Starting in a familiar place, but with a “totally different polarity”
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TAMARA LINDEMAN: I’ve gone back to Canterbury [studio in Toronto], the same as Ignorance. It’s sort of an old-fashioned studio with really great booths. It allows you to go in with a lot of musicians, but also to have the freedom where you’re playing live and people can be making mistakes or trying things that don’t work. You’re not trapped in a one-room situation where you have to commit to every single part of the arrangement. And everything sounds really good, it’s very luxurious.
So it’s a similar starting place, but I think that this record will have a longer post-production. It’s not just going to be the songs from the studio – I think there’s going to be a whole other element that’s added afterwards. Some of the songs are less song-like, I guess. I’m trying to experiment a bit with the form. When I went in with the band, I tried to set aside time each day to improvise, and just record everyone playing and improvising. And then I wrote pieces on top of those little pieces.
I’m always trying to have something to influence me that’s not singer-songwriter music. Over the last few records, I’ve come to this process where I have very distant influences that are not at all like my own music. I’m still myself, it still sounds like me, but it’s pulling in this unusual direction. Even though this album has some of the same players and some of the same process, it’s got a totally different polarity.
I’m trying to ask the music to tell the story thematically as much as the lyrics, so I’ll see if I can pull it off. I’m always trying to find that line between conceptual and personal, and I think with this album, there doesn’t need to be a line, it’s all the same thing. The questions I’m thinking on are pretty existential in terms of climate and AI. It can feel like there are strange forces at work in the world that are really anti-human, and I’m just very confused: why are we building a society that doesn’t work for us? The album is engaging in that, trying to understand why that is happening. And also trying to push back against that and assert what it means to be alive in a very fucked up time.
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