Tamara Lindeman’s already garnered acclaim for her writing style, defined by her penchant for stringing together observations of tiny details and moments and making them seem huge and full of emotional weight. Like many songs on her upcoming new album, The Weather Station, “You And I (On The Other Side Of The World)” is heavy with the feeling of time having passed, tracing the distance between memories and individuals as people pass in and out of each other’s orbits through the years. Narrating a relationship the lyrics are suggestive enough that it could just as easily be an intense friendship as a romantic one the song doesn’t gallop like its predecessors “Thirty” or “I Kept It All To Myself.” Instead, it calmly meanders, string arrangements bursting around it like hints of color flooding into a black and white image.
Lindeman, as she often does, tells a whole story via snapshots, the song beginning and ending with the “You” of its title entering the hallway, shy. Along the way, you get pulled along in the currents of this relationship, glimpsing different moments and places. They are remnants out of context, and yet you feel like you know the whole story by the end, with Lindeman’s reiteration of the first lyrics with the addendum “shy, and alone” the kind of denouement that lands like soft thunder. In the end, you don’t need to understand all the stray details. “You And I (On The Other Side Of The World)” is powerful because it captures the way past important relationships linger in your mind as more years accumulate: amorphous collections of images that hold way more than that single moment, coming together into a watercolor echo of the past as memories congeal.
thanks Stereogum
The Fat Angel Sings 