WINDS OF CHANGE
Tamara Lindeman took a risk on Weather Station’s latest album — and it has paid off,
It was never going to result in a shocking overnight shift of gears from folk to Slayer or anything, but Tamara Lindeman’s decision to tilt the Weather Station in a slightly more rock ’n’ roll direction on its fourth album still had her fighting against her nerves for the duration of its creation.
“It always feels like a risk, but with this record there were all these moments when I was mixing or I’d be driving to the studio and I’d be, like, ‘I can’t do this. What’s happened?’ and I was so afraid,” she confesses, while indulging in a fancy sherry cocktail at a Dundas St. W. watering hole not far from her home.
“Well, kind of. Sometimes I felt super great and super confident. Other times I just thought, ‘You can’t have these songs on the record.’ Obviously, knowing what to do was the more prevalent voice, but it wasn’t like there weren’t times where I went, ‘You can’t have this song on the record. That’s crazy.’
“But that was also a huge part of my mind. I was just, like, ‘If I don’t put this song on the record that scares me, what’s the point? Why would I bother asking people to listen to my record if I’m not putting things on the line?’ ” The gamble has since paid off. The Weather Station, released Oct. 6 via Outside Music in Canada and the tastemaking Paradise of Bachelors imprint abroad, is shaping up to be the best-received release yet in a repertoire that has earned singer/ songwriter (and sometime actress) Lindeman no small amount of acclaim.
Buoyed by praise from the lofty likes of Uncut, Q Magazine, Mojo, Pitchfork, The Line of Best Fit, Magnet and the A.V. Club, the new album currently enjoys an impressive 85 score on review-aggregate site Metacritic, for instance, good enough to make it the 38th best-reviewed re- cord of 2017 to date.
Granted, that doesn’t necessarily translate to a vast increase in record sales, but the Weather Station’s tour commitments are looking pretty healthy on both sides of the Atlantic once the latest round of roadwork in support of The Weather Station kicks off with a sold-out hometown gig at Toronto’s Great Hall on Friday.
A run of U.S. and Canadian dates opening for Bahamas in February and March should only keep the momentum going. And, curiously enough, it was Bahamas’ main man and longtime Weather Station pal Afie Jurvanen — he co-produced Lindeman’s poised 2015 album, Loyalty — who provided Lindeman with one of the first inklings that she was on the right track with her new material. Indeed, he was so supportive that Lindeman — who has led the Weather Station through a number of solo and band permutations over the past decade — was emboldened to take on the tasks of producing and all of the string arrangements on The Weather Station herself.
“In the very beginning, he just wanted to be a part of it and was, like, ‘I’ll help you,’ ” she recalls.
“So he came to the first session, but it was funny; he just sort of said, ‘I think you know what you want to do. I don’t think I should be here. I’m gonna peace out.’ ”
Subsequent, unexpected partings of ways with both her manager and her North American booking agent did briefly saddle Lindeman with further anxieties about this being “the end of the line” for everything she’d worked so hard to build up over the years. But the Weather Station emerged on the other end unscathed, with its finest work to date in the can and a sleek, electrified new sound that now begs comparisons to Patti Smith, the War on Drugs, Kurt Vile and P.J. Harvey along with the more typical, if still completely valid, references to Joni Mitchell that have always followed Lindeman around.
The Weather Station’s rock makeover is a subtle one, and one that feels completely natural to the newer material’s noticeably hardened lyrical bite: the product, Lindeman says, of a lot of combined personal and politi- cal factors “that kind of radicalized me a little bit.”
Turning 30 a couple of years ago helped catalyze the transformation, as you can hear on the surprisingly caustic “Thirty,” but also just generally “feeling that osmosis of people everywhere being screwed over.”
“People are constantly yelling at each other about everything, it seems like, and you feel trapped,” says Lindeman, now 32. “I went through a period a few years ago where it just seemed like all of my friends were getting beaten down by life. Jobs are disappearing, the climate is warming and nobody cares. It’s like a vice grip and you just start to feel really angry . . .
“Are we just supposed to sit here and download new apps and feel OK about it? It just makes no sense.”
Moreover, fronting a slightly louder version of the Weather Station is simply just more fun than staring down clubs with a set list heavy on the sombre, stately and thoroughly soft-spoken repertoire that was once Lindeman’s stock in trade.
“Oh, it’s super fun. It’s so fun. It’s great. It’s rockin’, yeah,” she says. “There were some really magical shows when it was just me where it would work and it was such a powerful experience, but at times it was also a real drag because I was, like, ‘Man, I feel so bad that I’m asking people to be quiet right now.’ So this is way more fun.
“And it’s so much more reasonable to play rock music on a stage in a bar than it is to play solo, acoustic music. I was always pretty good at making people shut up, but it gets old. And it’s very vulnerable. This is vulnerable in a different way, but you feel powerful, you know? The first couple of shows we played, I hadn’t thought it through and I was worried people might be coming expecting that we’d be super-acoustic and be bummed. But that hasn’t happened. Nobody seems bummed,” she said.
“It feels very hard-won. I’ve been doing this for a long time and everything has been this slow, incremental movement and, with this record, it feels more like there’s a sudden shift. It’s really awesome.”