Tamara Lindeman of Canadian indie-folk project The Weather Station is the latest guest on Beat’s Turning Heads podcast
The Weather Station’s new album Ignorance is out now via Fat Possum/Inertia. It’s Lindeman’s fifth album as The Weather Station and her most polished record to date. Ignorance follows The Weather Station’s self-titled fourth album (2017), which built on the folk and Americana sounds of Lindeman’s earlier releases with full band arrangements that were, at times, genuinely rocking.
Ignorance contains more stylistic depth than any previous The Weather Station album. The folky influences aren’t absent, but the album incorporates pop melody, disco rhythms and layered percussion. Lindeman wrote the album on keyboard, not guitar, and piano is at the centre of many of the songs. She’s backed by a band that includes not just drums, bass and guitar but also saxophone, flute and strings.
Lindeman has always taken a writerly approach to lyric composition, with past releases centring on faithfulness and faithlessness, feminist politics and the acceptance of love. On Ignorance, she focuses on climate change and its entwinement with neoliberal economics – often to devastating effect.
In the podcast, we speak about Tamara’s tendency to change her sound on each album, how the change in style prompted a revised lyric-writing method, the directions she gave to the band playing on Ignorance, and the role played by producer Marcus Paquin.
Check out the podcast episode below:
I will be back with another episode of Turning Heads next week. You can follow the podcast on Spotify, Podbean and through Apple.
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