Album: Ignorance (2021)
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Songfacts®:

  • Ignorance is the fifth studio album by the Weather Station. Throughout the record, the Canadian band's frontwoman, Tamara Lindemann, uses elaborate metaphors of a dysfunctional relationship and losing a loved one to articulate her grief concerning climate change. Her mourning of the erosion of trust between two people on this song ties into humankind's de-prioritization of nature and the world around us.
  • Lindemann is an empathetic person, and she wrote this song about the difficulty she has in understanding why some people actively choose conflict instead of living in peace with one another. "I wasn't actually thinking about a personal relationship when I wrote this song," she told Apple Music. "I was thinking about the world and various things that were happening at the time. I think the song is centered in understanding the softness that it takes to stand up for what matters, even when it's not cool."
  • Mojo magazine asked Lindemann what made her come up with an environmentalist breakup album. She explained: "I was going through something people have started to describe as climate grief, or climate anxiety. I found it to be a radicalizing experience that broke me open in a very profound way. I was writing from a bluntly emotional place and I tried, more than usual, to let it be that way.

    I'm very critical. I'm afraid of words, they're so permanent, and lyrics are really scary. That's why I take so long to write a song. But I challenged myself to let some of the lyrics stand that seems far too emotional, because I felt like I was expressing something very elemental. There's this profound conflict in the way everyone relates to each other right now. I think it exists for good reasons: people are trying to change the world.

    But there's also this level of, how can you learn to relate to a person when everything you see around you is so unloving and unaccepting? I've been thinking a lot about how many people were, and are, completely enchanted by Donald Trump. Why is that? And how is it that any different from emotional abuse in relationships, and why people don't leave abusive partners? What is it about our minds that we call so many things love that are the opposite of love? And why are we building this world that's so a human? It's like with a world for robots forgetting that we're very soft, Squishy, vulnerable, sensitive beings."
  • Canadian musician Owen Pallett arranged the strings. Pallett has also worked with Arcade Fire ("Loneliness #3 (Night Talking)"), Snow Patrol ("New York") and Wolf Alice ("The Last Man On Earth").

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