Feist

On her new 12-song collection, Metals, Canadian singer/songwriter Feist is joined by her longtime collaborators Chilly Gonzales and Mocky. The trio spent a frigid month "Trying to sound like we had played together as long as we'd collectively known each other, around 50 years," then decamped for California's rugged Big Sur coastline to record them. Feist co-produced the album with her aforementioned collaborators and Valgeir Sigurosson (Bjork, Bonnie 'Prince' Billy.)

"Recording can be a weightless free float from your day-life, and I like to pick places with certain fertile qualities that can give me a visual hook that I'm there to do something other than what I would otherwise do. And that clean line between land and see, the graphic edge of the continent pointing out toward the east, meaning not the Atlantic next stop Europe feeling, but next stop somewhere you've never been," Feist says. "Plus, you are somewhere that looks completely unfound and yet it's been so perfectly recorded literarily. Steinbeck made 1000 albums there! Henry Miller and Anais Nin probably considered that line between land and sea, too. And on top of it, we truly found the perfect room to build a studio in, perched on the cliffs. A giant empty space."