The personal and prolific project of Canadian singer-songwriter Tamara Lindeman, The Weather Station broke through in 2021 with the release of her sixth studio album, Ignorance.
A critically-acclaimed masterwork confronting the grief and anguish of the climate crisis, the album landed on countless year-end lists, from The New Yorker to Pitchfork, Rolling Stone to The Guardian.
Garnering more glowing attention than Lindeman had experienced up to that point in her 15-year career, it marked a bittersweet high as the tail of the pandemic left her feeling isolated, confused, and sometimes, in her own words, crazy.
Touring in support of the companion record, How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars, in 2022, she faced a personal mental health crisis that ultimately led her to write what would become Humanhood, her new album, released this past January.
“I don’t even know how to begin to understand how much changed in COVID,” Lindeman told Revue. “But when it was happening, what I thought about a lot was, being a climate person, I’ve thought a lot about what is being asked of people in terms of climate and people’s resistance to change. People don’t want to change. And yet with climate, it’s a change of an energy system, it’s not actually that big of a change. And with COVID, the change that was asked of people was to not have dinner with your friends, to not hug your grandmother.
“I mean, it went right to the heart of our most human needs in terms of what we lost. And by comparison, the sacrifice asked of the climate is so minimal… It just highlighted for me how much we need each other, and how we’re mammals. We like to look each other in the eye and we like to hug and we like to hang out, and I think COVID really did bring home to me our humanness, and our general need to be together, which is a beautiful thing.”
A profoundly deep thinker, who is equally candid about her own deeply personal struggles, Lindeman acknowledges the flaws and frailty of what it means to be human on Humanhood. Lyrically, she goes right to the heart of what haunted her coming out of that dark time, while also mirroring a broader, societal shift that has yet to be addressed openly and honestly, especially in the face of the ever-escalating climate disaster, and the artistic existential onslaught of artificial intelligence.
“Talking about climate, the question of human nature comes up all the time,” Lindeman said. “Some people really want to use climate as a sort of brick in a story about our badness, and how terrible we are… And I think that’s part of why that word (Humanhood) was something that I was really drawn to, and sort of the central thesis of the record is, in a lot of cases, about being imperfect and being flawed and being uneven. And that, to me, is such an antidote against, like binary thinking, like, good or bad.”
Musically the album blurs even more lines, incorporating elements of jazz and folk, art-rock and ambient. It moves with a propulsive pull of rhythmic percussion that drops out to give even greater weight to the devastating gravity of Lindeman’s sparser moments, where her voice lays bare, only accompanied by her piano.
Filled with compelling interstitial tracks, she intended for the record to be taken as a whole, and even allowed for her band to contribute several improvised parts in the studio. That process surprised and inspired her, through the sheer beauty of what can only come from the messiness and unpredictability of human interaction.
“It’s so interesting because this record is something that has taught me a lot,” Lindeman said. “There were times where I had ideas and then I was like, ‘Oh, I’m literally going against my own ethos in terms of what I wanted this record to be.’ And I think at one point I did really picture the record as more like electronic, and then it was so funny because I was like, ‘But this is a human record.’ Like when I heard these performances that everyone gave, that’s what’s so special about it. It is a very human record, and that’s the point. That’s what makes it good. That’s what it had to be. So I feel like making a record is always this journey of perfectionism versus self-acceptance.”
Bringing the new album to the stage, Lindeman said she has thought about this show for a long time, well ahead of the recent rising tensions between the U.S. and Canada that have changed her whole experience and perspective of touring across America, and the meaning of communal art to our shared sense of humanity.
“At the end of touring Ignorance, that was an amazing tour, and our shows were sold out, and things were great, but, I reflected back and it was a hard tour because we were touring through the tail end of COVID and people just weren’t comfortable yet being in crowds and, and we weren’t comfortable,” she said. “When I looked back, I was like, I had these amazing shows, but I didn’t quite know how to seize the moment in terms of like, ‘I’m in a room with hundreds of people and I have a microphone, what do I want to do with that?’
“And with this tour and this record, and this band, a lot of what the show is, comes from contemplating that and contemplating, what a privilege and a big deal it is at this point to have anyone at all come and stand and physically be in a room. We’re not on the Internet. You’re asking people to leave their homes and come see you. And I think it just made me think a lot about, like, what can a show be? You know, what can I add to it that I’ve never thought of before? So that’s why I added this visual element, and a spoken word element, and all these other sides to it.”
The Weather Station: Humanhood Tour
Wsg. Sister Ray
Bell’s Brewery – Back Room, 355 E. Kalamazoo Ave., Kalamazoo
April 13, 8 p.m., $20, 18 and older
Events.bellsbeer.com, theweatherstation.net
