Leslie Feist did not know what to expect when she was first approached about lending her music to the Crave series Heated Rivalry. While she is no stranger to receiving these types of requests to licence her songs, there was something about this show that stood out from the rest.
"I do get asked to approve the uses of [my] songs, and so things will get sent to you with a very brief description and sometimes a general synopsis of the show and a tiny clip, if they can send it," she tells iHeartRadio Canada's Ruby Carr. "So often there's very little to go on and you just think, 'Well, yeah, that sounds great.' So I remember [this one] being a love story hockey. And I just thought, 'What could this possibly be?'"
Like the many artists whose music appears in the show and on the soundtrack to the Canadian-made hockey romance, Feist didn't exactly set her expectations high. "Like, no one could have seen it coming, right?" she says.
But as with fellow artists Harrison and Peter Peter, the Toronto-based musician has seen her music gain worldwide notoriety and her fanbase grow exponentially, thanks to its inclusion in Heated Rivalry. Two songs from her 2007 album, The Reminder - "My Moon My Man" and "Sealion" - were selected for use by the show's music supervisor Scotty Taylor, most notably in a key montage that had everyone talking.
"I mean, who doesn't love a montage?" she says. "It's like you hit all the plot points. Here you're moving the story forward. It's daytime laughter, nighttime hotness, more daytime laughter. Then they're on the ice, they're fighting, then they're making up. It's like all that you need to know that has passed over the course of, I think, a couple of years. They're using the song to cover a lot of time. [But] I was into it."
In watching said montage, Feist noticed that the producers had to extend "My Moon My Man" beyond it's original three-minute and 48-second length to suit the scene. "It was also longer than the song is," she points out. "They edited it so it was the song and then they did all these stealthy edits. I think unless you're me, you might not notice that it's like two minutes longer than the song."
She admits that even though she was aware that her music had been featured in the show, she didn't rush to watch.
"It kind of came to me slowly through friends sending me videos of their feet on an ottoman with the projection of the show. And then someone else is with them smiling while [my song is playing]," she explains. "So I heard about it a lot before. It didn't cross my radar until people were like, 'You gotta watch this!" And I kind of started to understand that it was doing its thing."
This type of publicity is nothing new for Feist. In the late 2000s her Grammy-nominated and JUNO-winning hit song "1234" was everywhere, all around the globe. It gained phenomenal popularity after appearing in an iPod nano ad, in shows like The Office and Inbetweeners, and even scored her a guest appearance on Sesame Street, in which she sang it along with Elmo and friends.
"I suppose there are these moments where a sort of zeitgeist occurs and it's like getting struck by lightning," she says. "It usually doesn't happen more than once or twice. So this was a really enjoyable one that my manager and I were joking [about] because I had to do literally nothing. Whereas for "1234," there was Sesame Street, which was one of my best memories ever, going and shooting that with all of those Muppeteers. It was incredible. Like pure joy of childhood being satisfied as a grown-up. I mean, how does that happen?"
While she calls the response to Heated Rivalry and the discovery of her music through it "really incredible," like the rest of the Loons out there, she confesses, "I'm excited just for season two coming."
About that. Feist has an idea of what she thinks needs to happen when Heated Rivalry returns for its second season. So listen up, Jacob Tierney:
"A friend of mine had the world's best idea because she noticed that they used a lot of different versions of songs," she says. "There'd be the original [but then] now they're in the club and there's some sort of dance remix of the song. I'll tell you the plot so that they can use it, okay? Because I don't know how else to get it to them."
"So Shane owned that condo, but he mentioned that he had the one next door too, right?" she continues. "Now they've bumped the wall out and Ilya has his own apartment and Shane has his own, but there's an open wall. And so you start in the morning and there's this... Broken Social Scene is another band I'm in, and there's a song from years ago called 'Lover's Spit'. [It's] sort of a romantic, slow jam, very beautiful, sexy love song. And so, you know, they're brushing their teeth, they're, you know, and then you notice them walk through to each other, as you realize they're living together now. And then you switch to the remix version, which is the hot version, because they, of course, start to have a little morning get together. So there you go."
And if the producers would like Feist to make a guest appearance, just name the time and the place.
"I am there. I am there," she says. "I cameoed in The Muppets movie. I cameoed in Jann Arden's TV show [JANN]. And so why not? I'm not an actor, so they should cast me as a bartender or someone in the background."
Watch the full interview below.