Before Leslie Feist released The Reminder in 2007, her career had been a series of little breakthroughs, often as a participant in other people’s successes. She had toured with her roommate Peaches, taken a star turn on Broken Social Scene’s landmark album You Forgot It In People, and dazzled listeners with her harmonies alongside Norway’s Kings of Convenience. Even her compelling 2004 album Let It Die—which consisted of equal parts originals and covers—felt like a whispered secret, a Canadian treasure coveted by cognoscenti across international borders. But The Reminder solidified Feist’s budding reputation not just as an incisive songwriter, but as one of her generation’s most subtly expressive singers, able to say so much with a mere fray or quiver in her voice. While touring behind Let It Die, Feist took advantage of empty sound-check rooms to write onstage, imagining how her next album might sound as she captured ideas with a Dictaphone. In March 2006, she decamped to Paris’ beautiful La Frette studios, recording on its porch and in its grand hallways and cramped libraries with a magpie band of enormous range. To wit, the first three tracks on The Reminder find Feist swaying through feather-light bossa nova for “So Sorry,” snarling with a grunge élan for “I Feel It All,” and finding a sweet spot of kaleidoscopic nuevo soul for “My Moon My Man.” And while her smash single “1234” famously reaches heights of ecstatic harmony, “The Park” is so spare and intimate that hearing it feels like an invasion of privacy. In the end, it’s that candor that makes The Reminder so compelling, as though Feist had written private messages to herself about self-care and self-respect—and had found them useful for others. There’s the canny way that the tensile track “The Limit to Your Love” recognizes that maybe someone else is the problem, for example. And “Honey Honey” is about not waiting for some lover to stroll back in and solve everything. “I know, I know, I know/That only I can save me,” Feist sings at one point on The Reminder, in a brilliant bit of bravado. And on this album she finally made herself, too.