The Weather Station is Asserting ‘Humanhood’ in a Fractured World
A vast, meditative darkness lingers in the background as Tamara Lindeman, leader of the Canadian music project The Weather Station, stretches a sheet of fabric over a rock formation. The textile, a printed facsimile of herself, contorts to the jaggedness of the stones while her real, physical self, cloaked in one of the fabrics, perches like a chameleon. Serving as the cover to her latest record, Humanhood, the “witchy” image is a fitting encapsulation of the album’s thematic locus. “[T]he rippling fabric feels like the fabric of reality rippling…the fabric of your sense of identity that you realize is not as stable and secure as you thought.”
Much of Humanhood encircles these questions about discovering the self in the face of rising desires, temptations, and manipulations. On the record’s first single, “Neon Signs”, Lindeman sings, “Every neon sign, every flashing light tries to fool you. / Get you on their side, everybody swears they need you—and only you—to make the buy.” Through Lindeman’s winding vocals and a pulsing, percussive backbone, the song examines the gamut of metamodern decoy and impulse—capitalism, disinformation, and political conspiracy.
“What’s wild is that everything has gotten significantly worse in the last five years and now there’s this battle for reality where misinformation is getting so intense and so constant. I hope we don’t end up in a historical situation that other societies have ended up in where you can’t tell the truth…I kind of have a commitment to the emotional truth and the story of this record and [with] what’s happening now, there’s a similarity in having to see what’s real when you’re being manipulated.”
The music video, directed by Lindeman and Jared Raab, is a visceral accompaniment to the track, incorporating a first-person perspective as the camera dizzily bounces from differing vantages: a wanderer, a car, a zigzagging dog. It’s highly engaging and contemplative, evoking a feeling of sonder. In a behind-the-scenes video, Lindeman says, “The camera is the character…It’s getting passed from person to person, person to thing, person to animal. And in every perspective that the camera is in, you see what [they desire].”
This entwinement appears in the song’s arrangement, where Karen Ng’s flute riffs travel from the album’s atmospheric opener “Descent” before weaving their way into “Neon Signs.” Thematically, these threads materialize throughout the album, most notably on the closer “Sewing”, where Lindeman explores the titular activity as a metaphor for a distorted, patchwork self. Over sparse instrumentation, she proclaims, “In this undulating thing / this blanket I seem to be making / from pride and shame, beauty and guilt / sewing together a quilt.” Her voice is earnest and at its thinnest, unfolding itself as she lyrically journeys to discovery.
For Lindeman, the creation of the album—from the songwriting to the recording—hinged on that sense of searching. Lindeman’s bandmates—Kieran Adams (drums), Ben Boye (piano/synth), Philippe Melanson (percussion), Ng (saxophone/clarinet/flute), and Ben Whitely (bass)—all came with some sort of improvisational experience, allowing for the recording process to experiment with various arrangements and moods.
“I wanted to bring musicians to a studio where we could all feel secure to play and have songs lightly arranged so we could just capture that moment where everyone is finding something as opposed to having created this perfect arrangement and laying it down. I think the album does carry that discovery.”
In the mixing and overdubbing process, which she did alongside musicians like Sam Amidon and Marcus Paquin, Lindeman expresses their goals in “shaping the focus” of the album. She drew on a range of sources, from hip-hop records to British folk, gleaning an understanding of how different artists arranged sound. Still, she emphasizes exploring absence and subtraction. “It was also important to leave times where the full wilderness was there.”
While envisioning the record, Lindeman focused on the music being a realization of a visual imagining. “This album for me was a coming into how I actually think of music, which is very visual and it always has been. I’ve always felt that songs were a landscape and when I was trying to master songwriting in my folk-era, I had set that aside as I was just trying to think about melody and words and song. But on this album, I felt like I really got to play with texture, which does feel like color and place. I love to feel like a record is a journey.”
Such visualizations take shape in some of the album’s other video accompaniments. For the standout tracks “Mirror” and “Window”, Lindeman worked with director and projectionist Philippe Léonard. The result is a pair of rippling videos, showing a distorted Lindeman performing in a dark black background through lens flares and evocative filters. Complimenting the album’s cover, the videos embolden the conception of rippled selves within the music’s narrative.
In “Body Moves”, a song about the body betraying or tricking you, the video explores replicated and deconstructed representations of the self, with two projections of Lindeman enclosing the “real” self. “I’ve been thinking about the body as almost like a different form of intelligence…like it’s a different entity,” she explains. “I have my cerebral, intellectual intelligence that’s useful and verbal and then there’s this other intelligence that’s like an animal intelligence that I’m in possession of as a human. I feel like I haven’t really used that or haven’t allowed it to be in my thinking because I think I was just coming out of this Western civilization ‘fear of the body’ [concept].”
In Lindeman’s personal life, she’s finding new outlets to embrace this sense of embodiment and discovery. She recently traveled to Northern Canada, including Nunavut, Nunatsiavut, and the Torngat Mountains with the program Students On Ice—a journey she emphasizes as life-changing.
“I’m Canadian and the idea of the North or the Arctic or indigeneity is with you as a Canadian but most Canadians have never been North…You are raised in a certain culture [with] a certain story and a certain language and a certain belief system and then you enter a different one and realize how arbitrary a lot of shit is…I ended up thinking I need to be a lot more engaged in Canadian politics because the North is such a complex place and the federal government has so much power there.” Within the Inuit community, Lindeman underscores a sense of privilege and gratitude for how they welcomed her and her fellow visitors.
Lindeman’s journey to creating Humanhood follows the success of her 2021 release Ignorance, the album that catapulted her into more mainstream music scenes—landing on (and topping) year-end lists of major publications like Pitchfork and The New Yorker, performing on KEXP, and making an appearance on Elton John’s Apple Music radio show, Rocket Hour. In creating the follow-up, she acknowledges the pressure to create something that felt worthy, though ultimately underscoring her confidence in creating a “ballsy” record, not a mere replication of the same sounds. In terms of where the music goes from here, she is less sure.
“I feel like Ignorance was at the tail end of something and now I don’t really know what’s happening. [There’s] been a loss of cohesion in how the ecosystem of music happens and I think it’s really sad. I feel for all the people who have a vision and should be supported by [critics and promoters]…All of that is [still] struggling post-pandemic and I think with the world, people don’t have a lot of real estate for these questions.”
When I spoke to Tamara, the Los Angeles wildfires were going on their second day. For Lindeman, whose focus on climate activism has defined much of her personal life, the disaster is another urgent, terrifying sign of the existential crisis facing all of us. She recalls the mixing process of the record, which occurred in the canyons ravaged by the Eaton fires. “It’s definitely interesting to be promoting a record right now, I feel like how everyone (herself included) felt in the pandemic when they were trying to promote their record.” With the title, Humanhood, Lindeman found a way to encapsulate these manifold feelings.
“I have been and continue to be focused on climate and thinking about it a lot, but being in that world does run you up against this human problem, human nature for lack of a better word. When I was writing this album I was going through my own personal stuff and I wasn’t writing about climate, I was writing about my struggle and that title felt like it could encompass [the personal and collective]. It was just this broad canvas that felt like a gift to start conversations.”
This layered understanding of humanhood gives way to some of Lindeman’s sharpest songwriting, encapsulating both the self and the larger society. On “Mirror”, she sings, “I don’t make the rules / I just watch them unfurl / like smoke always rising from the fires of the world. / You were dousing your fields in a chemical rain. / You were cutting my arm to transcend your own pain.”
For such an embodied, visually-inspired record, Lindeman shares her excitement at live performance. With UK/EU and US tour dates announced, she is making the show her main focus. “It’s a privilege to be in a room with people and it feels very hard-won, especially now. It’s going to be pretty epic, it’s going to be pretty long. There’s going to be non-musical elements; I’m trying to bring in talking and various other elements…light and video.” Bringing in this newfound sense of embodiment, as well as a consciousness towards the climatic impact of touring, she says, “I just want to go big…I want to make it count if we’re going to do it.”
This desire for music as a connective force comes out of both her shifting relationship with the music industry and her exploration of embodiment. “I think it has taught me that I’m actually more interested in finding a way back to music as community or music as pursuit separate from success.” With a record grappling with visceral, sprawling explorations of self and society, The Weather Station holds the keys to creating a communion of individuals, all “carrying their humanhood.”
Humanhood is out now via Fat Possum Records. More information about The Weather Station can be found here.