First Aid Kit: Palomino Tour at the Palace Theatre in St. Paul on Sunday, July 23
with special guests The Weather Station

Doors 7 p.m. | Show 8 p.m. | 18+

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First Aid Kit

Uplifted by the familial creative harmony of sisters Klara and Johanna Söderberg, First Aid Kit delicately threads together eloquent folk, breezy Americana, and pensive pop. After amassing over 1 billion streams and counting, the two-time BRIT Award-nominated Swedish duo’s blend of artful songcraft and ambitious melodies continues to fixate audiences worldwide. Following The Big Black and The Blue [2010] and The Lion’s Roar [2012], the group reached critical mass with 2014’s Stay Gold. The lead single “My Silver Lining” gathered hundreds of millions of streams and picked up a gold certification in the UK. In 2018, Ruins went gold in Sweden and earned “4-out-of-5 stars” from The Guardian, Q, and NME, while Pitchfork applauded it as “a showcase for their sweet harmonies, with some bold stylistic departures.” In the wake of the latter, they scored a second nomination at the BRIT Awards in the category of “Brit Award for International Group.”

Along the way, they collaborated with everyone from Jenny Lewis and Conor Oberst to George Ezra and Zara Larsson. Beyond dozens of film and television syncs a la The Umbrella Academy, the girls voiced characters in the English and Swedish versions of NETFLIX’s Centaurworld. Not to mention, they’ve delivered stunning performances on Jimmy Kimmel LIVE! and The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. First Aid Kit takes flight like never before on their 2022 fifth full-length, Palomino. Produced by Daniel Bengtson and crafted in Sweden, it leans into vibrant and vital pop hooks with their signature intuition and emotional acuity on display as introduced through the single “Out of My Head.”

The Weather Station

One year ago, The Weather Station released Ignorance, one of 2021’s most praised and far-reaching albums. Today, Tamara Lindeman announces How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars, a new album out March 4 on Fat Possum. How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars is intended to be heard as a companion piece to Ignorance. These are songs written at the same time that connect emotionally and deal with many of the same themes: disconnection and conflict, love, birds, and climate feelings. Recorded live in just three days, How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars is achingly intimate; full of breath, silence, and detail.

“When I wrote Ignorance, it was a time of intense creativity, and I wrote more songs than I ever had in my life. The songs destined to be on the album were clear from the beginning, but as I continued down my writing path, songs kept appearing that had no place on the album I envisioned. Songs that were simple, pure; almost naive. Songs that spoke to many of the same questions and realities as Ignorance, but in a more internal, thoughtful way.” Lindeman elaborates, “So I began to envision How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars, a quiet, strange album of ballads. I imagined it not as a followup to Ignorance, but rather as a companion piece; the moon to its sun.”

Not long after completing Ignorance, Lindeman decided to make this album on her own terms, fronting the money herself and not notifying the labels. She assembled a new band, and communicated a new ethos; the music should feel ungrounded, with space, silence, and sensitivity above all else. On this record, there are no drums, no percussion; in the absence of rhythm, time stretches and becomes elastic. With Christine Bougie on guitar and lap steel, Karen Ng on saxophone and clarinet, Ben Whiteley on upright bass, Ryan Driver on piano, flute, and vocals, and Tania Gill on wurlitzer, rhodes, and pianet, the band comprised some of the best players in the Toronto jazz and improvisation scene.

How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars was recorded live off the floor at Toronto’s Canterbury Music Studios from March 10-12, 2020. With Jean Martin co-producing, Lindeman sang and played piano live while the band improvised their accompaniment. When the band entered the studio, Covid-19 was a news item, not front of mind, but just three days later, everything had changed. On today’s “Endless Time,” Lindeman sings about a feeling of unease, interweaving relational loss with anxiety about the impending climate crisis.

Lindeman comments, “In Toronto, I live in a world of overwhelming abundance; fruits and fresh vegetables flown in year round from Chile, California, Malaysia.  Standing outside a neighbourhood fruit stand one day, I found myself wondering how I would look back on this time from the future; if I would someday remember it as a time of abundance and wealth I did not fully comprehend at the time, and I wondered how it would feel to stand at that threshold of change.  I wondered too if we were not already there. The song was written long before the pandemic, but when we recorded it, on March 11, 2020, it began to feel eerily prescient. The day it was recorded truly was the end of an endless time, and as ever, I don’t know how the song knew.” Somehow, the music captures that instability; it is ungrounded and diaphanous, it floats and drifts.

You might argue that the underlying theme of Ignorance was vulnerability; vulnerability that goes unnoticed and unacknowledged, and the damage that results from that erasure. On How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars, this vulnerability is made manifest. It is an album of immense sensitivity, a recording of a band and a person daring to reach towards softness without apology.