The Weather Station, Union Stage
April 25, 2022
On Earth Day, this past weekend, a Buddhist climate activist committed an
act of self-immolation on the steps of the Supreme Court in Washington DC. This act of a horrific public suicide was apparently intended as a protest against our national inaction on the climate crisis.
I lost a friend to climate grief in the early 2000s, and I’m unsure, as a parent, how to raise a child in a world that seems irrevocably damaged and despairing that we will right our collective path forward.
I say this in the context of a review of
The Weather Station, a band which shot to greater prominence in the past year with
Ignorance, an elegant and heartbreaking high concept folk-pop album about our collective climate grief in the face of pending disaster. Coming in the face of the pandemic and growing despair about the fate of the world, the record and its haunted, beautiful videos like
“Tried to Tell You” were as gripping as a phone call from a long-estranged friend reconnecting with bad news.
Songwriter Tamara Lindeman, from Ontario, was by no means a novice when that record emerged last year. She actually has a decade-plus back catalogue of folk and country-influenced singer-songwriter records, and I have now heard and downloaded most of these previous Weather Station albums. All of them are worth listening to, but none bear the resonance or the immediacy of
Ignorance, their 2021 album.
Since
Ignorance, The Weather Station actually released an entirely new album —
How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, which I bought immediately on Bandcamp. Tonally, this is a lot closer to the pre-
Ignorance material. Stately piano pieces like “Endless Time,” with jazz-pop flourishes, don’t bear much similarity to
Ignorance but were recorded at the same time.
At Union Stage, in a show delayed from January and originally scheduled in 2021, Lindeman opened the show singing from her knees, as if bowed in prayer or in tears with an a capella, “How Is It that I Should Look At the Stars.” In a magnificent top that made her look like she was wearing an African savanna in the form of a blouse, she alternated between keyboard and guitar, periodically clacking sticks together for added percussion in the more syncopated numbers.
What I found most compelling in Lindeman’s vocals were the way she switches between the lower and higher registers of her voice, from a dark husky alto to an airy soprano. The change in vocal tone frequently mirrored the content of the song as Lindeman might switch midlyric from a coolly observational tone to impassioned anguish, almost like switching from the left brain to the right. And although it’s not evident in her records, Lindeman can belt as well as murmur, giving added weight to the emotional heights of
Ignorance’s best songs and others from her catalogue.
Lindeman had a lot on the brain, playing in Washington for the first time in years with the climate crisis and global fragility looming. She introduced one song with a lengthy anecdote about her discomfort speaking with politicians, but acknowledging that people in DC might see politicians routinely in their Ubers or at their coffee shops — notwithstanding the fact that there were certainly legislative staff members in the audience at Union Stage. She mused that politicians should be listeners, like therapists, taking in the values and beliefs of their constituents rather than lecturing them. And she implored Americans, sitting in the capital city of the most important country on the planet, to use their power, at potentially the most crucial moment in human history, to call and write their — then her face fell dramatically as it dawned on her that the American citizens of the District of Columbia do not have any Senators to call. It was all very powerful until the conversation got derailed with her recognition that democracy is still only a partial proposition in the 21st century United States.
This was billed as the Weather Station’s
Ignorance tour, despite the COVID-induced delays and the record released in the interval, and Lindeman featured almost all of their 2021 breakthrough, backed by the supple groove of her band, whose work built on her sturdy folk-pop underpinnings with flourishes that called to mind jazz-pop fusion, in the form of understated keyboard and horn additions to a propulsion that was almost New Wave.
Ignorance has a syncopation from percussionists Philippe Melanson and a smooth urgency that calls to mind 1970s and 1980s jazz-pop influences on top of Lindeman’s songs, most of which grapple with our emotional inability to confront the enormity of the crises we face. “Robber,” “Parking Lot,” and “Atlantic” were all spellbinding, frequently swooping dramatically in acknowledgement of Lindeman’s world of existential dread with glimmers of steely-eyed resolve. But nothing moved me as much as “Tried To Tell You,” featuring one of those repeated switches between Lindeman’s lower and upper singing voices, really one of the best-written songs of the last several years, whose line made me gasp: “I'll feel as useless, As a tree in a city park / Standing as a symbol of what we have blown apart.” Like the best of The Weather Station’s work, this one peers in close at the missteps and failed choices that wreck our hearts and minds before zooming out to capture the larger dysfunctions that surround us, so pervasive that they can be hard to perceive.
In the song “Ignorance,” which does not appear on the album
Ignorance, but instead 2022’s
How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, Lindeman contemplates the magpie, mocking the human (and stereotypically male) vanity to name and thence assert control of the natural world.
The set got louder and more energetic over time, backed by some truly stellar drumming. Lindeman stuck mostly to the two keyboards, but took electric guitar at times, including the closing song of The Weather Station’s encore, a frenzied and somewhat harried “Thirty,” from the self-titled
The Weather Station 2017 record, which calls to mind the best songs of rural Canadian wisdom like Kathleen Edwards’ or Sarah Harmer’s. “Thirty,” which remains the band’s most popular song on Spotify, featured a stunning guitar solo by Will Kidman.
I collected The Weather Station’s setlist on the way out from the stage, walking slowly out into the cooling night air for the long bike ride home, with Lindeman’s songs still echoing in my ears.
Sam Amidon, the opener, told heartbroken tales of loss and alienation, some original and many covers, on claw hammer banjo and guitar. Singing in a clear, unadorned vocal style that called to mind the word “limpid,” he did old murder ballads and an Arthur Russell song while referencing cross-country road trips accompanied by the harrowing autobiographical CDs of Mariah Carey and Tim McGraw. A multi-instrumentalist, he also popped onstage with The Weather Station to play electric violin on a few tracks. Lindeman referred to him as one of her heroes, and a living legend, which is touching, since he seems like a pretty unassuming and polite guy.
Edited 6 time(s). Last edit at 06/21/2025 12:52PM by zwirnm.
