The Weather Station Releases Loyalty’s Tapes

The Weather Station Announces Full North American Tour

Hear “Tapes” From Her New Album Loyalty

Out May 12th on Paradise of Bachelors  

The Weather Station, the musical project of Toronto artist Tamara Lindeman, has announced a full North American tour in support of her upcoming album, Loyalty.  The tour crosses Canada, the south and both coasts with Great Lake Swimmers, including a performance at this year’s Pickathon Fest.

Loyalty was recorded in close collaboration with Afie Jurvanen (Bahamas) and Robbie Lackritz (Feist) and crystallizes Tamara’s lapidary songcraft into eleven emotionally charged vignettes and intimate portraits, redolent of fellow Canadians Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, and David Wiffen, but utterly her own. 

“Tapes” on Soundcloud Here

“Shy Women” on Soundcloud Here

“Way It Is, Way It Could Be” on Soundcloud Here

The Weather Station Live Dates:  

(U.S. DATES IN BOLD) 

5/8: Gordon Best Theatre – Peterborough, ON

5/14: The Great Hall – Toronto, ON

5/21: Casa Del Popolo – Montreal, QC

5/22: Black Sheep Inn – Wakefield, QC

5/23: Crocks – Thunder Bay, ON #

5/25: West End Cultural Centre – Winnipeg, MB #

5/26: The Exchange – Regina, SK #

5/27: Broadway Theatre – Saskatoon, SK #

5/29: Royal Alberta Museum – Edmonton, AB #

5/30: Central United Church – Calgary, AB #

5/31:The Key City Theatre – Cranbrook, BC #

6/1: Civic Theatre – Nelson, BC #

6/3: Alix Goolden Hall – Victoria, BC #

6/4: Vogue Theatre – Vancouver, BC #

6/5: Chop Suey – Seattle, WA #

6/6: The Green Frog – Bellingham, WA #

6/7: Alberta Rose Theatre – Portland, OR #

6/8: Cozmic – Eugene, OR #

6/10: The Chapel – San Francisco, CA #

6/12: Troubadour – Los Angeles, CA #

6/13: Valley Bar – Phoenix, AZ #

6/14: Club Congress – Tucson, AZ #

6/16: The Parish – Austin, TX #

6/17: Club Dada – Dallas, TX #

6/18: One Eyed Jack’s – New Orleans, LA #

6/19: Workplay Theater – Birmingham, AL #

6/20: The High Watt – Nashville, TN #

6/21: Off Broadway – St. Louis, MO #

6/23: SPACE – Evanston, IL #

6/24: Double Door – Chicago, IL #

7/10 – 7/12: Winnipeg Folk Festival – Winnipeg, MB

7/14: Great Scott – Boston, MA *

7/15: Mercury Lounge – New York, NY *

7/16: Johnny Brenda’s – Philadelphia, PA ^

7/17: DC9 – Washington, DC *

7/18: The Pinhook – Durham, NC *

7/19: The Mothlight – Asheville, NC *

7/20: Zanzabar – Louisville, KY *

7/22: Club Cafe – Pittsburgh, PA *

7/24 – 7/26: Hillside Festival – Guelph, ON

7/31 – 8/2 Pickathon – Happy Valley, OR

# – w/ Great Lake Swimmers

* – w/ Andy Shauf

^ – w/ Mary Lattimore & Jeff Zeigler

After a string of acclaimed releases on You’ve Changed Records,

Loyalty brings a freshly unflinching self-examining gaze and emotional and musical control to Lindeman’s songs. Sonically, the record is a quietly radical statement, with certain passages achieving an eerie harmonic and rhythmic tension new to The Weather Station. She is an extraordinary singer and instrumentalist – on Loyalty she plays guitar, banjo, keys, and vibes – but Lindeman has always been a songwriter’s songwriter, recognized for her intricate, carefully worded verse, filled with double meanings, ambiguities, and complex metaphors. Though more moving than ever, her writing here is almost clinical in its discipline, its deliberate wording and exacting delivery, evoking similarly idiosyncratic songsters from Linda Perhacs to Bill Callahan.  

Lyrically, Loyalty inverts and involutes the language of confession, of regret, of our most private and muddled mental feelings, by externalizing those anxieties through exquisite observation of the things and people we accumulate, the modest meanings accreted during even our most ostensibly mundane domestic moments. 

Outside her musical practice, Lindeman also happens to be an accomplished film and television actor, and it’s her directorial eye for quietly compelling characters and the rich details of the everyday, Bressonian in its specificity and scope, that drives the limpid singularity of The Weather Station’s songs. As in Bresson’s films, there is no trace of theater here, no brittle singer-songwriter histrionics, but rather a powerful performative focus and narrative restraint. Despite the descriptive delicacy, the album never lapses into preciousness or sentimentality, instead retaining its barbs and bristles and remaining resolutely clear-eyed and thick-skinned.