Feist: Let It Die [ARTS & CRAFTS]

Why you'll love it

This Arts & Crafts LP comes with a glossy inner sleeve carrying photos, lyrics and credits. It won Juno Awards for Best Alternative Album and Best New Artist, and NOW Magazine ranked it No. 4 among the 50 best Toronto albums ever.

This edition

• Printed inner sleeve with lyrics

About the album

Before the iPod ad, before the Sesame Street counting song, Leslie Feist was a Calgary punk kid turned Broken Social Scene regular who decamped to Paris with her friend Chilly Gonzales. They cut Let It Die at Studios Ferber with engineer Renaud Letang, and what came back was a hushed, late-night record that sounds like a smoky club after everyone else has gone home.

The first half is her own songs: "Mushaboom" is a sunny daydream about a house in the country, "Gatekeeper" glows softly, and "One Evening" and the title track simmer. Then she turns interpreter, covering the Bee Gees' "Inside and Out" as a disco-tinged slow burn, St. Catharines' own Ron Sexsmith on "Secret Heart," Françoise Hardy on "L'Amour Ne Dure Pas Toujours" and the traditional "When I Was a Young Girl."

Rolling Stone heard the jazz tingle of Peggy Lee in her voice, and she's been a fixture in Canadian homes ever since. It's the kind of record that makes a modest apartment sound like it has much better furniture.

Also at Kops: more Feist on vinyl · browse CDN Pop / Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Arts & Crafts (cat# A&C 007), the 2004 album.