The Weather Station Premieres “You and I (on the Other Side of the World).”

Photo by Shervin Lainez.

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Don’t forget: pre-order customers will be entered into a drawing for a test pressing and PoB t-shirt.

N.B.: To celebrate the release of their new self-titled album, The Weather Station’s Loyalty (PoB-019) is now on sale for $15 LP/$10 CD/$23 LP+CD/$5 MP3.

Thanks to Gold Flake Paint for premiering The Weather Station‘s “You and I (on the Other Side of the World),” a gorgeous, stately counterpoint to the rush of her first two singles from her self-titled, self-produced album due on October 6th. Read, and listen, here.

“Another fervent chapter in The Weather Station’s story, conjuring up the kind of subtle magic that can lend the heaviest of blows. Her exquisite compositions are able to light up whichever room they find themselves despite – or perhaps in spite of – the heavy-heart that seems to drive the whole project forward.” – Tom Johnson, Gold Flake Paint

Here are the powerful lyrics:

It was always a marriage, from the moment that you stepped into my hallway, shy as anyone I’ve ever known. You choose what to believe in, in this flippant time there’s no real reason not to. We wrote letters to each other as though addressing the ocean. That we stand before now, you in my old cardigan, and I in your blue jeans, and the light turned golden on the distant headlands, and the ocean; you and I on the other side of the world. Love, it is no mystery, it never has been—no, not to me. I love because I see.

But we never got better, we never got to talking, we never figured out the questions, we got good at walking; walking the streets, when it was too hot to eat, walking in step, we can’t help it.

You remember in June, you showed up one day, with a small leather suitcase swaying your walk. And you stayed on with me late into the evening, into all the years that have passed on since then. With no certainty, no agreement, more intimate than I could imagine, but with space I cannot fathom. Like a song with so much silence, just like you in your defiance—you say you never questioned anything; you say you knew from the beginning.

I ask for your hand in it, some infinite understanding. But I don’t know nothing of what I am asking; I have no idea of what it will entail. I asked for your hand like it was too intimate to ask for your mind, or to count on kindness, like I count only on your presence, like I don’t count on nothing else.

Oh, it was always a marriage, from the moment that you stepped into my hallway, shy as anyone I’d ever known, curious and alone.

With The Weather Station, Tamara Lindeman reinvents her song craft with a vital new energy, framing her prose-poem narratives in bolder musical settings. It’s an emotionally candid statement – a work of urgency, generosity and joy – that feels like a collection of obliquely gut-punching short stories. The album declares its understated feminist politics and new sonic directions from its first moments. There are big, buzzing guitars, thrusting drums, horror-movie strings, and her keening, Appalachian-tinged vocal melodies. Reaching towards a sort of accelerated talking blues, Lindeman sings with a new rapid-fire vocal style. “I wanted to make a rock and roll record,” she explains, “but one that sounded how I wanted it to sound, which of course is nothing like rock and roll.”

Among other accolades, The Weather Station has been lauded by legendary critic Richard Williams in the pages of Uncut, with a lead review, interview, and her song “Thirty” on the covermount CD. Pick up a copy of the magazine to read it all.

9/10. Lindeman could never pass unrecognized. No one else is writing true-life songs with such a command of nuance and ellipsis, with such generosity of unguarded emotion and careful economy of means, like Sam Shepard writing haiku.

– Richard Williams, Uncut

The new record I’m most excited about right now is by the Weather Station, a folk outfit from Toronto fronted by the singer and songwriter Tamara Lindeman. “Thirty,” the first single from “The Weather Station,” the group’s fourth record, which comes out this fall, is a song that could take a punch to the face—an urgent retelling of her thirtieth year, its triumphs, its jokes, and its failures, and how difficult it is, sometimes, to tell those things apart. Lindeman has a poet’s eye for precise, unsentimental detail (“I noticed fucking everything,” she sings, recounting a scene at a gas station), and the rigor of her narration recalls Courtney Barnett’s “Depreston,” maybe the best song ever written about ennui and real estate. “That was the year I was thirty, that was the year you were thirty-one,” Lindeman sings. How does a person suss out the proper arc of a life? She doesn’t know, either. “That was the year that we lost or we won.”

– Amanda Petrusich, The New Yorker

The power of Tamara Lindeman’s music is in the details. Even more than her stark melodies, which often share the persistent flow of a car in motion, her lyrics provide the momentum, unfolding her narratives with patience and precision. As things move faster, she suggests that these subtle, shared moments are how we mark time. Few songwriters capture them with such fluidity.

– Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork

My favorite songwriter these past few years. Self-titled, the LP is a show of force in both what she sings and doesn’t. Another triumph.

– Duncan Cooper, The FADER

An inspired continuation of a rich tradition of intensely-disciplined, self-interrogative pop songwriting. The taut arrangements on The Weather Station, adorned here with aerial surges of strings, create The Weather Station’s own specific music universe, at turns claustrophobic or extending all the way towards a distant horizon.

– Winston Cook-Wilson, SPIN

Watch The Weather Station’s “Kept It All to Myself” Video

Listen to The Weather Station’s “Kept It All to Myself”

The Weather Station will tour North American this fall with James Elkington supporting on most dates; she will also tour the UK and EU with Will Stratton supporting. All dates are below and tickets are available at http://www.theweatherstation.net.

The Weather Station Tour Dates:

Fri. Oct 20 – Gent, BE @ Trefpunt *
Sat. Oct 21 – Utrecht, NE @ Ramblin’ Roots Festival *
Mon. Oct 23 – London, UK @ The Lexington *
Tue. Oct 24 – Manchester, UK @ Eagle Inn *
Thu. Oct 26 – Amsterdam, NE @ Tolhuistuin *
Fri. Oct 27 – Paris, FR @ Pop Up Du Label *
Sun. Oct 29 – Berlin, DE @ Monarch *
Wed. Nov. 1 – Los Angeles, CA @ Bootleg #
Thu. Nov. 2 – San Francisco, CA @ Café Du Nord #
Sat. Nov. 4 – Spokane, WA @ The Bartlett #
Sun. Nov. 5 – Portland, OR @ Mississippi Studios #
Mon. Nov. 6 – Seattle, WA @ Sunset #
Wed. Nov. 8 – Vancouver, BC @ Fox Theatre #
Fri. Nov. 24 – Toronto, ON @ The Great Hall
Tue. Nov. 28 – New York, NY @ Rough Trade #
Wed. Nov. 29 – Philadelphia, PA @ Boot & Saddle #
Thu. Nov. 30 – Chapel Hill, NC @ Cat’s Cradle #
Sat. Dec. 2 – Chicago, IL @ The Hideout #
Wed. Dec. 6 – Montreal, QC @ Divan Orange
Thu. Dec. 7 – Quebec City, QC @ Le Cercle
Fri. Dec. 8 – Halifax, NS @ The Carleton
Sat. Dec. 9 – Sackville, NB @ Thunder & Lightning