Muses: Feist at the Fillmore
I feel it all, I feel it all
I feel it all, I feel it all
The wings are wide, the wings are wide
Wild card in sight, wild card in sight
If there’s a soundtrack to my time living in San Francisco’s Hayes Valley, it’s Feist’s The Reminder. I’d walk to Van Ness Ave to catch Muni with my Ipod cued to ‘I Feel It All’ and be comforted by Leslie Feist’s ability to make heartbreak and thin-skin and confusion into music that one could skip to.
When The Reminder came out in 2007, I was a year-and-a-half into yet another attempt to start over in San Francisco after the death of my mom. In the fall of 2005, six months after her passing, I found a third-floor studio apartment in San Francisco whose one bay window overlooked the intersection of Hayes Street and Octavia Boulevard.
The Hayes Valley neighborhood was in the early days of its own revitalization (and upscale trajectory). A few days after I moved into my apartment, the city held ribbon-cutting ceremony at Octavia and Market to commemorate the opening of the newly finished roadway that replaced the old Central Freeway 16 years after the 1989 Earthquake severely damaged it. Earlier that same year, third-wave coffee pioneer Blue Bottle, opened its first brick-and-mortar location on Linden St., becoming an early-morning gathering spot for local residents (and soon, not-so-locals). Each morning, I scrounged up my change, stepped over the discarded needles that someone had left on the building’s front stoop, and walked across ‘Patricia’s Green,’ the new park that marked the terminus of Octavia Boulevard, to order a Gibraltar.
A few months after I moved into my small apartment, I walked across that same green and down another block to the Church of the Nativity on Fell Street, one of the few (if not only) with my guitar to play a song at my uncle’s funeral. When I moved in, I hadn’t realized that I was so close to the church my maternal grandparents had attended since they first arrived in the city in 1935. The Church of the Nativity was the one church in San Francisco that regularly held mass in Croatian and Slovenian. By the time I was living nearby, it had been a haven for Slavic immigrants for more than a century!
I was resistant to grief even as I couldn’t avoid it. I was trying to start over, to make the city my own, but everywhere I turned, it seemed, I was pulled back in time by my family’s ghosts or another death. Most of my songs were about loss despite my intentions (I sang ‘Adding Water to the Ashes’ at my uncle’s funeral). I passed my grandparents church on the way to shows at The Rickshaw Stop. As I rode the N-Judah to the beach, I thought of visiting my dad’s parents in the Avenues as a child.
Feist’s Reminder had a song for that, too”
So much present inside my present
Inside my present and so
So much past inside my present
Inside my present, inside my present so, so— ‘Past in Present.’
Feist’s latest record Multitudes is concerned with birth and death and the pandemic. I haven’t listened nearly as much as I did the The Reminder, but her newest songs segued perfectly into now-vintage material at The Fillmore on Tuesday. The rain was still coming down when we drove into the city for the show. I’d had the tickets for months but as we considered driving through the storm and the traffic, we came close to not going. I’m so glad we rallied.
After a riveting solo set accompanied by some mesmerizing video projections, Feist walked into the audience amid singing ‘I Took All of My Rings Off’ and did just that, placing two of her rings on the Fillmore’s sticky wooden floor. It was just one of a series of actions she took throughout the night to break down any walls between performer and audience. To start the night, she walked from the back of the venue, through the audience before taking the stage. After a song, she asked for audience participation to help with both her video projections. Early in her set, images from our cell phones — of the people, things and animals who got us through the pandemic — were projected onto the screen and everyone in attendance was instantly heart-centered as we all thought of and witnessed our beloveds flashing above the stage.
When Feist returned to the stage sans rings, the video screen raised to revealF her band. She had cast a spell, the vibe was high and now she was going to rock out! My life has changed, and changed again since, but as Feist and her band blasted into ‘My Moon My Man,’ I was transported back to Hayes Valley, cueing up my Ipod for my commute, feeling both sad and — with the help of a bunch of songs — hopeful.
Take it slow, take it easy on me
Shed some light, shed some light on me, please
Take it slow, take it easy on me
Shed some light, shed some light on me, please
When Feist started the song, she was in silhouette, the spotlight coming on as she began singing “shed some light…”. Anther perfect detail in her masterfully performed show, seamlessly choreographed from start to finish, telescoping from the acutely personal to the universal and back again, just like her songs do. Light had definitely been shed and we drove home feeling lit.