Last year, Feist released her sixth LP Multitudes, which was our Album Of The Week. Today, the indie-pop musician and Broken Social Scene member is celebrating 20 years of her breakthrough record Let It Die.

“I woke up today with a text from my old friend Chilly Gonzales telling me that today is the 20th anniversary of Let It Die being released (in France),” Leslie Feist wrote on Instagram. She continued:

These anniversaries function to create a giant set of scales in the sky, to compare one thing to another, to compare Then to Now.

I almost feel she, the previous me, was another person than who I am now, though I live in a life of her making, and so I feel attachment to her stories and the circuitous playout of her decisions.

This morning I was ghostlike, returning to old tableaus of that era in France, feeling the cast of characters and the hands that handed me so many of those decisions. A lot of those memories are as pixelated as these photos I found in the bowels of my hard drive.

An hour after Gonzo’s prompting I got another note, from an old friend in Paris, telling me that Jean-Philippe Allard died today.

Jean-Philippe was a monolith of music and signed me to Polydor France, a relationship that released every one of my albums and gave me the chance to survive this dice toss of an industry.

He was gentle and steady and always smiling and supportive. He brought Blossom Dearie vinyl to Studios Ferber after hearing Now At Last. He laughed backstage at the Olympia when I had just played 1234 as the first song in the set, and said, wide eyed, “One might not think that was a wise decision!”, and that was the extent of the president of my label giving me ‘notes’.

I was left alone, given the keys to the car and trusted. 20 years later, on the anniversary of the beginning of things for me, I’ll be thinking of him, and sending gratitude to him. My condolences to his family and a lifetime’s worth of musicians and colleagues.

In 2005, Let It Die won two Juno Awards for Best Alternative Album and Best New Artist. The album included the singles “Mushaboom” and “Inside And Out,” the latter of which was nominated as Single Of The Year at the 2006 Juno Awards. It was produced by Renaud Letang and released via Arts & Crafts.

 

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