One of the most popular “Sesame Street” songs is “1,2,3,4,” a take-off on Feist’s 2007 indie hit. With a Muppet cast that includes Elmo, Rosita, some penguins and vacation-ready chickens, it’s the appearance that the Canadian singer-songwriter gets recognized for the most, she said. The “Sesame” version of the song, released in 2008, has over 240 million YouTube views; the original has about 13 million.
Whenever she’s traveling, a breathless parent will stop her for a photo. They say, “Do you mind, my 3-year-old has watched it 7,000 times,” Feist said. “And I say yes, but I always joke: You notice me because you’re a grown-up — the 3-year-olds are really only interested in the puppets. And without fail, the kids are just sort of looking at me like, who is this weird lady in the airport?”
In a phone interview, Feist described what it was like to perform on “Sesame Street.” “It kind of just felt like playing,” she said. “It really didn’t feel like, we’re filming something that will far outshine anything else that I will do in the rest of my life.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Getting the call “It was a no-brainer. I handed myself over, knowing that they would rewrite the lyrics, and that the whole thing would be very much out of my control, because the caliber [of the show] has been so high my whole life.”
In the studio “A diction coach was making me pronounce the words so specifically, because she said, ‘Imagine you don’t know how to talk yet, and this is how you learn to count.’ And [the lyric] ‘Monsters walking cross the floor,’ there was no slurring, no poetry about it. It was very much, ‘There are monsters, and they are walking across the floor.’ You have to make sure they know what you’re saying.”
Meeting her collaborators “I hadn’t yet seen any of the Muppets. And at some point, these four penguins with football helmets just kind of peeked up at me [in the vocal booth]. I was literally [screaming]. It actually took my breath away with childlike glee. They kind of were hitting each other and trying to run away and trying not to get spotted, ducking down again, and then they would appear on the side. It was all that childhood is about.
My brother and I played with two sock puppets my entire childhood. And that’s all we ever did, was have them peek out the window and pretend to be in a wind storm when we were on long road trips. When these penguins showed up, they let me put one on my hand, which just felt like — did I just drop acid?”
On the set “It’s like you have this out-of-body experience. I remember walking down ‘the street,’ holding my hand out in front of me, wondering at what point I was going to hit the backdrop. I mean, I think it was the backdrop of my childhood. It felt like the most familiar place on earth.”
The Muppeteers “A subplot that was in no way being filmed, was that Telly was crushing out so hard on me. [Laughing] Like, the guy just had Telly nibbling on the tips of his fingers while he stared at me, nervously. And then I’d look, and he’d look away. And if you watch the video, there’s a couple of times where you’ll see Telly facing me, in profile, with this kind of awe. It was going on for, like, eight hours. It was incredible.”
The song’s viral success “That’s a number that’s hard to understand [240 million views]. It’s funny, I haven’t played ‘1234,’ the album version, in a few years. And then, this year, for a few summer festivals, I was like, ah, let’s just play it properly. And I had to look up the lyrics, because I had the chickens and the monsters going! It’s reverse-engineered me to be more aware of the Muppet version than my own.”
Melena Ryzik is a roving culture reporter and was part of a team that won a Pulitzer Prize in 2018 for public service for reporting on workplace sexual harassment. She covered Oscar season for five years, and has also been a national correspondent in San Francisco and the mid-Atlantic states. @melenar
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