How Feist grew to love ‘1234’ and more stories from her back catalog

In every musicians’ career, there are the songs that stand out among the rest. Perhaps it’s a song that changed everything for them, the song that they grew to love, or the song that was the hardest to write.

Those are the songs we want to learn more about on a new World Cafe feature called Backtracking. The premise is simple: We’ll give artists a long list of prompts they can choose from. Then, they’ll look back through their catalog and pick the song that fits best. They’ll tell us the stories behind them and perform them live.

In our inaugural Backtracking session, we’re excited to welcome Feist into the World Cafe studio. Still on the heels of her sixth studio album, Multitudes, the 14-time Juno Award-winning musician paid us a visit to share some stories of Multitude‘s making and special moments throughout her career.

For her Backtracking session, Feist chose four prompts:

• “A Song I Wrote During A Difficult Time”
• “A Song I Wrote At The Beginning of a Journey”
• “A Song That Changed Everything For Me”
• “A Song I’ve Grown To Love”

Tune in using the audio or video player above to learn more about which songs Feist hand-picked from her catalog.

This episode of World Cafe was produced and edited by Miguel Perez. Our senior producer is Kimberly Junod and our engineer is Chris Williams. Our programming and booking coordinator is Chelsea Johnson and our line producer is Will Loftus.