Tamara Lindeman’s work as the Weather Station has always been an interrogation of the self: putting sparse, intricate music to the narratives we construct from our lives and memories. While Lindeman often includes other characters in her songs, their presence mostly leads to deeper insight into her own mind. In “Shy Women,” from 2015’s Loyalty, she observes another woman’s increasing hardness with age, “as though it were mine.” In another track, she sings about a friend who looks so similar to her that they get mistaken for sisters. The pair laugh it off, but there’s a quiet anxiety, she suggests, of having someone accidentally become an appendage to your life.
The Toronto songwriter’s self-titled fourth album further explores that strange intimacy. Its songs are passionate and sprawling, formless and unwieldy. Often, Lindeman fills them with more thoughts than they seem capable of containing. “I don’t know what to say,” she sings at one point, “So I say too much.” There’s a desperation to her words, but Lindeman’s voice has never sounded clearer or bolder. She risks so much fear in her writing—fear of losing time and power, or her mind and her identity—for the cosmic payoff of happiness with another person: “You and I, we are complicit,” she sings, “Now we’re gonna live with it, our open eyes.”
In other words, this is Lindeman’s relationship album. For an artist whose breakthrough LP was called All of It Was Mine, there’s a startling generosity to the subject matter: after spending her career protecting and studying her psyche, she now devotes an entire album to it. In “You and I (On the Other Side of the World),” she describes a brief moment of happiness at the beach before a storm, “You in my old cardigan, and I in your blue jeans.” But the same things that draw these characters together also become a burden. “I cannot tell us apart,” she sings sadly in “In an Hour.” Lying beside each other, the couple are at once interchangeable and “dizzied by distances.” There’s a question, throughout these songs, of how to stay true to oneself while holding onto one another. It’s a balancing act that can swerve in a heartbeat from romantic comedy to psychological horror.
In addition to being self-titled, The Weather Station is self-produced by Lindeman. She finds new ways to bring her words to life, backed by a band with more urgency and energy than ever before. The guitars are largely electric, with driving rhythms where once she favored quiet brush strokes. Most of these songs avoid typical structures in favor of long, escalating verses, and Lindeman builds backdrops that offer complimentary dynamics to her lyrics. The single “Thirty” is an immediate stunner: dusty and simmering, with a faded, psychedelic flute accompaniment that buzzes like mosquitos in a desert. For other songs, she arranged full string sections, and in “You and I,” the strings accent her slow shifts of mood and tone. “We got good at walking,” she sings, before clarifying, “Walking in step—we can’t help it.” From front-to-back, this is the first Weather Station album that sounds as fleshed-out and powerful as the world it contains.
Throughout her career, Lindeman’s music has fit firmly within the folk lineage. This is both due to her preferred instrumentation (fingerpicked guitar, piano, banjo) and her subject matter, songs filled with rivers and roads, snow and rain. On The Weather Station, she largely forsakes that rural setting in favor of a domestic, sometimes claustrophobic landscape. When she turns to nature, it’s viewed through a wistful lens, like she’s locked inside and watching from a window through half-closed blinds. “I was raised to hear the curlews, I was raised to notice light,” she sings in “Complicit,” “And I watch the little swallows delicate in their flight.” Here, the gentle imagery arrives in a moment of tension: a declaration of identity torn from the environment she recognizes. It’s her heaviest, toughest song yet.
The emotional stakes on The Weather Station are particularly high; Lindeman refers at various points to a broken economy, to mass shootings and climate change. But the most vivid devastation she describes is internal. The album ends with the dreamlike fragment, “The Most Dangerous Thing About You.” Its closing lines are striking and mysterious: “And all of the sadness you can’t explain poured from you like a summer rain, hand in hand with your child in the morning,” she sings, before a sudden sweep of strings enters and disappears just as quickly. Lindeman narrates the song from afar, inconspicuously, in stark contrast to the closeness that defined the preceding tracks. Still, she makes these observations feel just as touching and true. “Love, it is no mystery,” she tells us in “You and I,” “I love because I see.” By the end of the album, she shows us there is no other way.
