By Will McGuirk
“‘Everywhere we go there is an outside, over all of these ceilings hangs a sky // And it kills me when I - you know it just kills me when I see some bird fly // It just kills me, and I don’t know why.”
I don’t know if, in all of my time I’ve been doing this, have I heard an artist who sums up the now so succinctly as The Weather Station has in this song, and in a way which captures something so global, so immersive, so common to all, so human, in a manner which expresses that human experience so readily, and, and, and. . . with such a propulsive hopefulness. When one hears other ones speak of music as an universal language this song is what they mean. There have been those who create an understanding of the recent past, the distant past, maybe even what the future was going to be and understood when that future has come to past but to be here, to be now, right here in all of this and give us this which so concisely sums up what I believe we are all feeling and I know I am feeling and with all of the artistry around it, all of the newness and exploration and abandonment and honesty of just being in this here and in this now and in the this of this is it and its so all of all of it, so . . . I have compared and others have, since The Weather Station’s first airings, compared Tamara Lindeman to Joni Mitchell and one can say with this one song Tamara Lindeman has both lived up to that comparison and stepped out of that comparison for ever more.
The Weather Station’s latest album ‘Ignorance’ comes out Feb 5 via Next Door Records - get it.
