Canadian songwriter Feist brought a multitude of visual trickery to The Fillmore this week while supporting her sixth studio album, Multitudes. The live Multitudes show has been honed and perfected over the past two years with international residencies spread across Hamburg, Ottowa, and Toronto’s Meridian Hall in 2021, and Denver, LA, Seattle and Stanford in 2022. The show was billed as Feist “in the round,” with the singer-songwriter entering through the crowd to take her place on the circular stage surrounded on all sides by adoring fans.
The visuals for the first half of the show were provided by a phone in Feist’s possession, projecting live (with a lag) onto a backdrop on stage. The awkward camera angle during the first few songs (held magnetically to the mic stand, pointing down at socks in sandled feet controlling a Boss loop pedal) helped showcase the artist’s control over her live-looping vocals. After a few “improvised” camera placements she relinquished camera duty to “audience member Colton,” who definitely wasn’t expert visual artist and filmmaker Colby Richardson doing his best amateur cameraman shaky-cam.
Feist | photos by Koof Ibi Umoren
While walking through the crowd, he projected textures and fabrics from audience members’ clothing, meandering views of the venue, and by request from Feist, people sharing their phone photos of their favorite ‘down the shore’ spots. Eventually the camera movements smoothed, and Colton’s camera started to resemble the visual imagery of Multitudes, present day Leslie Feist interacting with past versions of herself.
A conveniently-placed, and surprisingly unguarded purse lead Colton to “find” and deliver to Feist a mysterious black notebook, which she decided to read / recite a heartfelt monologue from before launching into an a capella version of “I Took All of My Rings Off” while moving through the crowd and making her way to the main stage to reveal a full band that joined her for the second half of the song and the rest for the show.
Along with bringing new tracks from Multitudes, Feist blessed the audience with new alternate versions of her classics, including a brooding version of her pop hit “1234,” and ended the show in the crowd with a green screen blanket singing “Love Who We Are Meant To.”