Torontopia: a term widely used to describe the collectivist music movement – spearheaded by the likes of Broken Social Scene, Metric, Hidden Cameras and Feist – that rose up in Canada during the early 2000s. A term used in books, articles, and on this very site, that was "thrown around downtown Toronto all the time", "came to symbolise this new urban-enthusiast mind set", and that Leslie Feist has literally never heard of."Toront…opia?!" she repeats back to me, delighted. "I've never even heard that! I had never… who are they deeming…" She flings her head back and laughs. "God, Kevin is gonna love that."Kevin Drew that is – often rumoured to be her partner, and the man responsible, alongside Brendan Canning, for co-founding Broken Social Scene at the turn of the century. Born both from necessity (there was never much money, so cramming multiple people into one recording studio space made sense) and an inherent culture of collaboration, the music collective's membership ranged from six to 19 at any given moment. Today, that era is seen as an important and inimitable time in Toronto; a load of artists poised between scrappy obscurity and global (if sometimes niche) success.We've got a good enough vantage point to look back at those years, perched as we are 155 metres in the air, at a restaurant in London's Sky Gardens. Feist had, her publicist tells me beforehand, requested to do the interview somewhere within nature, but this is England, so it's cloudy and drizzling outside. This vertiginous giant terrarium was the next best thing, and finds Feist back on the campaign trail promoting her fourth album, Pleasure (due out next Friday 28 April). She's used to the promo cycle by now, though she still finds the dynamic of interviews strange – more than once breaking off to dissect our encounter: "It's a different type of interaction and intimacy than would happen in normal life." She's fascinated, too, by how differently outsiders like me interpret her own story. Take Torontopia, for example. For her, it was "just my 20s".Read more on NOISEY.
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