Tamara Lindeman chooses her moments. 

Trading under the name of The Weather Station, she has been releasing increasingly sophisticated and acclaimed albums since 2012, recently releasing her seventh, the exquisitely understated, ‘Humanhood’. 

She commented on its release about the timing, noting that it was “a strange week to be putting out a record, but then again, that’s every week these days. It has made me uncomfortable lately to feel how resonant this record is with what I see around me – how much of the darkness in the record keeps coming up in the news.”

Nevertheless, by the time she speaks to CLASH, when she is on the promotional rounds doing a run of in-stores in Rough Trade shops ahead of her full band tour later in the year, her outlook is positive. She is a willing and reflective interviewee, who teases out thoughtful answers to even the less well considered lines of interrogation.  

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Her contentedness is perhaps down to being holed up in a Liverpool hotel, at some remove from the enveloping chaos in North America, where, at the time of speaking, Trudeau had just resigned, Trump had just been inaugurated, and Los Angeles was burning. For an overtly political writer, it is understandable that this comes as some relief. 

“It is lovely being here,” she says, “in the light of what is going on in the world, but it was mostly just chance. Being in Europe and doing some promo and the instores was just something the label (Fat Possum) asked me to do, and it has worked out well, I’m just glad that I’m not in the USA right now.”

“We were in the pub in the hotel last night and there was a trivia night on when the inauguration was playing in the background. People were making up funny anti-Trump team names and puns relating to what was happening and it was kind of nice to see that other people were thinking the same way.” 

This sociable, busy launch of ‘Humanhood’ is also a marked contrast with events at the time of the release of her breakthrough fifth album, ‘Ignorance,’ which came out amid the 2021 lockdowns. Like many others, her home city of Toronto was subject to a stay-at-home order and live shows were non-existent. While these very conditions allowed the album a space to circulate, it was nevertheless a weird experience putting music into the world during a global pandemic. 

“Releasing an album in 2021 was really confusing,” she recalls. “I remember when it came out, I went out just to have a look at a billboard advertising the album, and there was absolutely no-one about in the civic square. And there was an ice storm, and it was freezing.”

“Along with that weirdness there was so much that was positive and lots of love for the record, but it would always just be a twitter post with a link, so there was a sense of unreality about it. One of the good things about working with a lot of the same people is that I have been able to see them this time.”

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This type of interaction with friends, colleagues and audiences is central to the grassroots politics that are never far from the surface of Lindeman’s music, embodied in its title.

“’Humanhood’ was a title that I had a few years ago,” she says, “and it seemed back then when I just had bits and pieces of ideas that it gave a broad enough canvas for the whole of the record. It was interesting the way the record happened, and it turned out that it could be listened to as either very personal or more of an allegory. And though it has a lot of political resonance, you don’t have to hear it that way.”

Contemplating the album title on her substack, she added that: “of all the ‘hood’ words that the English language gives us – teenagehood, womanhood, adulthood, childhood; we hardly ever use the overarching one – humanhood – to the extent that when I first found myself singing it in a song I wrote years ago I didn’t even know it was a word. To me this became a sort of illustration of the unnoticed-ness of being human at all.”

And if there is a conscious ambiguity in her use of words, the success of the album owes as much to the intricate and spacious musical backdrop throughout, something Lindeman attributes to the musicians that she worked with (Kieran Adams, Philippe Melanson, Ben Boye, Ben Whiteley and Karen Ng) and the studio (Canterbury Studios in Toronto) where it was recorded. 

“I have been thinking a lot about space and silence recently,” she admits, “and I think that was in the background when I was recording. What the musicians on the album did was build a kind of wall of sound, bringing a real creativity to it. I would leave it to them and then do a lot of subtractive editing. It is a bit curatorial. I suppose that is my studio process.”

Brought up a couple of hours outside the city, she moved there as a teenager with a then burgeoning acting career, and despite concerns about the political forces at work in it, still feels strongly about her adopted hometown and its music scene.

“I think about Toronto a lot when I am away,” she says. “It is not somewhere that is seen as a big music city, but I think that in the last twenty or thirty years it has been incredibly powerful and influential. There’s a long lineage of avant-garde and experimental music, a lot of which isn’t very well known. But it is an inspiring place to be musically, I still get a lot out of it.”

“In a lot of ways, the music scene seems very separate from the city though,” she adds. “It has become a very expensive global centre.  With the type of gentrification that is happening in Toronto, it has been pushing musicians out. On one level it is a great place to be a musician but increasingly difficult for musicians to live there.”

This speaks more widely to her concerns, that underpin the album’s lyrics, about the way in which vulture capitalism is impacting on the environment and ways of living more generally. Here she lucidly describes the problems that the notion of “Humanhood” offers some of the answers to:

“I think that a lot of cities and places are just not set up for people generally. I don’t want to over-romanticise the UK or Europe but compared to a lot of places in North America, it does seem sometimes that things are more likely to be laid out for people, where there is some consideration of beauty or comfort, even though they are obviously subject to the same forces of capitalism.”

“You see this everywhere – highways and airports that are almost designed as if they don’t expect people to be there. I was looking at the customs clearance at Pearson International recently and it was just all these robotic machines and motorised cameras, with tired and exhausted people trying to get through and get them to work properly. AI seems like another version of that to me, it feels bizarre and I’m not sure who or what it is for.”

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Unsurprisingly, her perspective on the Trump regime, and in particular its inevitable impact on climate change is similarly despondent, with her hope invested in the power of individuals to resist and effect small changes. 

“I think everyone is very aware of what it means,” she says of the pending four years. “People are talking about it in LA, and even those that have not been personally impacted by the fires still feel fear. Trump offers a fantasy of invincibility which is designed to relieve people of their fear, which is why he casts doubt on the causes of the fires. He is a walking, talking climate change denial machine, but that can be where there can be people power in a dark place.  Turning towards each other, in a loving way, is really all we can do.”

For Lindeman, the music, musicians and the concept of “Humanhood” is all part of doing this, and something of an escape from the wider political context. The contrast in tone when she is discussing the global and the personal is marked – discussing her immediate musical future she is enthused and optimistic. On the immediate horizon is the best part of a year’s touring, but she is already thinking about the follow-ups to the current album.

“I’m always thinking to the next one,” she says, hinting at future releases, “but it is always hard because the music industry cycle around a release can seem endless. So, I’m not sure when it will happen. I’m hopeful we could do a b-sides and unreleased tracks compilation from the recent sessions at some point as well, but I’m mainly looking forward to getting out to play the songs.”

“We are playing so many types of venues this time, theatres and clubs, seated and standing, but it will be more of a production with the lights and video to make it as immersive as possible. I’m also so lucky that the musicians I tour with are very sensitive and knowing and we have never worked so hard on a show. It has never felt to me that it was so important to put on something that is meaningful and pretty, using the feel of the records but to go from place to place and take the audience on more of a journey than we would with a shorter set.”

Like her other musical interventions, the tour and next The Weather Station album will be as timely and doubtless as musically and politically resonant as its immediate predecessors. 

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‘Humanhood’ is out now. For all details of The Weather Station live shows visit her site.

Words: John Williamson

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