Feist / Multitudes / 2023
Borrow Trouble
unsettled, quietly obsessive, with a repetitive, incantatory undertow
A meditation on the anxious mind's habit of manufacturing worry before it's even needed, built around the old idiom about borrowing trouble. Feist traces how anticipatory dread hijacks waking thought, then turns the phrase into something communal and almost transactional, as if worry can be passed between people like currency.
anticipatory anxiety self-fulfilling negative thought borrowed time and mortality collective/shared suffering rumination as habit
Who's speaking
A first-person narrator examines her own mind's tendency toward worry, then widens the lens to address a 'you' and eventually a collective 'we,' suggesting the pattern isn't unique to her. The voice is self-aware and somewhat rueful, watching herself fall into the same trap she's describing.
What happens
The song opens with a general description of how dread arrives before the day even starts, before shifting into the title phrase as a shared, almost proverbial condition. It personalizes the pattern with an image of physical collapse and confesses to habitually imagining loss before it happens. The bridge-like repeated line becomes a kind of surrender or dare, accepting whatever trouble is offered. By the final verses the narrator admits she lives by this very habit, calling it a poor skill, before the chorus returns to reassert that everyone does this, perhaps more now than ever.
How it's built
Verse-chorus form with a recurring refrain that functions almost like a mantra or vamp, repeated eight times in two separate sections. This repetition mimics the looping, intrusive quality of anxious thought itself, while the verses provide the analytical, more discursive counterpart. The chorus's return with slight variation (from 'we' to 'I' to 'we' again) tracks a movement from observation to personal confession and back to universal claim.
Section by section
Opening verse
“before your eyes are open”
The song establishes worry as pre-conscious, arriving before the speaker has any say, which frames anxiety less as a response to circumstance than as a default setting of the mind.
First chorus
The idiom is introduced and immediately updated—old wisdom repurposed for a present the narrator suggests is uniquely suited to it, implying accelerated or amplified anxiety in modern life.
Repeated refrain
This eight-fold repetition breaks from the verse's analytical tone into something almost ritualistic, an unconditional acceptance of trouble that could read as resigned surrender or as a strange kind of resilience, absorbing whatever comes rather than resisting it.
Second verse
“so good at picturing the life”
The narrator turns the earlier observation inward, confessing her own skill at imagining loss rather than living what she actually has, and using a falling, weighted physical image to convey emotional collapse.
Final chorus
“a poor skill to get so good at”
Self-diagnosis sharpens here: what looked like passive habit is now named as a practiced, almost cultivated distortion, twisting fine circumstances into imagined disaster before returning to the communal frame that closes the song.
Craft
- extended metaphor
- Trouble is treated as a physical commodity that can be borrowed, lent, and accumulated like debt or time, letting abstract anxiety take on economic weight.
- personification
- Thoughts are given agency—winding clocks, whispering dissent, knitting—so that the mind seems to act independently of the speaker, generating worry on its own schedule.
- anaphora/refrain
- The repeated acceptance line functions as incantation, its insistence mimicking obsessive thought patterns and turning surrender into something rhythmic rather than passive.
- simile
- Comparisons to a dropped stone and dead weight render emotional collapse in blunt physical terms, grounding abstract dread in bodily sensation.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as an anatomy of rumination—how minds pre-emptively borrow future or others' distress and treat it as inevitable. The commodification language (borrowing time, taking all you've got) suggests anxiety functions like debt: it accrues, gets passed around, and never quite belongs to the person carrying it. An alternative reading takes the refrain more literally as address to another person, making the song about codependent emotional labor—one person absorbing another's trouble almost masochistically. Both readings can coexist, since the song moves fluidly between interior monologue and something spoken to a 'you'.
Context
Multitudes (2023) followed a period of major personal loss for Feist, including the death of her father, and the album is generally understood as processing grief and instability. I don't have specific documented context about this track's writing circumstances beyond that general album backdrop, so this connection is inferential rather than confirmed.
Listen for
- how the refrain's repetition builds an almost trance-like insistence rather than melodic development
- the shift in pronouns from 'we' to 'I' and back, tracking confession folded into collective observation
- the physical, weighted imagery breaking through the otherwise abstract language of worry
- dynamic or vocal shifts between the more spoken verses and the driving, repeated chorus
About Feist
Leslie Feist, known mononymously as Feist, is a Canadian indie pop singer and songwriter, performing both as a solo artist and as a member of the indie rock group Broken Social Scene.
b. 1976 / Canada
Full biography and catalogue