Fun with Feist in Carré!

Last weekend, Leslie Feist was in Amsterdam performing in the Carré Theater to promote her new album Metals, which was released on October 4th. It was a stunning fall evening on the canals of Amsterdam, which were lit up by the bright, clear sky, following an unusually crisp sunny day – a good day to be here!  I didn’t realize it at the time, but this was not only her first time back in Amsterdam in quite a while, it was in fact the kickoff show of her new album tour after a three year break from show business. After a few more (already fully sold-out) shows in Europe, she will go on to tour the US and Canada starting early November.  

Seated in the beautiful classical hall, the start time came and went. Eventually we were told that the unnamed warm-up act would not perform due to problems with the overhead projector.  Suddenly, we all became extremely curious about this potentially extraordinary warm-up act -- what could possibly be so important about a malfunctioning beamer to force the cancellation of the performance? A mini Twitter frenzy ensued.  Being new to twitter myself, I was completely oblivious to what was happening at first. When my mother -- a seasoned Twitter-pro -- nudged me to say people were twittering about the concert, I checked out #Feist on my cell-phone. Unfortunately, nobody from either Carré or Feist’s team was tweeting, so the question just kept bouncing around.



After about an hour, Feist came on stage, looking hippy-casual with her long flowing hair, guitar in hand and band beside her. Her songs may have changed, but thankfully her voice has not! Her singing always causes me to spontaneously imagine warm, liquid honey, flowing downwards like a peaceful waterfall in a Japanese Zen garden, with the occasional violent burst of water with a rough, sandpapery edge. Annoyingly, the stage was back- lit in such a way that a particularly loud drumbeat would set off intense bright lights, like a 1000 megawatt camera flash, to shine painfully into our eyes, which were already fully accustomed to the dark. Even when I listen to the album now, particularly hard drum beats still cause me to flinch – a classic case of classical conditioning!

Much to our leading lady’s dismay, it seemed most of the crowd had indeed come to hear her old songs. This could not have been altogether unexpected, since everybody would have bought the tickets long before the new album had been released. “How disappointed you guys must be that I went on and wrote a new album,” she shouted playfully! As the requests were being shouted from the crowd (with the occasional inexplicable “come to Stockholm!” or “I just got dumped by my girlfriend!” in between), one person took pity and shouted “New Album!” She laughed at this and said mockingly, “play songs from the new album, whose name I don’t even know!”  

Later, while My Moon, My Man was getting going – clearly an old favorite in the room - a guy near the front stood up, visible only in silhouette against the stage lights, and started rocking out like there was no tomorrow! At first we giggled profusely – he did look quite ridiculous - but then slowly but surely a few more people stood up. Although we applauded his courage in principle, we kept hesitating, embarrassedly, and decided to wait until more of the crowd stood up during the next song, when we were absolutely certain nobody would be looking at us. I always wonder, what kind of person does it take, to set off a mass group movement like that? A far braver person than I, that’s for sure….

The evening ended with several encores, and more individuals embarrassed themselves when Feist called out for couples to come on stage and slow dance to Let It Die, another old favorite. For the final, final encore, the backup singers took the stage on their own, but were eventually joined by the rest of the band and to our delight, Feist sat down at the drums – very cool. As we went back out into the gorgeous Amsterdam night, I checked twitter one last time and burst out laughing: “beautiful version of my moonboots, my man,” and then “damn this autocorrect!!!”   


View of the Amstel River from outside Carré

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