Multitudes
POLYDOR
“It’s a poor skill to get good at/Making wrong what’s all right”
LESLIE FEIST finished her first public performances of the music on Multitudes with her audience sitting rapt (if somewhat bewildered) on the stage and the singer playfully escaping through the back of the auditorium. A daunting trick to pull off, it was the Canadian singer-songwriter’s means of capping off the “egalitarian theatre experiment” that she concocted with Rob Sinclair – designer for equally unorthodox concerts by David Byrne and Peter Gabriel – and initially presented in Hamburg, Toronto and Ottawa in 2021 and then in Los Angeles and other US cities the following year.
Besides being a thrilling piece of stagecraft, this climactic reversal of the usual positions for performer and listener was an emblematic and the instantly hummable “1234” rather than 2011’s starker or 2017’s rougher-hewn , Feist’s hope has always been to create a greater closeness with whoever happens to be within earshot of her songs. If doing so requires some potentially radical approaches to her music’s shapes and forms, then so be it.
