In the damn (music) year of 2021, which has produced few masterful records, the most uplifting by far was “Ignorance,” whose only flaw was inlaying its creator’s rugged soulscape in a flawless folk-pop-jazz sound. With “How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars”, the Canadian songwriter Tamara Lindeman and her band project The Weather Station now deliver the balladesque, heavy-blooded counterpart.
A wisdom that leaves moral trends to the left and right.
Written in the same period as “Ignorance,” Lindeman initially thought the tracks were too intimate to release. But she also thought they were the best she had written to date. The artful weaves of rhythm, which brought the previous album close to some avant-garde pop grandmasters, have given way to a self-reflexive groping forward. Lindeman touches the eternal themes – love and how it breaks – with immeasurable tenderness, accompanied by piano, double bass, organ, homeopathic guitar accompaniment and woodwinds, and interweaves them with an only seemingly naïve understanding of nature.
In “Ignorance”, which gave the last album its title in the beautiful tradition of the complete works, but can only be heard here, Lindeman observes a magpie and ponders which (white) man once baptized the bird species with the disparaging English name “magpie”. “Song” and “Sway” lead the introspective immersion to the brink of standstill.
One could dismiss all of this as idiosyncrasies with a feminist tinge. But there is an inherent wisdom in the parable-like songs of How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars that leaves moral trends aside. Finally, someone marvels at the small atrocities that people do to themselves and their environment – and which grow into the foundation of a very real, very global horror. There’s something comforting about “Stars,” that heartbroken gaze at the stars, because it’s not clouded by cynicism.
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