Not so long ago, Canadian musician Feist was wearing pink leotards and body popping for filthy-mouthed rapper Peaches as Bitch Lap Lap.

Seven years later, she's making sing-song cocktail lounge jazz that would have your grandma's foot a-tapping and that features on TV ads for Silentnight beds.

While a silent night is probably the last thing the 31-year-old got when couch-surfing and singing with fellow Canadians Peaches and multi-instrumentalist Gonzales in Berlin, they were good times.

"I rapped badly with a sock puppet, in poor Spanish, wearing Cuban aerobics outfits," she says.

"The point of my character was that she was an incompetent rapper. I basically backed Peaches up as her B-girl."

As well as appearing on Peaches' albums The Teaches of Peaches and Impeach my Bush, she's colaborated with Canadian indie band Broken Social Scene, and (during her stint in Paris) Kings of Convenience.

When she wasn't helping her friends out, the steely-eyed singer who got her start and damaged her vocal chords singing with a Calgary punk band, was making music of her own.

In 2002, a collection of recordings that Feist made in Toronto, informally called the Red Demos, began to circulate on the internet. Two years later, she recorded Let It Die. The album sold 500,000 copies, and Outkast's Andre 3000 declared her music "amazing".

After several hectic years on the road peddling her jazzy, major-label debut, she wanted to record her latest release, The Reminder, somewhere a little more tranquil.

"We literally made The Reminder in our pyjamas," says Feist, who settled down with her three-piece band at La Frette, a mansion in the French countryside. "The flowers were just pushing through the frost, and the experience was all about being stationary."

The record, which with tracks such as 1234 and My Moon, My Man will soon be pillaged by the TV ad men, is full of ambient sounds, from the clip-clop of her shoes to the sound of birdsong.

"We recorded in the main house rather than the studio in the basement," she says. "We put up a forest of microphones in the two parlours and throughout the bedrooms. The point was to not use headphones as much as possible. We had all these musicians together and I thought it would be a shame if we couldn't hear each other."

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