How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars

AlbumMar 04 / 202210 songs, 32m 16s
Singer-Songwriter
Popular Highly Rated

When Tamara Lindeman started planning her sixth album for The Weather Station, she envisioned something like *Chet Baker Sings* or Bob Dylan’s *Shadows in the Night*: Delicate, nocturnal music that combines the subtlety of jazz with the immediacy of pop standards. Lindeman’s writing is quieter, and her band—a drum-free lineup of Toronto-based players who improvised their accompaniment to her live piano playing—is more digressive, but you get the comparison. This is spacious, unhurried music, fragile in sound but confident in delivery—a city, cast in paper. She might remind you of Joni Mitchell ballads circa *Blue* (“Endless Time,” “To Talk About”), but the key is in her lyrics, which ground the ethereality of the music with more tactile observations: “Drove out in the desert in a rental car/And I climb up on the roof and lie in wait,” she sings on “Stars.” “For my eyes to adjust/For some peaceful state.”

114

8.0 / 10

Performed almost entirely at the piano, the follow-up to Tamara Lindeman’s 2021 breakthrough Ignorance raises dizzying questions with sensitivity and quiet hope.

B

Singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman’s surprise release sounds nothing like her recent breakthrough album—but it’s just as impactful

The Weather Station's new album 'How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars' is a softer, more instinctive companion to 2021's 'Ignorance'.

7 / 10

The Weather Station's How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars is full of dense and oblique beauty

With its dazzling sounds and poignant reflections on relationships and climate change, 2021's Ignorance suggested that the Weather Station's Tamara Lindeman was at a creative peak.

8 / 10

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...

Tamara Lindeman follows up last year’s multilayered masterpiece with songs of love and existential sorrow that call to mind a fellow complex Canadian

8 / 10

On the companion piece to last year's 'Ignorance', the Weather Station creates a piano-based record just as existentially anxious but anchored by quietude.

7.6 / 10

The Weather Station 'How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars' Album Review by Greg Walker. The LP is now available via Fat Possum/Next Door

65 %

Album Reviews: The Weather Station - How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars

80 %

10 / 10

Soft, stunning set of unmoored ballads