The Weather Station is the project of Toronto’s Tamara Lindeman, a musician I was first heard of when she collaborated with Will Stratton. She compelled me immediately. Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who felt that way considering Lindeman just signed with label Paradise Of Bachelors, the storied,this singer songwriter and folklore-focused and a label that plucked artists like Hiss Golden Messenger, Steve Gunn, from relative obscurity and gave them a national stage.
Now, they’ve invested in the Weather Station, and a few listens of her third full-length record “Loyalty” indicate that their impeccable taste is intact. Recorded just outside Paris at La Frette Studios last winter, Loyalty is imbued with the crisp intimacy of the coldest season, the allure of the city of lights. Tamara Lindeman’s voice floats by in the highest of registers of her voice, never breathy but, instead, misty and amorphous.
On the record she plays guitar, banjo, keys, and vibraphone, but like most artists who take the folk music tack with any success, it’s Lindeman’s songwriting that catches your attention and holds it. She’s clever without any smugness, rendering every day events into existential pictures of uncertainty, poking and prodding at subconscious desires without ever fully exposing them.
Take album opener “Way It Is, Way It Could Be,” for example. Lilting along the twin lines of quickly picked acoustic guitar and a linear, electric guitar backbone, it’s one of the more upbeat tracks on the record. Ostensibly a journey through winter, the song investigates the ambiguity that lives with us as long as we’re here on earth: “The way it is and the way it could be both are.” In Lindeman’s capable hands, this is neither a blessing or a curse. It’s the mark of a good songwriter to force us to keep two futures in mind at once, never letting on if either of them exist at all.
The Fat Angel Sings 