Tamara Lindeman carefully selects her moments.
Operating under the name The Weather Station, she has been producing increasingly sophisticated and acclaimed albums since 2012, with her seventh release, the beautifully understated ‘Humanhood’, recently launched.
Upon its release, she remarked on the timing, stating 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 see how resonant this record is with what I observe around me – how much of the darkness in the record continues to appear in the news.”
However, by the time she speaks with CLASH, while promoting her album through a series of in-store appearances at Rough Trade shops before embarking on a full band tour later this year, her outlook is optimistic. She is a willing and thoughtful interviewee, providing insightful responses even to less considered questions.
Her sense of contentment may stem from being sequestered in a Liverpool hotel, away from the overwhelming chaos in North America, where at the time of the interview, Trudeau had just resigned, Trump had just been inaugurated, and Los Angeles was aflame. For a politically-minded writer, this distance is undoubtedly a relief.
“It is lovely being here,” she says. “Considering what’s happening in the world, it was mostly just by chance. Being in Europe for some promotional events and in-stores was something the label (Fat Possum) requested of me, and it has worked out well; I’m just grateful that I’m not in the USA right now.”
“Last night we were at the hotel pub during trivia night while the inauguration played in the background. People were creating funny anti-Trump team names and puns related to the situation; it was nice to see others thinking similarly.”
This lively launch of ‘Humanhood’ provides a stark contrast to the circumstances surrounding the release of her breakthrough fifth album, ‘Ignorance,’ which debuted during the 2021 lockdowns. Like many other cities, her home city of Toronto was under a stay-at-home order, and live performances were nonexistent. While those conditions allowed the album to circulate, it was still a peculiar experience to release music during a global pandemic.
“Releasing an album in 2021 was really confusing,” she reflects. “I recall the day it came out, I went to see a billboard advertising it, and there was nobody in the civic square. An ice storm had hit, and it was freezing.”
“Despite that oddity, there was so much positivity and love for the record, but it mostly came through Twitter posts with links, creating a sense of unreality around it. One of the positive aspects of working with many of the same people is that I’ve had the opportunity to see them this time.”
This form of interaction with friends, peers, and audiences lies at the heart of the grassroots politics that permeate Lindeman’s music, clearly reflected in the album’s title.
“‘Humanhood’ was a title I conceived a few years back,” she explains, “and back then, when I only had fragments of ideas, it seemed broad enough to encompass the entire record. The way the record unfolded was interesting, and it turned out that it could be interpreted as either very personal or more allegorical. While it carries significant political weight, listening to it in that way isn’t necessary.”
Upon reflecting on the album title in her substack, she added, “Among all the ‘hood’ terms in the English language – teenagehood, womanhood, adulthood, childhood – we rarely use the overarching one – humanhood. So much so that when I first found myself singing it in a song I wrote years ago, I didn’t even realize it was a word. To me, this illustrates the overlooked nature of simply being human.”
If there's an intentional ambiguity in her choice of words, the album's success is equally attributable to the intricate and expansive musical foundation throughout, which Lindeman credits to the musicians she collaborated with (Kieran Adams, Philippe Melanson, Ben Boye, Ben Whiteley, and Karen Ng) and the studio (Canterbury Studios in Toronto) where it was recorded.
“I’ve been reflecting a lot on space and silence lately,” she confesses, “and I think that was in the background while I was recording. The musicians on the album constructed a sort of sound wall, injecting real creativity into it. I would leave it to them and then perform a lot of subtractive editing. It’s a bit curatorial; I suppose that’s my studio approach.”
Raised a couple of hours outside the city, she relocated there as a teenager to pursue a budding acting career, and despite her reservations about the political climate, she maintains a strong affection for her adopted hometown and its music scene.
“I think about Toronto frequently when I’m away,” she states. “It’s not typically regarded as a major music city, but over the last twenty or thirty years,
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Tamara Lindeman selects her moments carefully. Operating under the alias The Weather Station, she has been putting out increasingly refined and highly praised music.