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Imagine your overzealous high school English teacher fiddling with the overhead projector, except this time she's not diagramming sentences (shit, what's an indirect object pronoun again?), but instead employing paintbrushes and paper cutouts to produce a big-screen recreation of a whimsical forest scene, a flock of seagulls, or a skirted woman with shapely calves tapping her toes to the deft guitar strumming of a spry, real-life girl standing just a few feet away.
That button of a girl vying for your attention would be Leslie Feist, (a.k.a. Feist), the honey-voiced Canadian singer-songwriter who glided into the "Best Of" lists of nearly every major music publication last year -- and appeared in those jolly iPod ads you may have seen a few months ago when you were hoovering episodes of Project Runway.
Last night, Feist and her band mates pulled into New York City's Hammerstein Ballroom, planted themselves in front of their precious projections, and played to a packed house of adoring fans who weren't afraid to lend their own vocals to the show, as they cooed along to faves like "1234" and "Sea Lion Woman," Feist's superb Nina Simone cover. The petite songbird, wearing a red dress and tights and looking very Little Red Riding Hood -- charmed the audience, referring to the balcony above her as the Titanic passing in the night, while she and her players were mermaids frolicking in the waves.
She's a hopeless cheeseball, yes (at two points she performed only as a silhouette and at another had a crew member pepper her with paper snow), but Feist’s vocal delivery was about as impeccable live as it is on her 2007 stunner, The Reminder. Too many down-tempo numbers may have weighed down the set, but, overall, Feist demonstrated that she can take her seemingly effortless musicianship out of the studio and beef it up with a little relaxed goofiness, reminding us why we fell in love with her in the first place.
Get a little "Reminder" here with the her slinky clip for "My Moon My Man," in which Feist grooves out to a choreographed number on an airport conveyor belt:
-- JASON LAMPHIER
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