Winds In The West

It has been mild for the past few days, but the temperature dropped and the wind picked up by Monday evening. I hopped on the subway, then the Ossington bus to make my way to The Great Hall. My last show there was sublime. Tamara Lindeman (The Weather Station) now has enough of a local fanbase that she can have 3 shows where each night she will play 2 of her 6 albums in their entirety. If I was still in Toronto, I would have bought the pass and attended all concerts. Being in Ottawa now, I settled on seeing the 1st night before heading back.

It was a seated event which was appropriate since Tamera Lindeman doesn't write tracks you can dance to, especially in the early days. Also, I find this arrangement reduces the backroom chatter so that softer music don't get drowned out. I was curious about the near sold-out audience since most of them weren't around back then. But we were all in for a treat tonight, because as Lindeman pointed out later, in those days she played solo sets. This was the first time that a live band would accompany her on the earliest material.

The first set had songs from the EP What Am I Going To Do With Everything I Know. This was actually released after the relative success of her first album. As one can tell from the title, The Weather Station's songs (Soft Spoken Man, Time) tended to be dense lyrically but also a bit elliptical. She had just left behind her banjo days so there was plenty of intricate finger-picking on the guitar. With only 6 tunes on that EP, we also heard a few unreleased songs to round out the set. They were more straightforward though many thought Crooked Line was a country/blues banger.

With the album All of It Was Mine we started to hear quieter arrangements (Traveller, Nobody) but there were still tricky runs such as when Lindeman broke out her banjo for Everything I Saw. She had to restart the song, adding wryly that her banjo muscles were rusty. Compared to a decade ago when she didn't talk much, we got background information and insight about her work. For example, Chip On My Shoulder was her obduracy in the face of some people (in life and also the music business) who get (creepily) excited about young, inexperienced women/artists. The second set was also relatively short. Lindeman mused, to the audience's laughter, that she needed to pad out her songs with more choruses.

I don't know if Lindeman will have different backing bands for each show; I saw that frequent collaborator Ivy Mairi was sitting in the audience tonight. But there were familiar faces on stage such as Ben Whiteley and new ones like Georgia Harmer. The one who came from the farthest away was Kentucky fingerstyle guitarist Nathan Salsburg. He reached out to Lindeman after her first album and they've been friends ever since. He was warmly received after his introduction but some in the crowd got really excited when he revealed that his wife was singer Joan Shelley.

The encore was an interesting dilemma because Lindeman will play all of her songs but just on different nights. Tonight we got 3 great covers instead. She opened with a capella rendition of Black Is The Colour of My True Love's Hair. Lindeman's musical career started when she received positive encouragement after singing it at an Irish trad at Dora Keogh (now Noonan's Pub) in the East End. Salsburg played his instrumental number Impossible Air. Then the full band ended with Richard Laviolette's Snuck Right Up. This musician, an early inspiration for The Weather Station, had recently died. This song (about "pure love" per Lindeman) gave us a sing-along refrain to send us warmly out into the cold.