A Feisty birthday present

Here's the Feist playlist I created for my friend Heidi on the occasion of her birthday. Heidi, I hope you can download the image below and insert into the CD tray.

I wanted to remain true to Feist's albums, but because I ran out of room on the disc, I re-ordered the track listing of her current album, which I still am not sure will live up to expectations (Though "Honey Honey" -- a track I omitted here -- is slowly revealing its offbeat bluesy charm as a part the somewhat successful new direction of this album... but truthfully I think overall there are many jammy, imprecise, and seemingly thrown-together songs that fail to find their spark and simple focused deliveries as witnessed in the vocals on "When I Was a Young Girl" or the measured production values of "Leisure Suite".)

It's clearly hard to match a strong debut with pop gems like "One Evening" and "Secret Heart" not to mention the title track, the album's lead singles and deft handling of French chanson. In any case, from that debut album I happened to come across some bonus tracks in my dad's collection at just the right moment and so I ended up with a substantially different tracklisting for Let It Die as well. I think the programming of both albums is improved this way!

I guess the real way to we be true to an artist is by buying the albums and giving them as birthday gifts to your friends. But I think that's what Heidi might end up doing herself actually, as a result of the playlist I made for her. The Reminder on sale in stores now has additional tracks and some interesting album artwork. I know what I did is copyright infringement but I don't think for a second it's not promotional at the same time and might stimulate a purchase where there might never had been one.

Speaking of promotion...

Picking up from where the last post left off (and from what I mentioned to Heidi on the weekend), Dragonette is a really great Canadian band with a slight problem getting themselves off the ground in the UK, where they are based. The buzz on "Competition" is stratospheric and it's on the album Galore to be released in a couple days. While no domestic release is evident at the moment, I finally heard "I Get Around" on the radio while in a Montreal magazine shop this morning, so obviously that is going to change. So watch for the album release near you... it's worth getting for what I've already heard and read here and here.