The Great Canadian Road Trip…Song #59/250: 1-2-3-4 by Feist.

Leslie Feist has very quietly become one of Canada’s most successful singers of all time. She has won almost a dozen Juno Awards over the years, including two separate times for Album of the Year.  Feist was also nominated for the Grammy Award for Best New Artist in 2008, going against Taylor Swift, Paramore and eventual winner Amy Winehouse in a power-packed category that year. She has been a member of some of Canada’s most successful Indie bands such as By Divine Right and Broken Social Scene but is best known around the world for her outstanding solo career that has included hits such as “Mushaboom”, “My Moon, My Man”,”I Feel It All” and her biggest hit “1-2-3-4”. It was because of the song “1-2-3-4” that Feist got to do something that I would consider a dream gig…she got to rewrite the song to make it into a counting lesson on Sesame Street! Her Sesame Street video was one that I used in my classroom many times over the latter stages of my career. I simply love it! And, by extension, I am a great admirer of Leslie Feist. She possesses one of the loveliest and most unique voices on the Canadian music scene at present. She is also very generous with her talent and her time by being part of a larger network of musicians and actors who frequently appear in collaborative projects with each other onstage, in the studio and on screen. Leslie Feist is well regarded and super talented and I am pleased to present her to you here today. Here is the story of Leslie Feist: Canadian singer extraordinaire.

Leslie Feist was born in Amherst, Nova Scotia in 1976. Amherst is a special town for me and all other Cape Bretoners who have made the drive home from the oil fields of Alberta or from Ontario, as I have done many times. Amherst is the Nova Scotian town that sits immediately inside the Nova Scotia/New Brunswick border. As you enter Nova Scotia, you do so with a bit of pageantry as there is a big “Welcome Centre” located underneath a row of large Nova Scotian flags. There is often a bagpiper playing you a welcoming tune as well. All in all, after having driven for many hours, finally crossing into my home province is always a time for celebration. Having said that, I usually don’t stop in Amherst, content as I am to simply blow past it on the way to Cape Breton. Leslie Feist didn’t stay there very long either. Born to parents who were both artists, Feist moved to Saskatchewan as a young child with her siblings and her mother after her parents divorced. Growing up, Feist was always very creative and spent much of her time in Arts-related endeavours. In fact, as a pre-teen, she even managed to find herself in a dance ensemble that appeared in the opening ceremonies of the Calgary Winter Olympics in 1988.

Like many high school age kids, Feist formed a band. She entered into a battle of the bands competition and won top prize. That prize included a fifteen minute time slot on stage at a music festival in Calgary that was being headlined by The Ramones!  It would make for a great story if someone from The Ramones spotted her and took her under their wing but that didn’t happen. However, in a career-defining moment, she did meet someone who changed the course of her life. Also appearing on the bill of that music festival was another Canadian band called hHead. One of the members of hHead was a young man named Brendan Canning. Feist and Canning didn’t fall in love but they did become friends and musical partners. This partnership resulted in Feist leaving the Prairies and moving to Toronto with Canning. Feist’s connection with Brendan Canning opened the door to meeting and becoming involved with many musicians in the Toronto area. Initially Feist shared an apartment with a young woman named Merrill Nisker. Nisker would go on to adopt the stage name of Peaches. Peaches was a larger than life character who was ultra expressive when it came to donning costumes, singing provocatively and promoting causes related to the LGBTQ community long before that became a more commonplace thing for artists to do. While living with Peaches, Feist also met a talented pianist named Chilly Gonzales. Like Peaches, Chilly Gonzales wore his artistic expression on his sleeve. He was flamboyant and talented and charismatic and would come to play a pivotal role later on in launching Feist’s career as a solo artist. Not surprisingly, our relatively staid Canadian audiences didn’t know what to make of two colourful personalities such as Peaches and Chilly Gonzales. After a few years of not really making any headway in the local Toronto music scene, Peaches and Gonzales moved to Germany and set up shop in the much more cosmopolitan city of Berlin. Once there, both Peaches and Gonzales found audiences who were excited by the outrageous antics they peddled and both performers became quasi stars there. For Gonzales, he declared himself to be The President of the Berlin Underground. He released four different albums with a German record label and had a European disco-inspired hit with a song called “You Can Dance”. Peaches delivered a series of sexually explicit songs that ended up forming the track list for one of the most unique albums ever by a Canadian artist. The album was called The Teaches of Peaches and included her hit song “Lovertits”. There, with the two of them, was the seemingly more demure and reserved Leslie Feist. However, in life it is sometimes necessary for people to need louder, larger than life personalities in their corner in order for them to develop the belief in themselves needed to fly their own flag, as it were. After a few years in Germany, Feist ended up in Paris with Gonzales, who was well received there, too. He listened to a set of songs that Feist had written for herself but had never really done anything with, Gonzales thought there was something there and convinced Leslie Feist to allow him to help her record them. After a few tweaks and alterations, what emerged was her debut album called Monarch. A few years later, Gonzales, along with soon-to-be new musical partner Kevin Drew, helped her record and release an album called Let It Die. 

It was also around the time that Feist released Monarch that she returned to Toronto and reunited with old pal Brendan Canning. He introduced her to a friend of his named Kevin Drew, who was forming a band that went on to be known as Broken Social Scene. Feist was invited to join the band. Broken Social Scene had a dozen or so members who all came and went over time. BSS members included Feist, fellow singers Emily Haines (who would go on to front the very successful alternative band, Metric) and Amy Millan (who went on to become one of the co-lead singers of another successful Canadian alternative band out of Montreal called Stars). Kevin Drew did a lot of great work as one of the leaders of Broken Social Scene and is also a respected producer for others. He helped produce Gord Downie’s final two projects The Secret Path and Introduce Yerself  when Downie was dying from brain cancer. After Downie’s death, when it came time for The Tragically Hip to be honoured at the Juno Awards, it was Leslie Feist who stood in for Downie as the band sang “It’s a Good LIfe If You Don’t Weaken” at the recently renovated and reopened Massey Hall. That song was introduced by Gordon Lightfoot. 

In between all of that, Feist released an album called The Reminder. On that album was a song called “1-2-3-4”. The video for that song (which you shall see shortly in the links section below) contains a long choreographed dance number that Feist says was directly inspired from her performance at the Calgary Olympic Games. The song went viral when it was used to advertise iPods by Apple. Late night talk show host Stephen Colbert wanted to use the song as his campaign theme song when he announced a mock campaign for the U.S. presidency. All in all, “1-2-3-4” became a top ten charting hit around the world for Feist. It was voted as Single of the Year at the Juno Awards, with The Reminder being Album of the Year.  It was the success of  “1-2-3-4” that landed Feist at The Grammy Awards going head-to-head with Taylor Swift and Amy Winehouse. In TIME Magazine’s year end review issue, they listed “1-2-3-4” as the second best new song of the year, trailing only Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”. As mentioned previously, “1-2-3-4” also helped Feist land a job that she and I both call her dream job and that was being on Sesame Street. Overall, 2007 and 2008 was a very good time in the career of Leslie Feist.

In the time since then, she has released three more albums, appeared as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live, as well as releasing a documentary called Look What the Light Did Now which recounts the making of the album The Reminder. In addition to that, Feist has worked with anyone and everyone and continues to be one of the most sought-after collaboration partners in the country. One of the most exciting things, at least for me, is the fact that Leslie Feist is only just reaching the midpoint of her career. I am hopeful that she keeps at it and has many more successful years ahead of her. I can’t wait to hear what she releases next. I am certain that it will sound wonderful.

The link to the official website for Leslie Feist can be found here.

The link to the video for the song “1-2-3-4” by Feist can be found here. ***The lyrics version is here.

The link to the video for the song “1-2-3-4” by Feist as it appeared on the TV show Sesame Street can be found here. 

The link to the video for the song “Lover’s Spit” by Broken Social Scene (as sung by Leslie Feist and Kevin Drew” can be found here. *There is no suitable lyrics version, only karaoke.

The link to the video for the song “It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken” by The Tragically Hip, as sung by Feist at the Juno Awards can be found here. *The lyric version by The Tragically Hip can be found here.

The link to the video trailer for the documentary Look What the Light Did Now can be found here.

The official websites for Peaches, Chilly Gonzales, Broken Social Scene, Metric and Stars can be found here, here, here, here and here.   

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