How do you measure the change inside of a year? The difference between then and now, same season, different circumstances. I’m writing now from the desk at my day job where I have been sitting for 40 hours a week for the past two years. This windowless room has housed the same body, over and over, indifferent to its changes. I take the same train line into the city every day, board with the same nameless faces, know where they get off, which ones are readers, which will put their feet up if there’s room for it, who has once offered a smile, who I’ve thought about knowing if such a thing were allowed. I wonder if they see me now, after so many days inside of months of seeing me, and think He looks like someone who’s lost something. I hardly think they notice me at all.
May 2023 was an incredibly upheaving time for me in ways that I still don’t quite have the language for. The people around me were splitting open, cracking into bits, demanding things of me that I did not know I was capable of. I put my mind and body through the wringer and came out not stronger but with a wider view of myself and my ability to navigate this world with a sense of integrity owed to my heart. That month imprinted on me righteously and with a conviction I haven’t quite known before. When May of this year, 2024, squeezed through the cool April earth, I began to feel the past year layer itself on top of this one and converge in a kaleidoscope of vivid memory and swollen emotion. Everywhere I turned, I found myself one year younger looking through the adrenaline eyes that kept me alert and in motion for that difficult month.
It was a grievous time to relive again, even through the diluted inaccuracies of human memory, but it reminded me the laughable incomprehensibility of time and aging and the separation of past selves from current selves. There are all these multitudes that we spend so much time denying. I am a layered being. Layered in time, experience, memory, earth, touch. I am every person I’ve ever been, maybe even all the people I will be. It’s daunting and freeing.
One of the memories that came back at me hard and uncomfortably welcome was from that May seeing band/artist Feist (here on Substack if you can even believe it) in concert touring her latest record Multitudes. I went with my partner at the time and their sister, both longtime Leslie Feist superfans but neither of whom had gotten the chance to see her live yet. I, on the other hand, had only recently started listening to Feist but was already enamored with her past few records. I didn’t know what I was in for but I don’t think anything could have prepared me for it anyway.
Walking into the venue, I’d already found myself somewhat confounded. The big elevated stage had been closed off with a massive, thick curtain and instead a smaller, circular stage had been placed in the center of the floor where the audience would gather. It was a stage not very tall, something anyone in the audience could easily climb on top of if they wanted to. Even being new to Feist’s music I knew she was a massive totem of the indie world, really the biggest an indie folk/rock artist can get without having to start opening for Taylor Swift. The idea of a timeless monolith like Leslie Feist, one of the forbearers of the entire twee genre, walking through the audience to get on a tiny stage and make sure we knew she was no bigger than the rest of us, well it seemed implausible. And, yet, that’s exactly what she did.
A projector lit up the gray curtain, streaming a confusing angle of Leslie Feist somewhere in the building but moving quickly, looking crouched over, nothing discernible but the folds of her dress and shifting hair. By the time you realized she was weaving through the crowd, making her way to the stage, and filming it all herself with a camera in hand, she was already climbing aboard. She placed the camera on the stage, peering up at her just like the rest of us so there was the Leslie on stage and behind her, being projected with just enough of a delay to make the whole thing a little bit trippy, the larger than life Leslie–a vision of the thing we expect of the performer, huge and spectacular.
It was all so dazzlingly intimate, and I do not want you to underestimate that word. It was of course intimate in the sense that it was just Leslie Feist and her acoustic guitar, moving through all the purposeful empty space with her voice and her fingerpicking that she so carefully weaves through her recorded music. But it was a big venue too and a woman at the center of a sea of expectant watchers cannot just play music in close proximity to the people and be called intimate. It was also deeply personal. She spoke between almost every song, asked questions of the crowd, did a quarter turn every so often so there was no front of the stage, no back of the stage, just constantly shifting perspective.
A few songs in, playing A Man Is Not His Song, she reached the bridge, the part in the recorded track where she sings, backed by no instrumentation, “A man is not his song” and then a backing chorus rises with “though we all wanna sing along.” On the first go around, when only the bravest souls joined the chorus, she told us to do it again–not scolding, not even insistent, just noting that we can and should. We genuinely do all wanna sing along. Why should we be scared to do so? She welcomed us in.
After a few songs to warm the room, she said that she wanted to hand off the live-streaming camera to someone in the crowd, have them do some recording improv for her while she played, so she asked for volunteers and offered it to a tall art-school looking guy. It was a big sacrifice to take on this responsibility of creating the backdrop to Feist’s gorgeous performance, to have to focus on adding to the art rather than getting to fully watch the show you paid for. He wasn’t doing anything too wild, filming the concertgoers' shoes, the patterns on clothes he found interesting, weaving through the bodies like Leslie had when she arrived. Meanwhile, she had turned to face my section of the crowd to play The Redwing, my uncontested favorite song off the last record. Her voice is so sharp and careful, it wraps you up like a swaddled baby and sings straight to your heart.
The endless weight of our lives / can be lifted up like wings, she crooned. These days were so heavy for me, a weight that seemed to push in from all sides in defiance of the laws of gravity. To picture it all rising, that it might rise with me–the utterly healing power that one song held for me then cannot be understated. She asked us in the audience to pull up pictures on our phones of a place or a thing that made us happy and light and the camera guy moved nimbly through the crowd projecting the pixelated images while Leslie sang of the California winter that lifted up her wings.
Then things started getting strange. Our new friend–his name was Colton (or was it Colby?)–was still recording but seemed to have tapped into the camera’s effects settings and was turning all the images fuzzy and then sharp and then melting into one another, creating trippy time delays. So many Leslies layering on top of one another and then swirling away into the ether. I should mention here that we had all taken an edible before this show so I was wide open to the sprawling imagery like a kid with a picture book. It was around then that the audience started whispering to each other, wondering, but sort of embarrassedly, how this random kid knew his way around the camera so well. But Leslie herself was such a commanding and inviting force, that we really were so focused on just her and the gravity of her voice.
And then, recorder in his hand, Colby disappeared somewhere dark, leaving the audience a bit lost. Somewhere in the haze, he came across a purse, reached inside and pulled out a diary. As Feist fell into Forever Before, a sparse but shimmering track about being a new mom, Colby lit the pages of this diary up with the camera and suddenly, the lyrics to the song are projected behind Leslie as she sings them.
I don’t think I can accurately describe witnessing this show unfold as a spectator. It was immersive, yes, which was very cool and refreshing, but it was all so carefully thought out with the intent of exciting us as an audience. Not just to surprise and confuse, but to genuinely bring out a sort of childlike giddiness in our eager grins. What’s gotta end for forever to begin? She asks in Forever Before. Oh fear, fearlessness. Following this song, she insisted that her and cameraman Colby did not know each other; this was all very strange to her as well. But as she went on digging into this acoustic set, it was clear that this guy had been a plant all along; though looking back on it, what unfolded happened so naturally, it doesn’t even quite feel like he was planted. It was nothing more than a thing that was supposed to happen, a show that flowed so beautifully it didn’t even matter if we’d been duped because it added to the mystique and the sheer miracle of being surprised just when you thought you knew everything.
So, I’m already at what I think is peak euphoria then. I’m already thinking ‘this is the best show I’ve ever been to’ and it’s genuinely not just because I’m still a little high. I feel my physical self being unlocked and a path through all of the layers of myself being laid out and each step is a chance to be kinder and more connected to parts of me I haven’t touched in years. I feel both the breadth of my life and only this present moment. Leslie Feist does this.
And then, she’s playing I Took All Of My Rings Off. This song has a really interesting and sort of jarring structure. It bobs and weaves and explodes and dies out just as quickly and I wondered how it would play out with only her voice and her acoustic guitar. While surreal, it’s true, she sang, climbing down from the stage, leaving the guitar behind–just her and the song’s eerie bridge which she used to cross the crowd to the curtain that’s been holding the projection of her this whole time. She sings: The gods laid down the whole of Earth in silence / Symmetry became the moving lines we call a circle.
And then the curtain drops, revealing the full band who has been waiting quietly for god knows how long, and they swell into the song’s epic declaration. The world's a ring! the stars are rings! the moon's a ring! the light got in! I don’t think I picked up my jaw from where it hung for at least the next three songs. Maybe I should have expected that the curtain was all a facade and there was always going to be a full band moment set against an impeccable backdrop but that was sort of the beauty and the purpose of the show–it allowed for and encouraged this sense of naivete. It asked you to indulge in only the thing that was happening and to suspend all expectations so that you might simply sit back and learn something, without reason to judge yourself.
My partner said after the show, “I feel like she just took me to school.” There was nothing infantilizing about it, either. Learning is ageless, but at a certain point we can get so stubborn and hard-headed, convinced we know everything, or rather we’re terrified to be found out for not knowing enough. But Leslie Feist, in just two hours, broke down those thick walls and made it okay to be a wide-eyed child who is so receptive to understanding, a baby being constantly born into a state of fearless wonder.
The rest of the show was a fever pitch. She ticked off all of the hits; My Moon My Man, Any Party, 1234, I Feel It All. The rest of the set was as raucous and explosive and wide as her discography’s sonic reach. But she wasn’t quite done with us. For the encore, she clambered back into the crowd, making sure that the whole thing returned to the place it began, down on the floor with the people opened wide to the awe. She wrapped herself in a green screen blanket, returned to godlike size on the big curtain and swirled with manufactured color. People spilled all around her, let their bodies give themselves over.
She closed the whole thing out as quiet as it had started. We will struggle with the truth, she hummed. Sometimes we don’t get to love who we are meant to. For all the crushing weight that May had brought, I came out on the other side at least hoping that this trying time would bring my partner and I closer once more. I had no concrete clue that they would not be mine for much longer. That the weight would inevitably cleave us. It feels like a premonition now, doesn’t it?
She just performed this song on Jimmy Kimmel last week, offering a little peek into the production of the live show with our old friend Colby leafing through her journal to project the lyrics behind her. Watching this in 2024 and sitting in the memory like a fortune that came true—well, it all collapsed for me. All of the years layered on top of one another, spun themselves into an untidy ring. Everything moves in circles, sometimes before we can see it.
How do you measure the change in a year? I work still in the same office, take the same train line, even live in the same apartment I once shared with my partner, but there are all these big and little pieces that have moved and shifted, disappeared and revealed, the cast altering the setting. Well, the truth is, even if I was somewhere else working a different job in a place that reminded me of nothing, the distance would all be the same. The layers of the body’s time are much closer than we can imagine, all nestled up against one another but not always accessible. Sometimes all we need is a good teacher to show us this. To show us how far we are from ourselves and how close we can be.
Sitting down to write this, I wondered, how can I write about a show from a year ago? Can I trust that much distance from the memory? Oh, but I’ve found I’m not far at all. I could still be there. I am still there. I’m 6 years old learning school can be cool for the first time and I’ve never been to a concert in my life. I’m 73 and my mouth is a wide O shaped by an old memory. I’m 26 and life feels impassable but there is music and it is making me lighter than I’ve ever imagined.
I still carry the weight of last May because it still lives inside of me. I am the woman on stage, the same size as you, and the improbable projection on the screen, bigger than it really is. Everything stays the same, really. Everything is irreparably changed, really. Both of these things are true.
All the time in the world / You can't begin to prepare / For forever before
The contradictions of time! Oh dear. We are all forever, aren’t we?
jw