The Weather Station w/Bernice
Friday December 8, 7pm
The Carleton, 1685 Argyle Street
$20
Near the beginning of "You and I (On the Other Side of the World)," from her self-titled, fourth album as The Weather Station, Tamara Lindeman sings what could be taken as a distillation of her music: "I love because I see."
Describing the lyric and her latest record, Lindeman gestures toward the clarity at the heart of her experience of emotion and music. "There's a lot of songs about how love is complicated or difficult or crazy," she says. "But it's not love that's difficult. To me, love is the simple part."
Lindeman's music has always been intricate, but her vision has never sounded clearer than on The Weather Station. Her latest record feels like a revelation of beauty and confidence—and she and her band are bringing it to The Carleton on Friday. "Making the album was a process of empowering myself to make those decisions," she says of The Weather Station, which she also produced. "When I wrote the record I had a very clear vision of how I wanted the record to sound, down to drum sounds and melodies of the different instruments. Everything was pretty clear in my mind, so it was a matter of trusting that and moving forward piece by piece."
Lindeman's lyrics are meticulous and prosaic, stories that resonate through melody instead of repetition. She describes her songwriting process as a series of revisions, letting go of caution to let her words settle into the spaces she opens with melody. "There's a lot of things that are pretty stressful, the world is in a pretty dark place, there's a lot of uncertainty," she says. "As an anxious, cautious person, at first I worried about that. But now I got to a point where I'm sort of past that, in a different state of grace."
