NEW RELEASE
How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars by The Weather Station
CONTENTS
- INTRO: A Superb Companion Piece To Last Year’s Climate Grief-Themed Album Ignorance
- PLAYLISTS: On YouTube and Spotify
- REVIEWS: Exclaim!, Pitchfork, American Songwriter
- LYRICS: KURATED 141: PART 2: The Lyrics The album’s quiet musical ambience helps foreground writer Tamara Lindeman’s lyrics and clearly articulated vocals. The full set of lyrics are in this separate post
HOW IS IT THAT I SHOULD LOOK AT THE STARS
The Weather Station offers an intimate companion piece to last year’s acclaimed climate grief-themed Ignorance
The Weather Station’s new release poses this: How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars. Sans question mark, it’s a poetic statement. But its ambiguity does beg a question. The band’s driving force, Tamara Lindeman, replies with deep intimacy, compassion and observation relayed with subtle intonation.
Laments and hopes, mingling with sad, angry and bemused observations populate the lyrics and music in this collection. Weather Station founder Lindeman wrote them during a creative spree that spawned last year’s Ignorance – an album whose focus was a statement on climate grief.
The songs on this collection draw from similar air but are more personal. The musical ambience is subdued – and without percussion – in comparison to the bold sound and energy that powers Ignorance.
Lindeman says: “When I wrote Ignorance, it was a time of intense creativity, and I wrote more songs than I ever had in my life. The songs destined to be on the album were clear from the beginning, but as I continued down my writing path, songs kept appearing that had no place on the album I envisioned. Songs that were simple, pure; almost naive. Songs that spoke to many of the same questions and realities as Ignorance, but in a more internal, thoughtful way.”
She adds, “So I began to envision How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars, a quiet, strange album of ballads. I imagined it not as a followup to Ignorance, but rather as a companion piece; the moon to its sun.”
How Is It That I Should Look At the Stars is indeed a worthy moon that holds its own place in The Weather Station’s sky.
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Stay tuned and enjoy,
10 April 2022
REVIEWS
EXCLAIM MAGAZINE
The Weather Station Is Quieter But No Less Impactful on ‘How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars’
How do you follow up the most celebrated record of your career so far? For the Weather Station‘s Tamara Lindeman, the answer has been in her back pocket this whole time. Arriving 13 months after year-end-list stapleIgnorance, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars was written at the same time as her acclaimed fifth LP and recorded live off the floor in three days in March 2020. In Lindeman’s words, “I think of it almost as the moon to Ignorance‘s sun, the exhale at the end of the phrase.”
How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars is a quiet album. There’s Lindeman, her piano and faint wisps of additional, jazz-inflected lap steel and woodwinds like the colours of a fading sunset. Where Lindeman is often flanked by two (and sometimes three) percussionists when performing songs from Ignorance, here, there is no percussion.
PITCHFORK ONLINE MAGAZINE
Performed almost entirely at the piano, the follow-up to Tamara Lindeman’s 2021 breakthrough Ignorance raises dizzying questions with sensitivity and quiet hope
Tamara Lindeman recorded How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars in a short stretch of days as the world tipped into stillness. A year after completing her stunning fifth album as the Weather Station, Ignorance, the singer-songwriter returned to Toronto’s Canterbury Music Company to put down another LP. Since 2017’s The Weather Station, she had shifted her songwriting foundation from acoustic guitar to piano, a change of framework that she expanded upon with woodwinds, strings, and tumbles of percussion. Between March 10 and 12, 2020, Lindeman recorded live from the room where she’d made Ignorance, with sax, lap steel, clarinet, and electric organ adding dashes of shimmer and glisten.
Though the ringing “Ignorance” didn’t make it to the album of the same name, that song and the rest of Stars further her questions of what possibilities remain amid clouds of uncertainty. The songs, performed almost entirely on the piano, predicate a world undergoing permanent, devastating changes, but they float with delicate sensitivity. They add more nuance to a body of work that already teems with vivid detail.
The open air of Stars occasionally feels like an echo of the early Weather Station LP All of It Was Mine, returning to lighter arrangements that place Lindeman’s details in central focus. But now with a decade of adulthood behind her, Lindeman’s perspective is steadier, less springy, more careful. The cool, fluid movement of the album recalls the quieter periods of prolonged reflection between the dramatic flushes of passion. The gravity of the piano’s hammers and the airy lift of Lindeman’s voice feel like complementary forces, glassy like reflections in clear water.
AMERICAN SONGWRITER MAGAZINE
Wincingly personal slow songs reference similarly styled works like Laura Nyro’s New York Tendaberry or Joni Mitchell’s Blue
by Hal Horowitz
Just a year after the release of Tamara Lindeman’s (aka The Weather Station) highly praised previous album, comes this follow-up. Pre-release material says it’s a companion piece to the 2021 set with songs written at the same time. One of these, “Innocence,” even became the title of the first disc.
Those who appreciated the pensive, introspective nature of Innocence will find more of the same here. Stripped down to a shady, stark, skeletal percussion free acoustic combo, the curiously named How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars’ (note the lack of a question mark) ten contemplative, almost wincingly personal slow songs reference similarly styled works like Laura Nyro’s New York Tendaberry or Joni Mitchell’s Blue. Lindeman describes it as “a quiet, strange album of ballads” where she accompanies herself on acoustic piano (sometimes solo), and the five backup musicians stay on low boil.
There aren’t any catchy melodies, the song structures are loose, often amorphous with a stream of consciousness flow, and the muted ambience of the 32-minute, live in the studio set isn’t for everyone. Lindeman’s trilling voice is similar to that of Kate Bush as she unwinds these pieces at a pace best described as snail-like. One word track names such as “Marsh,” “Taught,” “Ignorance,” “Stars,” “Sway” and simply “Song” also allude to the plain, bare trees approach.
