Why The Weather Station Moved Backwards To Get Ahead

Tamara Lindeman, lead singer and central force of Canadian folk band The Weather Station, recorded their latest album Loyalty at La Frette, an old mansion turned recording studio in a small town just outside of Paris.

"This mansion, this town, there's something very beautiful about all of the objects," says Lindeman. "The walls are beautiful and the floor is beautiful, and all these things that in North America we kind of don't think too much about. Everything felt kind of thought out. And so I think that went into the music in that it made me want to make a beautiful record and unafraid to make a beautiful record."

Loyalty is a gentle, intimate collection of songs — a description that Lindeman says she finds interesting. "I don't see it as soft or gentle, but I recognise [that] it does sound that way." It is feminine, "as an idea, not necessarily a gender", Lindeman clarifies. Feminine in that it is, "just a natural extension of how I think, you know, I don't draw conclusions about a situation, I sort of present multiple ideas about it, and that's a song. Which is, I think, a very feminine way of looking".

"The walls are beautiful and the floor is beautiful, and all these things that in North America we kind of don't think too much about."

Lindeman travelled backwards, in a way, towards this gentle folk music. Lindeman had moved to Toronto from a small town in rural Ontario, and she says, "I was actually into a lot of experimental music at the time, because that was what I was surrounded by." Her first album, The Line, was "kinda crazy. It's very different. It took years and, you know, it's pretty flawed, but there's lots of ideas on it". At the time, she says,  "Toronto was a big outpouring of weird music, and I wanted to make music like that." But despite herself, her approach to songs was instinctively folky. "Just acoustic guitar [and] voice seemed like the right choice in the way I present them, so that was the direction things went."

Making the second album, All That Was Mine, "I was just home a lot and I would try to write this bombastic song or this emotional song and I just felt like talking about my house and my backyard, so that was the record I made." 

Her third record, Loyalty, is just as intimate, with its fingerpicked guitar lines and Lindeman's sweet, soaring voice floating across them, singing of low sunlight and ice on the trees, faithfulness and loyalty.

"I called it Loyalty because I feel like loyalty is often presented as a virtue or something that's on a greeting card. And I am a very loyal person. But then I noticed that on the songs I was really examining that and noticing how I have been loyal to many things that have not necessarily been loyal to me or had been good to me. And I include in that people or ideas or sort of fantasy versions of how I thought things should be. And so I began to see loyalty as sort of a double-edged sword in my life. So I thought it was interesting to name the record Loyalty because at first you're like, 'Oh yeah, that's so nice,' and then you listen to a lyric and you're like, 'Oh, maybe that's not what she meant,'" she chuckles.