Feist to Launch ‘Pleasure Studies’ Storytelling Podcast

Feist has announced a new podcast series called Pleasure Studies, which is co-presented by Talkhouse and Earios. The storytelling series will premiere on July 9th with a new episode available each week via podcast services. Each episode will examine different themes Feist explored on her 2017 album, Pleasure.

In a short trailer for Pleasure Studies, various voices reveal personal things about themselves, from discussing being an undocumented immigrant and having panic attacks to living in a compound with sex workers. Feist concludes the teaser. “It’s a storytelling project that looks at the common ground under our common struggles,” she says in the clip. She adds that it’s not an interview series, instead, she turns over the mic to “people from all walks of life to talk about places where they feel themselves.

“Hard times are made harder by hiding out in that feeling that we’re all alone,” she continues. “This podcast seeks to look at how we’re not.”

The first episode will center on Pleasure track “Lost Dreams.” Podcast guests include a time traveler researcher, a Dreamer and activist, a transgender triathlete, an FBI undercover operative, a monogamous couple in adult film, and a professional storm chaser, among others.

In a Facebook video post, she discusses the podcast’s genesis, which was borne from “going through something really tough” (which she also hinted at in a Rolling Stone interview), while making Pleasure and her pondering if others had gone through a similar “dismantling of yourself.” She created a questionnaire, which received a strong response from people from all over the world who shared their “interior world.”

“We went around and found a bunch of stories and we braided them together into these episodes,” she explains in the video. “And it’s a little experimental, it’s a little intuitive, it’s meant to just speak to your intuition.”