How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars

When Tamara Lindeman started planning her sixth album for The Weather Station, she envisioned something like Chet Baker Sings or Bob Dylan’s Shadows in the Night: Delicate, nocturnal music that combines the subtlety of jazz with the immediacy of pop standards. Lindeman’s writing is quieter, and her band—a drum-free lineup of Toronto-based players who improvised their accompaniment to her live piano playing—is more digressive, but you get the comparison. This is spacious, unhurried music, fragile in sound but confident in delivery—a city, cast in paper. She might remind you of Joni Mitchell ballads circa Blue (“Endless Time,” “To Talk About”), but the key is in her lyrics, which ground the ethereality of the music with more tactile observations: “Drove out in the desert in a rental car/And I climb up on the roof and lie in wait,” she sings on “Stars.” “For my eyes to adjust/For some peaceful state.”