The road from young punk to mellow singer-songwriter is a well-traveled one, but few have taken it as fast as Feist (born Leslie Feist). At 15, the Calgary native's band won a contest to open for The Ramones; at 29, her domestic daydream "Mushaboom" fits snugly on WXPN. Along the way, she's earned indie points from stints with Peaches and Broken Social Scene. On the phone from Paris, her adopted hometown, Feist doesn't want to talk too much about her early work ("I want to keep going forward"), her current album ("Let It Die is one stop on a longer trip"), or her next project ("I don't want to jinx it").

City Paper: Has there been a description of your work that you found particularly amusing?
Feist: Just the other day, I saw something that talked about Astrud Gilberto and bossa nova and all this. And I thought it's very funny how North Americans can hear one kind of very deeply embedded clave beat. … There's one song on the album that has kind of a shuffle to it that I'm sure by any actual Latino standards would be totally lowbrow, fake, not true bossa by any stretch of the imagination. But to North Americans, you hear a little swivel in the beat and immediately they identify it as like, "That place in the South that's hot and brown people come from!" I do find that funny, 'cause it's interpreted through North American ears. I guess if a French person [was] drinking what Air Canada would serve as wine on a flight, they would be like, "Zis is not wine." And I'm sure any Brazilian would hear my song and go, "That's not a salsa."

CP: Do you think there's any facet that's been blown out of proportion?
F: The chanteuse thing. That word means singer in French, but I don't sing in French, except kind of a couple times on the album, I've tried. And I don't have any relationship to what that tradition is, and when I hear the word chanteuse, like maybe before it was a word applied to me, I was always thinking it means like a soft, kinda fluffy, gentle singer, and I don't really want to think about myself that way.

CP: Tell me about the period of time when you couldn't sing.
F: I was 20 and I had been in this really heavy kinda hardcore pre-grunge band. And I had lost my voice on tour, so I moved from Calgary to Toronto to see a specialist and took a six-month kind of silent hiatus. And that's when I started to play guitar, actually. So it was dark, 'cause I was unsure if I would ever be able to sing again, but it was also, when I look back on it, really productive, you know? Solitude versus loneliness, it's like the state is the same.

CP: How did you rediscover your voice?
F: I never tried to do what I had done with it before again. I never tried to sing over top of such loud guitars. Maybe that's part of the reason I really wanted to play guitar, so I wouldn't have to compete with anybody. … I just began to sing quite tentatively when I began again.

CP: Are you surprised to find that a particular audience likes your work?
F: It was pretty funny when I realized that basically the equivalent of my mom was coming to shows all over the world. And my little sister. There seems to be this range in age. … I found it very surprising, 'cause I've played gigs for years, but it's always been kind of to my layer of the cultural sediment. Basically my people. And now it's people that maybe I would see in the world walking down the street or on the bus, shopping, but not necessarily people that I would see walking into my favorite bookstore or eating at my favorite place.

Feist plays Mon., Sept. 12, 7:30 p.m., $15, with Great Lake Swimmers, World Café Live, 3025 Walnut St., 215-222-1400, www.worldcafelive.com.