The Weather Station Announces Ignorance Companion Album, How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars

A year after releasing one of 2021’s best albums, The Weather Station (Tamara Lindeman) is back with a companion LP. Coming March 4 on Fat Possum, How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars was recorded live in only three days just prior to the pandemic, and features no percussion of any kind. Its lead single, the poignant and prescient “Endless Time,” is out now alongside a self-directed video.

Lindeman explains the genesis of How Is It and how it fits with Ignorance in a statement:

When I wrote Ignorance, it was a time of intense creativity, and I wrote more songs than I ever had in my life. 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.

Lindeman started work on How Is It soon after completing Ignorance, funding the record herself, not notifying her labels, and installing a new band and ethos: “The music should feel ungrounded, with space, silence and sensitivity above all else,” per a press release. Lindeman and her co-producer Jean Martin recorded live at Toronto’s Canterbury Music Studios on March 10-12, 2020—just before the global pandemic began in earnest. Lindeman sang and played piano while her band—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—improvised their accompaniment.

Lead single “Endless Time,” however, finds Lindeman unaccompanied and wrestling with the notion that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone, her rosy (literally) remembrances of more abundant times tinged with an unshakable sadness: “We were still in love, and the sun went on making flowers from the mud / We could walk out on the street and buy roses from Spain / Lemons and persimmons in December rain / All of our lives, it had been that way / But it’s only the end of an endless time,” she sings over her lone piano, bemoaning her blindness to the past’s preciousness.

Lindeman says of “Endless Time”:

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.

Next month, The Weather Station embark on a long-awaited tour in support of Ignorance and How Is It. However, almost a dozen of those dates have been canceled or rescheduled for later in the spring—find the band’s complete itinerary down below, and ticket info here.

Watch Lindeman’s “Endless Time” video and 2017 Paste Studio session below, and see the details of How Is It and The Weather Station’s tour dates further down. You can preorder the new album here.