ignorance - the weather station
why tamara lindeman's astonishing new album is my favourite new music of 2021 so far
In the last week, I’ve spent a horrifying amount of time listening to this album. I have not intentionally listened to music other than the Weather Station’s Ignorance for, at this point, several days. So, while normally I let things fester for a while before I write about them, this time I’m going to do something slightly different, and write about an album I only listened to for the first time the other day. While part of the writing process for this newsletter is always and unavoidably me working out precisely what I think about something, I’ll normally have known it for long enough that the act of writing feels in a sense automatic. Part of listening to music, reading books, watching films or tv — consuming media, basically — is always puzzling through what about it works (or doesn’t), and for me in particular, I think, I’m always trying to work out how I’d justify why I love the things I love to others. Hence this newsletter. But I’m interested in seeing what happens when I don’t have that normally essential festering time. I don’t even know the band’s other music apart from the vague descriptions given by reviews of this album. I’m doing this partly because I think it’s just remarkably good; partly because I’m interested to see what writing something more like a conventional first-look review than normal feels like; partly because I feel like I might have something to say about it. Let’s see.
The Weather Station have been around since 2006, focused around Tamara Lindeman and with a changing membership; until this album, their music was generally folk. Ignorance is not folk. Lindeman herself plays, variously, vocals, piano, guitar, Moog, Pianet, Wurlitzer, and provides string arrangements (as does noted genius Owen Pallett) and production; fourteen other musicians contribute. For a band which tends towards folk, this album’s remarkably adept at switching between genres — there’s elements of folk, jazz, rock, pop (if only of the art variety), probably others I don’t know enough to classify — and lots of the songs just have so much going on. The tracks are rhythmically complex, eschew pop song structure, and evolve a lot along the way: ‘Wear’, for example, starts with just Lindeman’s voice alongside sparse piano chords and a simple rhythm section, but opens up into a much fuller composition and ends with an extended instrumental including horns and strings. Similarly, Lindeman’s voice is astonishing: simultaneously haltingly tender and devastatingly confident, she switches in and out of a falsetto in the middle of lines, most noticeably in ‘Separated’.
Despite this complexity, though, one of the strengths of the album is how effectively Lindeman understands silence. One of the most compelling things about folk music for me is that so much of their motion comes from pauses or its willingness to leave songs relatively unadorned. This kind of sparingness is extremely visible in Ignorance. There are obvious moments like the beginning of ‘Wear’, but across the album you see instruments only coming in for the briefest snatches, like Felicity Williams’ remarkable harmony and backing vocals in ‘Heart’. She comes in to underline specific lines, but there are also almost sample-like melodies floating in the background. For most of the track, you just get snatches of them as the song propels itself forwards, and they’re that much more effective for their scarcity.
The obvious referent for me in how Lindeman orchestrates her band is Destroyer. Both Lindeman and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar began recording more acoustic songs but opened up over time to collaborators and less folk-inflected music while retaining an extremely distinctive vocal style and cadence; both moved towards diverse genres, including some jazz elements; both have a habit of only sparingly using certain instruments in a way which I find extremely effective. While I love Destroyer a great deal, obviously, a notable difference is how much more affecting I find Lindeman’s lyrics.
There’s a lot to love about this album, but the most instantly notable is the lyrics. In all honesty, I struggle to think of any artists whose lyrics have compelled me so much so quickly, though I’ve written about a couple who come close. The album as a whole coheres into a narrative and a meditation on how we relate to the world around us. Some songs don’t fit inside the breakup plot traced by ‘Parking Lot’ and the second half of the album — like album opener and lead single ‘Robber’, an anti-capitalist, anti-colonialist, jazz-infused banger, or ‘Atlantic’, which talks about the weight of living through the climate crisis. But the whole thing fits into a remarkably coherent and precise whole.
The track which really grabs me is the second single, ‘Tried to Tell You’. Not only does it have a great music video (above), it’s just gorgeous. Written about a friend of Lindeman’s who was resisting a romantic relationship with someone they clearly loved, the song became an expression of her faith in humans being ‘soft, vulnerable creatures’ who ‘fall in love easily’ but are nevertheless endlessly ‘turning away from things that we clearly deeply love.’ It’s a song, that is to say, about humans’ essential capacity but chronic reticence to fall in love, to let yourself truly be in the world. She evokes the real experience beautifully — she talks about her friend’s fear they ‘might call her’, might not be able to help themselves, while Lindeman sees how love ‘lived in you all day’, ‘watched her in your eyes’.
And then she moves to a stunningly rich register in talking about the nature of her friends — of our — fear:
You were so afraid to try and pull apart
the endless rain you thought of as your heart;
with blood on your hands from the river inside,
you try to deny it, you never felt the tide
of the moon pulling closer.
There are so many competing but somehow complementary metaphors here: the specific sense of how any one image interacts with another is obscure, but the whole takes on a strange, synergistic coherence. The ‘river inside’ is the blood in the veins, the constant current which gives the lie to the idea that your heart can just be the painful fleeting permanence of an ‘endless rain’; not least as it feeds finally into the sea, the way that love and desire can make us part of something greater than ourselves. As if to underline that point, the song reaches a crescendo as she sings about the tide, the song suddenly sweeping us off our feet, transporting us into the rest of the world. We so often try to protect ourselves from that, even as it pains us, even as we get blood on our hands from trying to stem the flow of blood to our hearts.
The image the music video uses — flowers appearing in a man’s mouth unbidden, a version of those clips of eating played backwards — is such a gorgeous way to express that concept, this kind of constant unignorable immanence of our connections to others, our beauty. As Lindeman sings, we sometimes spend days encountering nothing ‘to stand behind the fragile idea that anything matters’; but it’s in us all along, if only we’re able to find it in others.
If Lindeman thinks we underappreciate our connections to others, though, she also feels the pain — the wear and tear — that comes from being part of a world that doesn’t quite fit you right. In ‘Wear’, she figures the world as ‘some kinda garment’, a jacket that ‘does not keep me warm’ and which she ‘cannot ever seem to fasten’. I promise I’m not making everything about autism on purpose, but it’s hard not to find it painfully relatable when she asks questions like ‘why can’t I be the body graceful in the cloth of it?’; both the longing to have fluency and joy in embodiment and the seeming struggle to even express the concept. The secret — of being autistic, of just being in the world, whatever — is that as much as it’s in the essence of the thing to feel disconnected and uncomfortable, that’s not for lack of wanting or of moments of feeling something like ease. She tells us that:
Bodies nеver want not to move — they want it, all of it:
to be hidden, to be touched, to be known,
to be undressed, to be clothed.
It’s not, I think, that embodiment, being-in-the-world, is itself painful — it’s that trying to fit yourself inside of the shapes that life demands of us so frequently only gets in the way of being actually touched, known, of living. I have had a lot of panic attacks in nightclubs in my time (clubbing is the part of pre-pandemic life for which I feel the least nostalgia), and what triggers it is invariably the sense that I cannot do what others are doing, of just letting the body express itself. I can when I’m by myself, or with people I trust. But in a crowded room full of strangers, I need too much protection to really experience anything directly: the clothes I have to put on to make myself look real are too tight to let any actual life happen.
This song, like much of the album, is addressed to ‘you’, a lover who’s unable to offer anything like the care Lindeman needs (and who she rails against in the amazing ‘Separated’). She asks them why they can’t ‘want me for the way I cannot handle it’ — a question whose straightforwardness in searching for a way to redeem the painful fact of not quite fitting in the world is just heartbreaking — but can’t quite stop seeking out validation or support or some kind of stability in something outside herself. After telling them that ‘I tried to wear each word that you had ever said to me — even as careless as it turns out you have been with me’, she insists that ‘I still reach out to hold everything I’m told’, ‘to touch, and to enfold’. The work of fashioning a way of protecting oneself, of trying to truly and genuinely be part of the world, is so much just the work of reaching out and trying to get a stable grip on something outside of yourself — or even better, to bring it inside of you.
The instrumentation swells up behind Lindeman in this outro, driving this real force and power which almost overflows what her voice can contain; it keeps running long after she’s stopped singing. It’s answering her when she asks if she’s ‘ever understood’, or if she’s just ‘hidden by this hood’. This utter faith that there is a way to find connection — whether it’s in the innately collaborative process of recording or otherwise — is a wonderful kind of optimism. It’s an understanding of the truth that there is always something valuable and important we can find in others, even if they don’t always repay our faith in them, even if it’s painful.
This optimism continues in the penultimate track, ‘Heart’. It’s the most alive the band sounds on the album, a galloping drum beat and a rich, propulsive sound arranged entirely around a single chord played throughout the track; it’s the most joyous breakup song I’ve ever heard. It opens with an immediate declaration:
I don’t have the heart to conceal my love,
when I know it is the best of me:
if I should offend you, I will show myself out;
you can bury me in doubt, if you need to.
It’s a manifesto for refusing to contain your love for the world around you, and for finding whatever moments of beauty you can in it. The total faith that love is ‘the best of me’ is gorgeous, and I love the play on ‘heart’ in that opening line; and it’s a love which isn’t restricted to romance. It’s about finding joy in connection, in being part of the world, just as in ‘Wear’ she keeps ‘reach[ing] out to hold’. In an utterly gorgeous passage, she describes how:
My dumb eyes turn toward beauty,
turn towards sky, renewing.
My dumb touch is always reaching
for green, for soft, for yielding.
While she might ‘feel all my loss’, find herself ‘reeling / through long midnights of feeling’, she won’t let this cut herself off from the world around her; she won’t be cowed into the conformity of refusing to feel. She’ll keep ‘reaching’ towards the softness and comfort and restoration of the world around her.
She won’t be told to cut herself off, either: ‘I guess that I am soft, but I am also angry’, she tells us; any vulnerability which comes from her openness to joy is mirrored by her anger at a world which tells her not to feel so deeply. Her lover can ask for ‘many things’, but they can’t ‘ask me for indifference’, shouldn’t ‘come to me for distance’. I love how the song as a whole is just an utter commitment to bringing ease and joy into being, despite what anyone else says, despite maybe having to just ‘hold my heart inside me’.
It’s not that she doesn’t doubt her resolution. In closer ‘Subdivisions’, her voice can only be described as heartbroken as she goes on a drive after ending her relationship, and feels the utter isolation of being separate. In a lovely comparison, she connects ‘the cold metallic scent of snow’ she gets from the static as she turns on her radio with the ‘snow / piled high in all the ditches’ overwhelming the road she’s driving along. The plain ‘white fields’ around her cut her off and leave her wondering over and over if she ‘misjudged / in the wildest of emotion’, asking ‘did I take this way too far?’ If her discovery of joy in ‘Heart’ was an embodiment, the highway she drives down is ‘disembodied from / the rest of my experience’. In this, though, it’s a reminder of what she’s leaving behind,
a narrow band of ice that stretched across the disappearance
of the central plan, the guiding hand,
the keeping up appearance of a life.
She might not know if she misjudged it, but she knows that she ‘simply could not do it: / tell you I could be with you when I could see right through it’; she knows she could not continue with just keeping up appearances. She knows that she has to value connection, has to trust the ‘wildest of emotion’ even if she worries about its effects on her judgment.
This is a transformative album. It’s a genuinely staggering accomplishment, so perfectly constructed and so deeply felt. It’s got the rare quality of both feeling painfully relatable and like it opens entirely new ways of seeing life, of ‘reaching / towards green, towards soft, towards yielding’; towards letting joy in and letting it take you forwards. Many of the songs are accompanied by ‘visualizers’, which show Lindeman in her suit of mirrors, looking out to sea. In the final one, the sun’s coming up.