In either late 2000 or early 2001 (it’s hard to remember exactly), 2004’s executive producer Courtney E. Smith watched Peaches and Chilly Gonzales play to maybe five people at Maxwell’s in Hoboken. A woman stood at the side of the stage fanning Gonzales like a Greek emperor while his toy keyboard inflated into a cartoon grand piano. When she told Leslie Feist about it for our bonus interview, Feist had no memory of ever playing New York. “There’s so many versions of the truth,” she said.

That slippery memory is a good way into her story, because the record that made her, Let It Die, was an accident. Peaches mailed her a paper ticket to Vienna, and Feist flew to Europe for the first time to be Gonzales’s sidekick. On days off in Paris, Gonzales and the producer Renaud Letang started recording her, first covers, then her own songs. It was supposed to be a lark. She was terrified of her first real studio microphone, with no tape hiss to hide in. Months later, she realized it was a record.

These are some of the stories Feist tells in our bonus interview with her, which is unlike any of the other interviews because her experience was so wildly different than everyone else.

Letang put the word out about her in France, and she had multiple record deals to weigh from multiple countries. She found a lawyer, Melinda Cody, who drew the math out on a napkin. Feist’s description is blunt: on the British offer, she could sell far more records than anyone she knew had ever sold and still not see a cent. Polydor France, by her account, doesn’t recoup recording costs from artists. She calls it “the only place on earth where there’s a fair deal,” and says that without it she wouldn’t be talking to us today.

That’s the flip side of the conversation we have in Episode 4. Matt Marshall, who was doing A&R at Epic, describes Modest Mouse waiting on radio and video money that never arrived while Dann Gallucci talks about what it felt like to have a hit and how weird everything was — seemingly with no idea what was happening on the label side.

When Martin Kierszenbaum approached Feist about releasing the record in the States on Cherrytree, he pitched it as a “little cherry tree sized umbrella” inside Interscope. By 2007, Let It Die had sold about 400,000 copies worldwide.

Hear all of this and more in the Feist bonus episode. The audio is below for subscribers.