  Canadian singer-songwriter-musician Feist, whose disc The Reminder hits stores today, says her life is a whirlwind right now.
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Feist is trying mighty hard to ignore the overwhelming hype surrounding today's release of her third solo album, The Reminder.
"I think in a few months I'll probably have more perspective," says Feist, down the line from MTV's New York studios yesterday.
"I haven't read anything. And I think that's the only healthy way to go about this particular moment in time is not read anything. If what was coming, floating on the wind across to me, from my respected peers, was some kind of, 'Oh, it's been bad,' or something, I would probably torture myself by reading every word. But because I feel there is warmth to what I'm hearing, it kind of has given me a calm."
Walk past any newsstand right now, and you'll see the lovely face of the 31-year-old Calgary-raised, Toronto-based singer-songwriter-musician, adorning several magazine covers. Meanwhile, The New York Times put her on the cover of its Arts section a few Sundays ago, proclaiming her Canada's indie-rock girl of the moment.
"Except I'm on a major label," laughs Feist. "I like that I still get to be called indie-rock girl. It's kind of like I did my time or something."
To explain, Feist, who has previously collaborated with such Toronto indie royalty as Broken Social Scene, By Divine Right and Peaches, is signed to Universal worldwide, but is still on the indie label Arts & Crafts in Canada.
Either way, Feist says her life is definitely a whirlwind right now as The Reminder is released in every territory around the world more or less simultaneously.
"I'm trying to find a balance because I'm still of the mind where I feel grateful that anyone wants to ask questions about this record, but then at the end of the day I need to keep one tiny corner of my mind for myself," she says. "So, as the old adage goes -- it's a good problem to have."
When it came time to record The Reminder, the follow-up to her 2004 breakthrough disc, Let It Die, Feist knew she wanted to regroup with the same producer-keyboardist Chili Gonzalez and bandmates from her previous, seemingly never-ending tour.
She had been toying with the fact of planting herself on a cliffside house in Portugal, but instead ended up in a 10-bedroom mansion on the outskirts of Paris recording in what she describes as "a summer-camp feeling," for 21/2 weeks.
"I wanted to sleep where I worked and I wanted to not get in any kind of vehicle," says Feist. "I didn't want to see the world blurring at me through glass for even one moment, the whole time I was making the record, which worked. So Portugal was as remote as I could imagine -- and then I just worked backward to something more realistic."
