It kind of figures the new Feist record, The Reminder, was recorded in a French mansion. The four-week-old record was tracked in a 200-year-old manor outside of Paris with all sorts of people taking cigarette breaks on the back terrace between takes. You can hear it in every song. Leslie Feist belongs in a French manor. She belongs on a chaise lounge in a lacy white dress with a microphone dangling above her nostrils. She belongs on horseback, galloping about plucking the strings of a pawn-shop guitar in a meadow of tall grass. She belongs sipping espresso and nibbling on a baguette while leafing over the pages of a book of French photography. It all just makes sense.

The Reminder makes me want to be in a French manor, but the closest I come to any of that is playing ultimate-frisbee on Monday nights, and that’s not even close at all. The record makes me want to get my ear pierced and dangle an Eiffel Tower from my lobe. I want to cook my meat much less and be able to recognize something from the smell of a cork. I want to serve both colors of wine, one from the left hand and one from the right, and tell my guests about the music playing on the Victrola. “Oh this? It is nice isn’t it? Yes she is Canadian, it makes me want to dance too.” Then I want to dance. Eventually though our flailing French hands will need to stop dancing as the hand claps change to brushed snare swipes and harp strings — this will be when the French kissing begins.

All that aside, we can’t spend our whole lives dreaming.

Today, I built a fence around a vegetable garden while listening to The Reminder through one of those portable speaker jawns that you plug your iPod into. Really I did. It went well. The fence is mainly to keep deer out, but it is also so the garden is like a room. In 200 years I plan on recording a record in this room. The record will appeal to all sorts of people. If you are driving back with your parents from your sister’s graduation in Boston, this record will please all family members in the car. If you are going to someone’s home that is a big Pitchfork-head, or a person who is an anti-Pitchfork-head, they will both be pleased when you gift a tape with this record on side A and The Reminder on side B and label it “Records recorded in 200-Year-Old Places.” How could they not be pleased? Feist appeals to all. She does that to people. She breaks down barriers and kicks out the jams for all walks of life. People in France and America like her, and those countries both think they are better than the other, but Feist says, “Wait a minute land-masses, we have similarities! We both have hearts and minds and legs to shimmy with. We both have credit cards to complete a transaction at your local record shop with! We both laugh when a dog sneezes and we both chill out after stressful days. I am Canadian, but I have lived all over the world and know that we are all the same.”

Like I said, that’s just what she does. Then, after she does that, she writes another eloquent, insightful, buttercup of a song. I don’t want to make comparisons, but another femme to play similar cards is one Neko Case. I enjoy recording artists that are to music genres as drag queens are to genders. If you swing both ways you just end up pleasing twice as many people… musically I mean. In closing, I suppose we should thank Leslie… I mean Ms. Feist… I mean Feist for putting out something original and creative and laidback and fun and rock steady and also for bringing worlds together without having to take her clothes off.