My favorite songwriter these past few years is a Toronto folk/rock musician going by the name of The Weather Station, who is releasing her fourth album this October on Paradise of Bachelors. Self-titled, the LP is a show of force in both what she sings and doesn't.
Take for example the lead single, “Thirty,” which punches with conviction on bold statements like “It was a joke my whole life through / All of the pain and the sorrow I knew” and the memorable “I notice fuckin’ everything.” As such, there are quiet observations too: “Just then an ambulance passed on the street and you took my arm reflexively.”
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But these are only in constellation around the center of “Thirty,” and why that birth year was so essential to the song’s narrator — there’s a horror that isn’t described quite directly, and maybe it’s not that deep or maybe it’s the worst thing you can imagine.
The music video, premiering today, plays with a powerful conceit, exaggerated but only so far from reality. Tamara Lindeman, the woman behind The Weather Station, performs alone before a dozen unimpressed men. “The song is (in part) about feeling loved and rejected at the same time,” she told The FADER. “Which is directly analogous to the experience of being under the male gaze — and also to being on television. So we staged a fake television show, with a male audience … Would it feel uncomfortable? Who would you side with, when you watched?”
The Weather Station is available for pre-order, and her exemplary 2015 album, Loyalty, is on sale to celebrate.
