You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishikesh Herway.

Fist is a singer and songwriter from Canada, where she put out her first solo album in 1999.

She's won 11 June awards, including two for artist of the year, and she has four Grammy nominations.

She's also been a member of the band Broken Social Scene since 2001.

In April 2023, she put out her sixth album, Multitudes.

And for this episode, I talked to her about how she made the opening song from that album.

It's called In Lightning.

I am Leslie Feist.

Just inside the Rockies, there's a place called BAMF, and there's a huge center for the arts there.

And there's this artist residency program where they'll just give you a cabin in the middle of the woods.

And I was offered one of those retreats, which was 10 days.

And I thought, oh, this is fantastic.

I'm going to just try to get my wits about me in terms of what I was working on.

But there were plenty of hours in the day where I was faced with these uncomfortable thoughts.

I started to feel that there was just a tendency that I would receive a curveball,

some sort of input from a relationship or from a circumstance.

And no matter what came at me, I tended to essentially absorb it as a negative information instead of positive.

Like, as if I'm playing defense my whole life instead of offense, instead of initiating anything.

When you have a realization like that, like it shakes the foundation, because you start to realize,

oh, wait, I'm, I am the author here.

And then I started to be interested in the way that I was thinking about my own role in my own life,

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