Feist — “1234”

60 Songs That Explain the '90s

The Ringer

Music

4.7 • 849 Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2026

⏱️ 84 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Imagine, you’re on the road with an indie sleaze band making sock puppets sing obscenities when Sesame Street gives you a call. Leslie Feist’s career can most similarly be compared to the life of Benjamin Button with her most successful and youthful song, “1234,” coming later in her colorful and previously raucous music career. Rob breaks down Feist’s magical ability to bring new perspectives to covers and sing emotion into numbers before he is joined by Canadian filmmaker Chandler Levack. They discuss the role Feist’s music played in soundtracking Chandler’s college years and how this affected her most recent film, Mile End Kicks, which follows a young music journalist becoming increasingly more involved in the music scene she’s documenting. Listen to the songs from the episode: '00s #44 Feist "1234" Host: Rob Harvilla Producers: Olivia Crerie, Julianna Ress, Chris Sutton, and Justin Sayles Additional Video Editing: Kevin Pooler Guest: Chandler Levack Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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0:00.0	Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs.
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0:22.8	entrepreneurs like you. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at Shopify.com slash setup. I don't know about you, but I spent a great deal of the mid-2000s, weirdly fixated on that Kate Bush song, where she appears to sing the digits in pie out to the first 137 decimal places.
0:55.0	Are you up on this?
0:57.0	Three.
0:58.0	From her 2005 double album, Ariel, here we have English intergalactic art rock superhero
1:17.3	Kate Bush, the best to ever do it, meaning the best ever do any of the rad, wild shit
1:23.7	she does, including this.
1:25.4	Here we have Kate Bush rapturously singing a song called Pi. That's
1:30.9	P-I. Pi, the famous mathematical concepts. Dude, don't ask me what Pi is or what Pi does or why it's got to be
1:41.0	so long. I got two middle schoolers who could already kick my ass at math.
1:46.3	Kate starts out singing 3.14.
1:49.1	I knew that.
1:50.1	And then over the course of this song, she takes a little breaks to sing other stuff,
1:54.1	words and so forth.
1:55.0	But yeah, eventually she wondrously rattles off her own proprietary combination of
2:00.6	134 additional digits in pie that I was
2:05.1	less familiar with.
2:07.1	Kate Bush, who really needs no introduction, because she ain't going anywhere where she might
2:12.0	accidentally be introduced to you.
	...

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