The Weather Station hits critical bullseye with current album

Story by Mary Dickie | Thursday April 15th, 2021

The Weather Station might be the perfect name for Tamara Lindeman’s musical entity. She’s had her antennae up, listening intently to what’s going on in the world, and translating big climatic shifts into human terms – through songs about strained personal relationships.

Lindeman’s latest album, Ignorance, has hit a bullseye, receiving widespread and high critical acclaim, from the New York Times saying she evokes thoughts of Joni Mitchell; to The Guardian deeming Ignorance a “heartbroken masterpiece”; to Pitchfork calling the record “stunning” and “unforgettable.” And indeed, it’s musically adventurous, with lyrics that refer to our feelings of shame and obliviousness about the climate crisis, as well as our inability to really communicate with each other.

“I think this record has touched a nerve,” says Lindeman. “It’s powerful when ideas and emotions are out there and we all resonate with the same things. I wasn’t sure at first whether the songs were about personal feelings, or feelings I was soaking up from people around me, or from society as a whole. But as I wrote, I realized that it was often all three, and that it was a positive thing to maintain in the lyrics.”

The album opener, “Robber,” addresses the way environmental devastation becomes almost accepted while we’re not paying attention. “The robber don’t hate you,” she sings, “he had permission by laws, permission of banks.”

“I think it’s true,” she says. “The robbers I was thinking of don’t even consider their actions to be negative. We like to find a villain, but that song asks, what if no one is really bad but bad things are still happening? How do we deal with that? Do we need to find a villain that looks like a villain? Maybe we don’t – maybe we just need to contend with what is occurring.”

Lindeman points out that some of the songs might also reference other political issues, like residential schools, or living through the Trump administration. “In naming the album Ignorance I wanted to be a bit confrontational,” she says. “Colonialism is the same as racism and sexism. It’s all learned, false ignorance, imagining that you know what another human being is, or what a piece of land is for. It was difficult not to feel a connection between [Trumpism] and the way people experienced romantic relationships, women in particular. It laid bare all these dynamics that we’ve been accepting for far too long. And to me, it’s all part of the same cultural narrative of silence and learned helplessness.”

““It’s powerful when ideas and emotions are out there and we all resonate with the same things”

The deceptively upbeat “Separated” reflects the lack of real communication Lindeman noticed on Twitter. “We can’t talk to each other,” she says. “The whole point of communication and understanding is absent from these places where we’re having conversations. So I was thinking of all the things that were separated and wrote a list, and it was a good, hooky rhythmic line, but it’s a description of all the ways that we refuse to understand each other.”

 Ignorance also represents a sea change in Lindeman’s music, from guitar-based folk to a broader palette that references ‘70s soft-rock and pop, and features keyboards, drum machines, and even a beautiful, jazzy sax solo by Brodie West.

“When I started writing on guitar, I felt like I was just going with the same chord changes and falling into old habits, and when I switched to piano it woke up my creative mind in a positive way and I found it really exciting and fun again,” says Lindeman. “Using the drum machine really opened up the idea of an album with aspects of ‘70s and ‘80s pop music.

 “I’ve never really understood the point of genres,” she adds. “I sort of sew a crazy quilt out of different pieces that remind me of different genres. And I like pushing things together, for example a drum style that’s almost like dance music, and strings that remind me of chamber pop, and guitars that remind me of rock. Having them all together is a nice way to achieve an esthetic richness.”

Holding it all together is Lindeman’s voice, a soft soprano that puts a gentle spin on even the darker themes. “I really leaned into that,” she says. “I never learned the skill of singing loudly, I find it difficult and uncomfortable. So I’ve always sung quietly, and I love it because I have this expression in my voice that’s kind of my signature. On the last record I was trying to make my voice say a bunch of stuff emotionally, but on this one I felt like I let my voice sit more softly, and had the instruments express things I can’t embody with my voice.”

A short guide to non-fungible tokens (NFTs)

Story by Howard Druckman | Thursday April 15th, 2021

There’s been a sudden, widespread proliferation of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in the music industry in February and March of 2021, so here’s a short guide to explain how they work.

NFTs are a way to sell a unique piece of music (or a painting, photo, graphic, collage, video, piece of writing, or anything else, it seems), exclusively to one person, or one small set of people, via a non-fungible token –  which is intrinsically linked to the original work. In essence, the buyer is purchases ownership of a data file that contains the music (or other work of art) in a unique transaction. The back end is controlled by blockchain technology – a kind of digital ledger that can record transactions between two parties efficiently, verifiably, and permanently.

The only way to buy NFTs now is with a cryptocurrency called Ethereum. Once the artist approves the sale, the Ethereum token is deposited in their digital “wallet,” and can then be transferred into their bank account, and withdrawn as actual money. The combination of blockchain technology and cryptocurrency makes buying an NFT very secure. Once the buyer, or small group of buyers (usually fans of the artist), has purchased the item, the only way for anybody else to obtain it is if a buyer re-sells.

There’s usually still a “middleperson” with NFTs, as the artist sells to the fan through a company, which usually takes a percentage for facilitating the transaction, and a fee for the energy required to create the token. But there can also be less need in the transaction for other typical music industry professionals; record companies, streaming services, digital service providers, agents, managers, publicists, promoters, venues, and so on, might all be left out.

There’s a lot of money to be made with NFTs. Often, the sale is done by auction, which drives up the price for in-demand recording artists. One globally popular Canadian musician auctioned off a video-art piece with a song demo for about $490,000 CAD. Kings of Leon made more than $2.5 million CAD in NFT sales of various exclusive versions of, spin-offs from, and merch for, their current album When You See Yourself. It’s not unlike crowd-funding or Patreon perks, with different products offered by artists to their fans at different prices, or levels of funding; but with NFTs, the sale is only to one fan, or very small, exclusive groups of fans, either once, or in very limited-edition numbers.

And the money can be made multiple times. Because the artists set the terms of the sale, they can dictate the percentage they receive of all future sales of the product, no matter how many times it’s re-sold. So, for example. If whoever bought that Canadian musician’s video-art piece for $490,000 CAD re-sells it for, say, $800,000 CAD, and the musician has established, say, a 20 percent share of future sales, they’ll receive another $160,000 CAD when it’s re-sold. And it might be re-sold many times.

But, according to the eternal laws of supply and demand, in order to drive up the price of the NFTs via auction, or set a high initial price for them, the demand already has to be there. So if a musician draws hundreds of fans rather than hundreds of thousands, or casual listeners rather than hardcore fanatics, they might not make more money from NFTs than from crowd-funding or Patreon offers.

The major, current  drawback to NFTs is that the energy used – referred to as “mining” – for Ethereum is bad for the climate. From Time magazine, March 18, 2021: “Critics say the mining that makes NFTs possible is perhaps humanity’s most direct way of making money by polluting the planet – Ethereum mining consumes about 26.5 terawatt-hours of electricity a year, nearly as much as the entire country of Ireland and its almost five million residents.” But that may improve over time with new advances in technology, so the problem might eventually be solved.

Currently, the buzz around NFTs seems driven more by their money-making potential than their intrinsic musical value. Some say they’re the future of the music industry, some say they’re a fad. Only time will tell for sure.

Photo by courtesy of / courtoisie de Gabrielle Laïla Tittley

Visual Arts X Music : Pony, a magical combination of contrasts

Story by Dominic Tardif | Wednesday April 14th, 2021

Through our new series of stories, Visual Arts X Music, we aim to present you with visual artists for whom music plays an essential role, in both their artistic approach, and their lives.

What’s the first album that had a profound impact on the artist known as Pony? Gabrielle Laïla Tittley was 10 when she bought – with her own money! – Jay-Z’s Vol. 2… Hard Knock Life (1998).

Why did it have such an impact on her? ‘Cause it’s Jay-Z (obviously), but also because one of her childhood’s favourite movies – the musical Annie (1982) – is set in an orphanage during the Great Depression, and her mother is an orphan, which establishes a kind of link: As you may remember, the rapper sampled the movie’s “It’s a Hard Knock Life” ditty for his own “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem).”

“A major part of my artistic approach is rooted in that song,” says Tittley, whose pre-teen enthusiasm remains intact. “There’s a magical combination of contrasts between the dude who comes from a tough background and says, ‘Here’s my reality, I sell drugs,’ and then you move on to the super up-beat chorus. There’s a resemblance with what I do: I want to talk about real shit, but with happy colours.”

What’s the place of music in Tittley’s life? “I’m like the Robin to the person I aspire to be,” she explains with a laugh, comparing herself to Batman’s sidekick. What does that mean, exactly? Gabrielle’s analogy means that she has already dreamed of herself as a rock star, ruling a compacted and screaming crowd. But since it’s often wiser not to go against the talents life has bestowed on us, Pony instead became, right in high school (in Gatineau), the ally of choice of her musician friends – their Robin! – for whom she’s been designing posters, flyers, and other promotional materials since the age of 16.

Whereas, at that time, it was the pop-punk stylings of Blink-182, Sum 41, and The Offspring, or even the hardcore of Poison the Well, that rocked Tittley’s headphones, it’s the incendiary rock of Le Nombre that was the soundtrack of her arrival in Montréal when she turned 18. “I was completely ob-ses-sive about Le Nombre,” she says, clearly separating the adjective’s syllables.

She scours her fuzzy memory to try to remember some paintings directly inspired by the organized chaos of Le Nombre’s recordings. “They were huge paintings,” says Tittley. “There was one with an orange Marshall amp.. the amp was open and inside it were…  organs? I can’t remember what lyric it was referring to. There was another one with a zebra-headed human. That was a reference to “Tous ceux de ma race.”

Around that time, the painter began writing down the title of the song that was the soundtrack to the long birth of a painting – “When I’m really into a song, I’ll listen to nothing else for days,” she says.

PONY album covers

It was only a matter of time before she started getting commissions for album cover art, and she immediately embraced this stimulating exercise for the likes of Brixton Robbers, Travelling Headcase, Le Husky, L’Indice, and Bravofunken. The illustration she imagined in 2013 for Ultrapterodactyl’s Quand une mascotte saigne EP couldn’t better summarize Pony’s vision of the world. It’s both jovial and violent, childlike and tragic: on the right side of the image, a blond girl holds the head of a dinosaur mascot, while on the left side of the image, the dinosaur mascot stands, decapitated and bleeding profusely. The rabbit on the cover of Manger du bois (2012) by Canailles deserves to be examined closely: each of its hairs rests on a distinct lead pencil stroke.

In 2016, Pony received the Lucien award for the Album Cover of the Year for Le temps f33l by CRABE, and in 2020, she was nominated at the Gala de l’ADISQ in the same category for Robert Nelson’s Nul n’est roé en son royaume. The first season of the series Résiste ! (which she hosts on TV5) sees her meeting with different musicians, including the Montréal-based rapper Nate Husser, for whom she’ll soon direct a music video.

Pony, Vincent Peake, Groovy Aardvark

Photo: Marc-Étienne Mongrain

During one episode of her own series of shows L’amour passe à travers le linge (whose goal is the feature the work of some of her illustrator peers through the creation of t-shirts sold for the benefit of various charitable organizations) Tittley briefly realized her rock-star ambition and stepped on stage with the band Groovy Aardvark.

“Vincent [Peake] knew that “Ingurgitus” is my all-time favourite song of theirs,” she says. “When he invited me up, everyone was screaming like there was a murder going on, I couldn’t understand what was happening. It was the dream of all my friends, we’re all Groovy fans. Normally I’m super-shy on stage, but that night I gave it my all.”

Does she have a fantasy collaboration with a musician? “I’d love to direct a music video for an old Jean Leloup song,” she says, “maybe ‘Fashion Victim,’ but, like, a thousand years later. Creatively, he’s one of the people I admire the most. I’ve always loved stuff that is out of the ordinary and fucks with standards.”