The Weather Station’s last album, Ignorance (2021), was a masterpiece. A set of lush pop songs about climate grief and lost innocence, it paired Tamara Lindeman’s sophisticated songcraft with a bold, outgoing sound palette.
How Is It … is a parallel work of voice, piano and barely-there, often improvised orchestrations recorded with different musicians; songs too intimate and delicate to fit the Ignorance tracklisting – although you can hear the similarities between songs such as Sway and Ignorance’s I Tried to Tell You.
Recorded over three days in early March 2020, songs such as Endless Time boggle quietly at first world comfort and entitlement, hitting the acetate just as Covid upended reality. Lindeman catalogues the things we will soon recall taking for granted, such as buying “champagne grapes, strawberries and lilies in November rain”, and the presumptuousness of explorers who miscatalogued indigenous fauna according to too-narrow taxonomies – the terrible “ignorance” of the last album’s title.
These songs about love and existential sorrow feel purposely airy and unanchored – there’s no percussion – mirroring the psychological freefall of recent times. Ironically, though, they firm up the parallels between Lindeman and fellow complex Canadian, Joni Mitchell.
