Feist recalls formative years in on eve of Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame induction

'It has made me turn my head and look directly at the thing I have not been looking directly at my whole life'

Published Sep 25, 2026  •  Last updated 12 minutes ago  •  6 minute read

Leslie Feist is being inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame. Photo by Burak Cingi

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The turning point for Leslie Feist came in the halls of Calgary’s Bishop Carroll High School when she was 15.

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It was 1991, and she was approached by two students, Toby Connolly and Elescia Eisler, who were planning to form a punk band. They didn’t know Feist very well, but had noticed she attended the same all-ages community hall shows they did. On weekends, all three would end up watching bands such as Wagbeard, Forbidden Dimension, Chixdiggit and The Primrods.

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Connolly and Eisler, who played drums and bass, had also noticed that Feist belonged to the school choir at the time. Since she sang and seemed to have good taste in music, they asked her to be their vocalist.

Placebo was born.

“If they hadn’t said that to me that day, I have no idea,” says Feist, in an interview with Postmedia from her home in Toronto. “It’s like that movie Sliding Doors. If I had turned left and decided ‘I’ll go into the bio lab for a second,’ that may have never happened. Unfortunately, there are recordings, so you can hear that we were really a bunch of teenagers just pressing the distortion pedal on and off. But, in my memory, it was my identifying, central sense of self. I think high school can be so impossible unless you have some idea of who you might be in the cast of characters. It pulled me through years where I think identity can be difficult to find.”

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Placebo became all-encompassing for Feist, who dove full-on into “all of the organizational, logistical, left-brain, right-brain stuff that’s a part of being in an indie band.”

“We were postering for our own shows and calling and booking, assuming alternate personalities to try and sound official to try and get a gig for Placebo and that sort of thing,” she says. “We were going around town on our bikes and giving tapes out, trying to get shows. All that stuff was really good and hard work in terms of a musical boot camp.”

Placebo went through all the rites of passage of a fiercely DIY indie band. They slept on the floors of strangers’ homes during tours and would enter new cities and drive around “until we saw someone cool and would ask ‘Hey, do you know where we could try and get a gig tonight?’ ”

“We made it all the way to Montreal and Vancouver, and everything in between, touring when I was probably 17, 18,” she says. “I am so glad that Toby and Elescia handed me what turned out to be my life.”

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Placebo has secured a near-mythical presence in the annals of Calgary’s indie scene.

Much of that is due to the impressive career it spawned. On Sept. 26, Feist will be inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame alongside the Tragically Hip, Loverboy’s Mike Reno and Paul Dean, and Roch Voisine during a star-studded event at Massey Hall. Feist has become an international star since those early days in Calgary. She has released six solo albums, won 14 Junos, four Grammy nominations, a Polaris Prize and appeared on Saturday Night Live and Sesame Street.

After Calgary, the next turning point for Feist came in 1996. Placebo was responsible for this as well, at least indirectly. She moved to Toronto, where she would eventually co-found Broken Social Scene and play with By Divine Right and Royal City. The reason she went east in the first place, however, was because she had injured her voice after years of belting out punk tunes: “I screamed until I was essentially bleeding from the throat.” After returning to Calgary after a tour, she realized her voice was shot.

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Her uncle, the late Dan Achen of the band Junkhouse, told her about a Toronto-based clinic that specialized in health care for musicians. She was given a “prescription of silence” and told she couldn’t sing for a year.

While Feist had written her own lyrics and melodies for Placebo songs, she had never written by herself before. Her father had given her a four-track cassette recorder. She eventually moved into the basement of his Toronto house, taught herself guitar and began recording experimental “noise sculptures.”

“They certainly were not music,” she says. “I started making these constructions that weren’t songs.”

Still, it changed her approach to singing, and eventually she began establishing her voice as a songwriter as well. While playing with other Toronto acts, she released her solo debut Monarch in 1999. Her 2004 sophomore record, Let It Die, became a breakthrough that earned three Juno nominations. That led to 2007’s The Reminder, a worldwide critical and commercial success that catapulted her to superstardom. Her fourth album, Metals, followed in 2011, and Feist became the first female artist to win the Polaris Music Prize. Her most recent album, Multitudes, came out in 2023.

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Nevertheless, being inducted into the Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame came “completely out of left field,” she says. “It caught me entirely by surprise.”

It led her to contemplate her process as a writer, something she hadn’t analyzed too closely in the past.

“It has made me turn my head and look directly at the thing I have not been looking directly at my whole life,” Feist says. “You know when you sense something in the corner of your eye, but if you look at it, it disappears? It’s that idea of the presence of the phantom in the room, and if you look right at it, it evaporates? Songwriting has never been something I felt I had a clear process for or any kind of regular, every day, play-by-play plan or anything. It was just the most intuitive, and it remains a very intuitive, private process that I’ve never had to think clearly about until now. It’s made me consider what it is I’m doing.”

‘I think it will be pretty relaxing’

In 2025, Feist sent the haunting ballad What Happens Now to her old band, Broken Social Scene. She hadn’t meant it to be a BSS song. It was just a voice demo she had recorded and intended as a solo song. They built the song around her voice memo, and it landed on their 2026 release, Remember the Humans. She also co-wrote two songs — My Guy and Moondance — and provides harmonies on English singer-songwriter Sam Smith’s recent release, Hazel Eyes.

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Feist remains in demand as a collaborator and continues to be an influence for younger artists. On Sept. 26, past collaborator Jeff Tweedy of Wilco — Feist duetted on the band’s 2009 song You and I — singer-songwriter Charlotte Cornfield and American producer and songwriter FINNEAS will pay tribute to the singer by performing her songs. FINNEAS, who has produced tracks for his sister Billie Eilish and Selena Gomez, has named Feist as one of his major influences. She says she expects the experience of listening to them interpret her songs will be touching.

“I think it will be pretty relaxing, because I won’t have to do anything except sit there and hear these interpretations,” she says with a laugh. “Tweedy is brilliant. Charlotte Cornfield is brilliant. FINNEAS is one of the best producers and songwriters on earth. Even on the Internet, if people cover a song, I watch their hands and say, ‘What are they doing there? That’s not what I do, but it sounds so cool.’ Their voice or guitar is different, and I can learn from them in a strange way. It’s this cyclical experience when people cover your songs. James Blake covered a song of mine (The Limit to Your Love) that was almost a complete reinterpretation such that he owns the song more than I ever did. I love that. A song gets to have a whole other life. I’m only tickled pink to hear what’s going to happen.”

The Canadian Songwriters Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony takes place Sept. 26 at Massey Hall. It will also be live-streamed globally on the Amazon Music Twitch channel and on Prime Video in Canada.

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