“I’m really astonished and grateful,” she tells Newsweek. “It wasn’t just the acclaim—it was like the way that the album was treated and heard and the sensitivity. I feel like I revealed a bunch of things that I perhaps was afraid to reveal in public. The reception of that record is really connected to a lot of things that matter to me. It’s just been amazing.”

Ignorance struck a nerve with the public. Now The Weather Station’s new record, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, which was released via Fat Possum earlier this month, carries the same emotional effect (The band recently made its late-night TV debut on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, and has U.S. and European tour dates this year). A collection of intimate ballads, the new album not only delves into climate change once more but also matters concerning discord (“Sleight of Hand”), love and relationships (“To Talk About”), writing (“Song”), and a bird (“Ignorance”).

Lindeman says the album is more a companion work to Ignorance than a follow-up; its 10 songs were written around the same time as the material that eventually ended up on 2021’s Ignorance. Unlike its predecessor, though, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars employs no percussion, giving The Weather Station’s jazz-pop arrangements and Lineman’s wistful singing a more stark feel. The musician says she was influenced by albums like jazz trumpeter Chet Baker’s Chet Baker Sings and Bob Dylan’s Shadows in the Night.

“I would write this softer other song,” she recalls, “and every time it happened, I was like, ‘I don’t know what to do with this. It doesn’t fit on the [Ignorance] record. What do I do?’ Then at a certain point, I was like, ‘Well, maybe this is another project.’ And then I started to be like, ‘Actually, I really love these really quiet songs I’m writing, so I’m going to honor them and then write them and make sure they get finished.’”

Lindeman and her band recorded How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars in three days in March 2020 as the COVID lockdown was commencing; the opening line on the track “Marsh” is, “The year was unrelenting, we argued all the time.” The gravity of the climate crisis is referenced on the new album’s first single, “Endless Time.” It was inspired by Lindeman walking down a street and noticing the plentitude of fruits and vegetables widely available for public consumption long before the pandemic.

“I kept thinking about that abundance that we take for granted and how we don’t notice the systems that uphold that,” Lindeman explains, “also combined with an ending in a relationship and the grief of that. The line “I used to think that I could see everything that met my eyes” was the line that made me feel that song was finished. It felt really heavy to me. I think, too, the refrain of “It’s the only end of an endless time/They don’t put that in the paper/You won’t read it in the news”—that is very much literally about the climate crisis. It feels endless that nothing will ever change, but it’s an ending all the time.”

On “Stars,” the narrator looks at the night sky around New Year’s Eve. “I had the story of childhood and the panic attack of looking up at the stars,” Lindeman says. “To me, every time I hear that it’s a [new] year, it sounds like the year that we were supposed to have renewable energy by—like, we were supposed to have cut 30 percent [of greenhouse gas emissions] by 2020, et cetera. And we never have. It’s always this failure. Once I hit on that metaphor of the fireworks and the celebration, that felt like it completed the song.”

The tender “Loving You,” Lindeman’s cover of a John Southworth song, ends How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars on a somewhat optimistic note. “I really wanted that beauty of real love, care, concern and tenderness,” she explains. “That is what we’re all looking for and trying to embody. I loved the line, “I’m on my way to loving you.” I thought that was really beautiful.”

How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars represents another evolution for Lindeman—who began her career as a child actress—since The Weather Station’s 2009 debut album, the folk-ish The Line. Her sound over the course of now six studio albums has grown nuanced and expansive, with the constants being her voice and pensive lyrics. “I was growing and changing,” she says. “I think it’s taken me a long time to understand. I love recording and I love vision. I think [in] all of these records, there’s been this essential vision about how the record should be and everything shapes itself around that. I didn’t know that when I was younger.”

During her childhood in the 1980s, Lindeman was aware of climate change through her parents. But it was years later when she read an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report that she became galvanized. She says: “I went on this whole journey of being like, ‘Wait, can we fix it?’ ‘Can we stop it?’ ‘Is it too late?’ ‘What’s going to happen in my lifetime?’ All of this information is actually kind of hard to really grasp. I went on my own journey of just trying to figure out how to be an activist.”

“I thought no one will pick up on the climate side of [Ignorance]. And then somehow it just became a climate crisis record in the public consciousness, and I did not expect that. But the fact that it happened was really interesting to me where I was like, ‘People want to talk about this.’ It’s a wild ride, and I hope it’s not over.”

Lindeman says she doesn’t write protest music but rather songs about what she thinks incessantly about. “One of the deepest feelings on those two records [Ignorance and How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars] is the sense of betrayal and anger and disconnection,” she says. “To me, that is very much about the climate crisis and my generation and being lied to your whole life about this incredibly serious thing and doubting yourself. "

Climate change was not the reason Lindeman first called her band The Weather Station. The moniker was based on the romantic image of a person living in a weather station in the Arctic. “It feels like a beautiful piece of fate that I call my band The Weather Station not thinking about climate change, but then somehow realized that that is the exact right name for what I do literally and metaphysically,” she says. “I do feel like as a person and a songwriter, what I do is observe and I observe these weather systems, emotional and physical.”

“I feel an immense sense of gratefulness to my 20-year-old self [at the time] for somehow understanding all of this before I did. I felt embarrassed by the name before and felt kind of silly that I just didn’t use my name. But as time has gone on, I think it’s beautiful and appropriate. I hope I’m able to keep talking about all of it truly. And I hope I can learn to do it even better.”

Further Listening

The Line

self-released

2009

First-time listeners of The Weather Station’s music via last year’s Ignorance might be in for a surprise upon hearing the band’s 2009 debut LP—a mix of folk, bluegrass and alt-country rendered in minimalist fashion. Lindeman made the album herself with the help of a computer. “I recorded everything,” she recalls, “and it was sort of this beautiful process of just experimenting and recording sounds and layering them. I was learning banjo and I kind of half played guitar. But because I was recording it, I didn’t have to be good at an instrument—I could just take a chunk and then manipulate it. So that was my opening.”

All of It Was Mine

You’ve Changed Records

2011

Lindeman’s sophomore effort didn’t depart too drastically from its predecessor. The folk-laden performances recall the work of artists like Karen Dalton, Linda Perhacs, and Sharon Van Etten early in her career. “I wanted to be able to play a song that I could just play,” Lindeman says of making All of It Was Mine, “whereas The Line was all songs that required all of this complexity to even perform. I was like, ‘Can I write songs that are good enough to stand up without any of that?’ I was really into bluegrass and old-time [music] and the Stanley Brothers. I got deep into that world at that time. And I met [musician/producer] Danny Romano, who made that record and basically shaped that sound with me.”

Loyalty

Paradise of Bachelors

2015

Recorded in France, the third Weather Station album Loyalty was a leap forward. The folk influences were still present, but the tone was brighter while Lindeman’s singing felt more assured; highlights include"Floodplain” and “I Mined.” In a 2015 interview with The Line of Best Fit, the musician described Loyalty as a “symbol of emancipation”: “In a lot of the songs on the record, it was kind of looking at how I have tried to please people in my life, and am always trying to be obliging to what other people want me to be. I think this record was where I realized, ‘Yeah, this is me.’”

The Weather Station

Paradise of Bachelors

2017

Released to tremendous praise in 2017, The Weather Station’s self-titled album leaned towards more rock and pop than her earlier folk explorations. It’s on The Weather Station where Lindeman really elevated herself as a songwriter, singer and producer. Of the album’s standout single “Thirty,” the singer told NPR: “As a woman, 30 is the age you’re taught to fear. When you’re 25 you picture it like falling off the edge of a cliff into some amorphous, bisected destiny—one path being children and suburbia and the other some sort of cartoonish loneliness.”