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Welcome to a new edition of the Best Music of All Time newsletter!
Today’s music pick is the latest from a Canadian indie music icon, featuring some of her best, most inquisitive songwriting.
Plenty of artists have released pointed self-examinations in the wake of the pandemic, with the main takeaway for listeners being some version of “it’s okay to not be okay.” However, few of those records have elevated that experience to the level of generational prognostication the way Feist’s Multitudes does. Over 12 tracks, the Canadian indie covers a lot of ground and exorcises many demons in the process. Before embarking on a slate of intimate 2021 shows, she’d become a mother and, tragically, lost her father during lockdown. As she told the Guardian, she was “[singing] myself through my grief.” She added: “The songs were new, the loss of [my father] was new, the role of being a mother was still new. I had to figure out how to show up for all these different faces I needed to wear.”
And wear them with the calm conviction of Leonard Cohen or Joni Mitchell. The raw realness of the performance is prioritized here, with arrangements and production by Mocky and Robbie Lackritz sometimes so sparse they border on still. Like a meditation tape, it’s folk music as chicken soup for the soul. But because there’s no fat on this album’s bones, each detail carries an even greater weight than it might in one of her earlier, more assertive records. Consider the gorgeous “Hiding Out in the Open,” which layers different vocal takes on top of one another to create this sense of being stuck in an echo chamber. This effect mirrors the lyrics of being forced to sit with a messy headspace. Then there’s the closing one-two punch of “Calling All the Gods” and “Song for Sad Friends,” which eschew any notions of self-pity or hopelessness, preferring to tie the narrative up with a sense of hope (”The Earth sustains all different kinds of people/Many are good and true”).
Having sat with this one for a while and given it multiple listens, I can safely say it gets better each time. It’s grown into one of my favorite indies of the year.
👉 Don’t forget to click the album image to stream the album on your favorite platform 👈