Feist Quotes

"I'm a Canadian. Outside Canada I carry the flag. Canadian nationalism isn't as insidious as American nationalism, though. It's good natured. It's all about maple syrup, not war."

"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."

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

"'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 haven't written many like that."

"Something that I think I figured out slowly was if you're playing a show and there's a chatter or there is, you know, a lot of noise - people talking or something - I was never the one whose instinct was to try to be louder than them."

"You're an enormous sponge and everything goes in there and you squeeze it out in songs, I guess. And if you're a painter, you squeeze them out on to a canvas."

"I made the first Feist album in '98. So at that point, it was my nickname. It was as far as with my circle of friends, and just felt more accurate than two names."

"For me, music is in the choice of what not to play as much as in what you've chosen to play."

"You never know what's going to play into what's worthy of getting encapsulated into a song."

"I live and die by puns."

"I need therapy after writing. It's like leaking blood from a stone. It's brutally difficult but worth it."

"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 get really scared about how the Internet is shifting and changing everyone's minds, and the way we see ourselves and interact online. Everything is so diluted now."

"I once looked over the shoulder of a friend on Facebook and it looked like hieroglyphs to me. There's merit online, of course, but social media gets super freaky. Imagine if three generations from now, people online have forgotten what date or day of the week it is."

"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."

"Opinions are like snowflakes, you know what I'm saying?"

"Commercialism isn't challenging creatively; it's only challenging in a stamina way."

"'Metals' has partly been about me regaining my self respect and I feel like I'm growing the muscles I want to grow again."

"I remember doing my mosaics or being in my little hiding place behind the couch snooping. I'd get bored sometimes, of course, but I think that's good for a kid, because it forces you to be creative."

"After 'Sesame Street,' it's a hyper-familiar world to me and I have this childlike ability to ignore the fact that I'm talking to scraps of cloth. Every country I go to, I see posters promoting the film in different languages. 'Los Muppets' - I love that!"

"I guess I found it useful to realise that everything is true at once, you know? You can pull back and say, 'Everything will be fine,' but you can also be in a situation and say, 'Not everything is going to be fine.'"

"When I wrote 'Mushaboom', I was living in the second verse, but I suddenly found myself in the first."

"As I get older, the present and the past shift and become the past and the future... A lot of it is a new awareness of time and life and the wheel of fortune crushing you and lifting you and crushing you and lifting you."

"Since I was 19, I've always gone where there was a reason to be. Maybe I'll be lucky and there'll be a reason to go somewhere tropical for a while."

"There's a crazy amount of goodwill, and I don't know where it came from, and I don't understand, but the more I pay attention to it, the more it's going to sting when it flips, so I think I'm almost subconsciously cultivating this naivety to it all."

"There's no mystery any more. So my instinct is to show very little, because there's much too much information about everyone, everywhere right now. Reality TV is an example of that."

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

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

"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."