.

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#79. I know more than I knew before I didn't rest I didn't stop Did we fight or did we talk.

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