The Weather Station has announced a new album called How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars. Billed as a companion piece to 2021’s Ignorance and co-produced with Jean Martin, the LP was recorded live in only three days just before the pandemic in March 2020 and features no percussion. It arrives March 4 via Fat Possum. Today’s announcement comes with the release of a new single, ‘Endless Time’. Check out a music video for it below.
“When I wrote Ignorance, it was a time of intense creativity, and I wrote more songs than I ever had in my life,” the Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman explained in a statement. “The songs destined to be on the album were clear from the beginning, but as I continued down my writing path, songs kept appearing that had no place on the album I envisioned. Songs that were simple, pure; almost naive. Songs that spoke to many of the same questions and realities as Ignorance, but in a more internal, thoughtful way. So I began to envision How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars, a quiet, strange album of ballads. I imagined it not as a follow-up to Ignorance, but rather as a companion piece; the moon to its sun.”
Commenting on the new track, she added:
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 neighbourhood 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.
Lindeman started working on the new album without notifying her label, taping everything live from the floor at Toronto’s Canterbury Music Studios. Her band features Christine Bougie on guitar and lap steel, Karen Ng on saxophone and clarinet, Ben Whiteley on upright bass, Ryan Driver on piano, flute and vocals, and Tania Gill on Wurlitzer, Rhodes and pianet.
How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars Cover Artwork:
How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars Tracklist:
1. Marsh
2. Endless Time
3. Taught
4. Ignorance
5. To Talk About
6. Stars
7. Song
8. Sway
9. Sleight of Hand
10. Loving You
