Feist quotes

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

No matter who weaves in and out of your life, regardless of the quality of those deep friendships and familyships, I'm the only common denominator at this point who's been with me the whole time. And there's this sense of trying to make sense of that ultimate solitude. It's not a negative or even a positive. It's just a fact.

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

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

I've always been a bit wary of keyboards because there's an invisibility to it - you're not really hitting anything.

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

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.

I wrote the album [Metals] in the fall. In about four months, I went from zero to finished. It usually takes forever.

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

You can get anywhere on earth by falling asleep.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I don't think that village idea of actually knowing what you're contributing to the whole exists anymore.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I like being swept up in weather and observing it as something beautiful and giant. It makes you feel so minute. The only thing as big as that are your thoughts about it, which can expand exponentially while your physical self is just trapped. It's a pretty awesome feeling, in the original sense of the word.

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.

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.

So, I'm on Sesame Street, walking around with all these monsters, Elmo and his buddies, a whole bunch of chickens, a whole bunch of penguins and a number four dancing about. It was just pure joy, simple, ridiculous fun, stupid joy. There's no irony. Sesame Street is just a crazy great place to be.

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.

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

Instead of just looking back, whiplash-style, I can assume there's something else coming. Time just folds over itself, like origami.

Songwriting is a really fortunate skill to have to frame living and to find new ways to observe things you're going through.

I'm in the countryside outside of Paris, in a beautiful old manor house. The studio is in the basement, but we decided to set everything up in the old parlor and dining-room area so we can look at each other and (at) the sunshine coming through the stained-glass windows. It's pretty idyllic, and I think it's spoiling me. I'll have to go back to regular life after this.

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

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.

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.

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

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 doesnt feel familiar any more.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There are certain parts of chords that resolve things and tie a bow, and others that keep things open and unanswered.

It's amazing when you find a photo of your grandparents when they were young because it's black and white and the care that they put into their appearance back then was so grown up and specific to that era.

I'd hear some beautiful Sade or Kings Of Convenience ballad remixed in a club and I liked that these simple little songs seemed to be masquerading. They had put on superhero costumes, got all beefy, and here they were on the dancefloor. I was interested in that. I can't make electronic beats, so I leave it to the pros like Boys Noize and Chromeo.