How do you follow up the most celebrated record of your career so far? For the Weather Station's Tamara Lindeman, the answer has been in her back pocket this whole time. Arriving 13 months after year-end-list staple Ignorance, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars was written at the same time as her acclaimed fifth LP and recorded live off the floor in three days in March 2020. In Lindeman's words, "I think of it almost as the moon to Ignorance's sun, the exhale at the end of the phrase."
How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars is a quiet album. There's Lindeman, her piano and faint wisps of additional, jazz-inflected lap steel and woodwinds like the colours of a fading sunset. Where Lindeman is often flanked by two (and sometimes three) percussionists when performing songs from Ignorance, here, there is no percussion.
What's left are gentle piano ballads that are filled with deeply intimate moments and thoughts. Not the moments that you shout about or throw a party for, but the everyday events and musings that make a life. There's dancing, walks are taken, stars and birds are gazed at, a head rests on a lover's chest. Many of the topics Lindeman grapples with on Ignorance, including the climate crisis, are present here too, but delivered with a softer touch. On "Endless Time," Lindeman reflects on how precarious our lives are in the shadow of climate change. "They don't put that in the paper, you won't read it in the news," she reminds us. "You have to use your eyes."
On How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, Lindeman also touches on the act of songwriting itself, which makes listening to the record feel as if you are witnessing the creative process of not only this collection of songs but of Ignorance as well. "I'm tired of working all night long, trying to fit this world into a song," she sings on "To Talk About." But just because How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars is unadorned doesn't mean it feels unfinished. By design, these songs are understated but Lindeman's voice is so strong and incredibly beautiful that what she gives you is fulsome. Paired with the album's multitudinous lyrical details, Lindeman delicately succeeds in fitting the world into her songs.
(Next Door)How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars is a quiet album. There's Lindeman, her piano and faint wisps of additional, jazz-inflected lap steel and woodwinds like the colours of a fading sunset. Where Lindeman is often flanked by two (and sometimes three) percussionists when performing songs from Ignorance, here, there is no percussion.
What's left are gentle piano ballads that are filled with deeply intimate moments and thoughts. Not the moments that you shout about or throw a party for, but the everyday events and musings that make a life. There's dancing, walks are taken, stars and birds are gazed at, a head rests on a lover's chest. Many of the topics Lindeman grapples with on Ignorance, including the climate crisis, are present here too, but delivered with a softer touch. On "Endless Time," Lindeman reflects on how precarious our lives are in the shadow of climate change. "They don't put that in the paper, you won't read it in the news," she reminds us. "You have to use your eyes."
On How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, Lindeman also touches on the act of songwriting itself, which makes listening to the record feel as if you are witnessing the creative process of not only this collection of songs but of Ignorance as well. "I'm tired of working all night long, trying to fit this world into a song," she sings on "To Talk About." But just because How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars is unadorned doesn't mean it feels unfinished. By design, these songs are understated but Lindeman's voice is so strong and incredibly beautiful that what she gives you is fulsome. Paired with the album's multitudinous lyrical details, Lindeman delicately succeeds in fitting the world into her songs.
