You're listening to Song Exploder,
where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made.
I'm Rishikesh Hirway.
Feist is a singer and songwriter from Canada.
She put out her first solo album in 1999.
She's won 11 Juno Awards, including two for Artist of the Year, and she has four Grammy nominations.
She's also been a member of the band Broken Social Scene since 2001.
In April 2023, she put out her sixth album, Multitudes.
And for this episode, I talked to her about how she made the opening song from that album.
It's called Enlightening.
I am Leslie Feist.
Just inside the Rockies, there's a place called Banff, and there's a huge center for the arts there.
And there's this artist residency program where they'll just give you a cabin in the middle of the woods.
And I was offered one of those retreats, which was 10 days, and I thought, oh, this is fantastic.
I'm going to just try to get my wits about me in terms of what I was working on.
where I was faced with these uncomfortable thoughts.
I started to feel that there was just a tendency that I would receive a curveball,
some sort of input from a relationship or from a circumstance.
And no matter what came at me,
I tended to essentially absorb it as negative information instead of positive.