It was only a year ago that Tamara Lindeman released her latest album as The Weather Station, Ignorance, but today she’s revealed that she’ll be releasing a companion album called How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars through Fat Possum on March 4.
Unlike the meticulous craft of Ignorance, Stars was recorded in three days. Explaining the sudden return, she says: “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… 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.”
The first song to be shared is “Endless Time”, which she introduces by saying: ““In Toronto, I live in a world of overwhelming abundance; fruits and fresh vegetables flown in year round from Chile, California, Malaysia. Standing outside a neighbourhood fruit stand one day, I found myself wondering how I would look back on this time from the future; if I would someday remember it as a time of abundance and wealth I did not fully comprehend at the time, and I wondered how it would feel to stand at that threshold of change. I wondered too if we were not already there. The song was written long before the pandemic, but when we recorded it, on March 11, 2020, it began to feel eerily prescient. The day it was recorded truly was the end of an endless time, and as ever, I don’t know how the song knew.“
Ignorance was unabashedly about the climate crisis, and “Endless Time” continues in that vain but from a people-based, metropolis-based perspective. The wistful piano part and Lindeman’s sorrowful vocal suggest looking back on a time that has already past – an era when we could buy fruits and goods from all over the world without giving a second thought to how they’d got there. It truly does feel like an “Endless Time” due to our complacency about believing they’ll always be there, no matter what. But, as Lindeman sings “It’s just like a sunset about to begin”, and later, echoing our innocent naïveté “it never occurred to us to have to pay.”
Watch the video for “Endless Time” below or find it on streaming platforms.
The Weather Station’s new album How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars comes out on March 4 through Fat Possum (pre-order/save). Follow her on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
