Pitchfork: Why are you taking on the idea of pleasure with this record?

Leslie Feist: The day the word “pleasure” sprung to my mind, it was a contrarian idea, because I was having too little of it at the time. I was experiencing things through a bit of a pall of feeling quite lost. But I realized I could try to pivot away from pain and put my weight on the other foot—it was the switch that gets flicked, and some new light is shed on a situation. It just dawned on me that I might have been feeding my own fire of exhaustion and overwhelmingness, because I was investing in it. I started to think that I actually could change things by deciding to change them, and that something as ephemeral as a feeling or a mood wasn’t as uncontrollable as the weather. There have been times when I don’t get to pick between depression and resiliency, but when you have the wherewithal to try, that’s when you get stronger.

Did that more positive approach work for you?

It’s currently up for debate. I’m definitely starting to understand that whatever you do, you get better at it—but that doesn’t mean you learn how to pole vault overnight. I used to wake up at the mercy of whatever I woke up with, and now less so. But every day is still a day.

Some people seem just fine, though, don’t they? There are certain people you say this stuff to, and they’re like, “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.” But others get it because they live that way a little bit, feeling like the wind is out of your sails. I remember talking about it with a friend of mine who doesn’t really doesn’t deal with this stuff, and he was like, “I don’t get it, like, I live in Berlin and in the winter it’s really brutal and I feel really shitty sometimes too.” And I was like, “OK, well imagine Berlin winter is inside your head—but it’s a sunny July morning, and you don’t have to do anything except weed your garden and make breakfast.” He was like, “Oh, that sucks!” A lot of people live that way. We don’t really name it.

What kind of hardships were you trying to get past at that time?

It was about wanting to make sure I was making another record because I needed to do it and not because it’s just what I’ve done so far. I didn’t want to think that 15-year-old me got to decide what I’ll do for the rest of my life because she just happened to be in a punk band. I was in my late 30s and I had that moment where I was like, “Can I open a hotel, or go back to school?”—not even go back, but go to school for the first time. I sat around waiting to be struck by lightning, to be compelled; it was a quiet reckoning of whether or not this was gonna be an authentic need in me. Eventually I realized that something new might come, but it’s not ever gonna replace this [musical] language that I’ve developed with myself. You can’t really just walk away from that, but I was willing to. That’s the point.

Did you seriously consider doing something else instead of music?

I built some stuff. There’s something about holding tools in your hand, it’s not like holding a melody in your head, where it’s like vapor. When you are tangibly making something, like a chair, you can either sit on it, or it collapses. There is no, “Do you like it?” I built a deck on my roof and a screen porch off of my cabin in the country, actually stretching screen on frames and friction fitting them into the holes. It was the most satisfying thing I’ve ever done.

Is that deck still standing?

Yeah! I always joke when proper workmen come to my house, like, “You might want to take some notes.” But that’s as close as I got to being this dilettante woodworker—and that’s not very close. A friend said, “Oh, could you build me a deck on my roof?” And I said, “No way! I can’t be responsible for someone else leaning on the fence!”

You know, it’s a double-edged sword being a musician. It can be a power if you perceive it that way, but you can also be incinerated by it. You have to live that shit—and then thank god there’s a place to put it. It’s not that I’m putting what I do into some lofty light, it’s literally what the day-to-day act of living is for anyone, if you decide to look at it that way.

Do you feel like having a more traditional, structured, 9-to-5 lifestyle would help tamp down those depressive feelings?

Maybe. But if that was the case, it would look pretty nasty too. Actually, that reminds me of this quote from this fantastic book called My Apprenticeships by the French writer-philosopher Colette. The context is that her first husband imprisoned her, kind of, which was a social norm of the early 20th century, when women couldn’t work. He was an author but she was a better author, so he literally locked her up for hours each day to write and then published her work under his own name. And then he banished her to this farm because he was having so many affairs, and she loves it out there. She’s not bitter. She’s in her 60s writing down the story of her 20s. I read this quote and thought, This is really good. I wrote it down: “Away from his presence I felt myself becoming once again a better person. That is to say better fitted to live upon my own resources, punctually and orderly, as though I already knew that discipline is the cure for every ill.” Meaning that while living out on this farm and collecting fruit all day and fixing the fence and writing and just keeping herself busy from dawn to dusk, she felt better, and I do know that to be the case. So while I don’t know that 9-to-5 would be the solution...

… maybe building a porch every once in a while helps.

Exactly. Or maybe some shelves. Do I need more shelves, because I need to build more shelves! Do you need some shelves?