It sometimes feels like modern life demands you operate in one of two distinct emotional settings – the first being a default blankness and rejection of what constitutes reality, the other in leaving yourself open to the always shifting tides of joy and despair.
When The Weather Station (aka Tamara Lindeman) released their fifth album Ignorance in 2021 it was greeted with acclaim both for both its authenticity and ambition, but what the critics didn’t know was that around the same time Lindeman was stockpiling other material created within the same rush but that far less obviously fit its more garrulous profile.
The themes they drew from – disconnection and conflict, love, birds, and climate feelings – were largely the same, but this time the process changed. Recording outside of label oversight and in her native Toronto over the space of just three days, Lindeman drew an ensemble cast of instrumentalists but also dictated that what they were creating should have no percussion of any kind, attempting to unhook the tracks from rhythm’s strictures.
How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars is the sum total of what transpired, an intimate front row seat to the singer’s state of mind. Whilst circumstances might’ve dictated a narrower scope, opener Marsh, with its occasional sax flourishes, soars, floating around the her angelic flowing voice whilst the lyrics muse about the perceptive detachment of nature versus the mental paralysis of the online world.
What’s refreshing too is that rather than falling into the trap of preaching, there’s a confessional strand to identify with as well on To Talk About, the words about love and the compromises we have to make in its pursuit: ‘I am lazy, I only want to talk about you/I spend all day with people who don’t think the way you do’.
This approach was conceived by accident, the singer describing it as: ‘It was a time of intense creativity, and I wrote more songs than I ever had in my life…songs that were simple, pure; almost naïve…I began to envision…a quiet, strange album of ballads. I imagined it not as a follow up to Ignorance, but rather as a companion piece; the moon to its sun.’
Another unintentional factor was the then unknown onset of the pandemic, with the sessions taking place in the last few days before its magnitude was even vaguely quantified. With this as a backdrop, this collection’s signature piece Endless Time resonates with the dread of tiptoeing into the fog of change, uncertainty ever present in its roots.
A measure of the free-flowing inter-connectedness between this and Ignorance is that the tune which bears the latter’s name is included here, the exquisitely observed clarinet offering a diverting warmth.
The pretext of Stars though is simpler, written ostensibly about a dark skies road trip on New Year’s Eve 2019, the celestial beauty presented as an unreachable blankness, whilst back on the dirt the lyrics close with a pessimistic, ‘I swear to god, this world will break my heart’.
Intimate, delicate, heartfelt…choose your adjective for How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars. At just over half an hour, it’s a brief lifting of any veil, but inside there are songs which Tamara Lindeman has allowed to drift between the lines of today’s conscious choices, with her instead being just the muse and leaving them to made by us.
