The Weather Station How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars LP

How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars is an album The Weather Station made during the COVID lockdown of 2020. These songs are quieter, more subdued than TWS' breakout success, Ignorance. This is a ballads album.

On the lead single, "Endless Time," artist Tamara Lindeman says: "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 neighborhood 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."

Concerning the new album, Lindeman says, "How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars is an introspective record of songs which were written alongside those that appeared on Ignorance. It is intended not to be a follow-up, but to be a companion piece, a piece of reflection and quiet, meant to hold stillness in the aftermath. It was recorded live, as a performance; an improvisation, with a group of Toronto jazz musicians. I imagined it as a record of ballads; simple, pure, almost naive, but speaking to many of the same realities as Ignorance does. I see the two albums as two halves of the same coin; the moon and sun, a photograph and a photonegative."

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.

With its dazzling sounds and poignant reflections on relationships and climate change, 2021's Ignorance suggested that the Weather Station's Tamara Lindeman was at a creative peak. More proof of just how inspired she was at that time arrives with How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, an album strikingly different from its predecessor but very much its equal.... Stars brings listeners so close to Lindeman that they can hear her feet on the piano pedals as a small crew of improvisers from Toronto's jazz scene provide intuitive extensions of her emotions and melodies. The mood is hushed but spellbinding...How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars' smaller scale puts the focus on Lindeman's songwriting, which is as brilliantly multi-layered as it was on Ignorance....A worthy follow-up to Ignorance and an accomplished work in its own right, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars makes the most of Lindeman's softly insightful powers.

It's primarily a piano and voice album, but the songs feel earthy and intimate the way Tamara's earlier folk music did. The album also has some of her strongest songwriting yet, particularly on 'Endless Time,' one of the most show-stopping songs she's ever written.