Paradise of Bachelors has spent the past few years building its reputation as one of the finest labels around for tradition-minded North American music. If they're putting it out, you should be listening. On May 12th, they'll drop The Weather Station's fantastic new album, Loyalty, and it might be my favorite thing yet.
The Weather Station is Toronto's Tamara Lindeman; Loyalty is her third LP, recorded in a 19th century mansion outside Paris. Like that studio, or memorable art, the record seems to exist outside time. "I saw recently the works of Mary Pratt, a Newfoundland artist who spent most of her life as a housewife—her husband was a successful painter," Lindeman told The FADER. "Her paintings depict domestic scenes—jelly in jars, cod fillets in aluminum foils, a salmon head in a sink, but in such rich, elaborate detail, it's painful somehow. I guess when I see her paintings, I realize that I'm trying to do the same thing, on some level."
"Shy Women," premiering today, is a perfect example of her attentiveness to minute, universalizing details. "It started the same as most my songs do—a small, commonplace moment that I couldn't get out of my head," Lindeman told The FADER. "There was something about it, so ordinary that it begged to be described, and describing it felt powerful somehow—simply to say that it was important, this commonplace thing—worth singing about. And as I did, the moment revealed itself as a kind of elevator shaft, going pretty much straight down, through all the 'shyness' of myself and many of the women I grew up with, and all the moments when we had kept silence, and how that silence has underpinned so much that is deeply wrong."
One of the great lines in "Shy Women" is: You were staring out, your eyes real straight, like nothing touches you these days/ It seemed to me that luxury would be to be not so ashamed. She explained a bit: "When I say it would be a 'luxury to be not so ashamed,' I mean that completely. Shame is, for most women, a constant companion, and is I think the last greatest gender divide, that will be with us for as long as women feel their experience is not worth speaking of, and blame themselves for the actions and feelings of others." Below, it adds up to a remarkable song.
Tour dates:
Apr-15 London, ON Aeolian Hall *
Apr-16 London, ON Aeolian Hall *
Thu-May-14 Toronto, ON The Great Hall
May-21 Montreal, QC Casa Del Popolo
May-22 Wakefield, QC Black Sheep Inn
May-23 Thunder Bay , ON Crocks *
May-25 Winnipeg, MB West End Cultural Centre *
May-26 Regina, SK The Exchange *
May-27 Saskatoon , SK Broadway Theatre *
May-29 Edmonton , AB Royal Alberta Museum *
May-30 Calgary, AB Central United Church *
May-31 Cranbrook, BC The Key City Theatre *
Jun-01 Nelson, BC Civic Theatre *
Jun-03 Victoria, BC Alix Goolden Hall *
Jun-04 Vancouver, BC Vogue Theatre *
Jul 10-12 Winnipeg, MB Winnipeg Folk Festival
* w / Great Lake Swimmers
Jul 31 - Aug 2 Happy Valley, OR Pickathon
