Photo by Perry Shimon
I saw the Weather Station at SXSW a few years ago, playing on a harsh, fluorescent-lit stage in the corner of the Convention Center. It was such a laughably bad situation. Tamara Lindeman plays subdued, detail-rich folk music, not the best kind of sound to go toe-to-toe against the Convention Center’s absurdity. But Lindeman has that rare quality of putting an audience in the palm of her hand. Her quiet intensity held back the SXSW tide for twenty minutes or so.
On The Weather Station, Lindeman’s upcoming fourth album, that quiet intensity gets amplified a bit. She says she wanted to make her own version of a rock and roll record, and the first single “Thirty” does move faster than some of her previous work. The shuffling beat mimics the days whipping past at age thirty, where she’s sprinting down a different road: “The dollar was down but my friends opened businesses / There were new children, and again I didn’t get married.” Lindeman’s best songs sit at these funny intersections where transcendence is possible, even among the noise.
“Thirty” appears on The Weather Station, out October 6 via Paradise Of Bachelors.
–Art Levy // host, Sunday 10 a.m. – 2 p.m., producer, My KUTX
