Exploring “climate grief” with fearless writing and sensuous music, THE WEATHER STATION’s Ignorance was one of MOJO’s revelations of 2021. Now Tamara Lindeman has a whole new album ready to fly. “I didn’t know if anyone was ever going to hear it,” she tel
RECORDING HER UPCOMING SIXTH ALBUM AS THE WEATHER STATION WAS, says Tamara Lindeman, “the craziest three days of my life”.
It was early March 2020. Lindeman had written 10 songs that didn’t suit the expansive mood of her as-yet-unreleased fifth album, this year’s lauded, revelatory Ignorance, but were too good to waste, so she convened half-a-dozen musicians at a studio near her home in Toronto’s West End to record not so much a follow-up as a companion or coda. Piano-based and acoustic where Ignorance’s production had echoed mid-’80s epics by Talk Talk and The Blue Nile, How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars will emerge early in 2022. “I didn’t even tell anyone I was making this record,” she says. “I didn’t know if anyone was ever going to hear it. It was almost like a secret. I just wanted it to exist.”
She’d heard of the coronavirus, of course, but thought it would be a “blip” like Toronto’s 2003 SARS outbreak, even as the news got more unsettling. “We were in our little dream-world,” she remembers. “We had no idea. But it did seep in. When I was recording [the album’s second track] Endless Time, I had this weird feeling in my stomach: What is happening?” Five days later, the governor of Ontario declared a state of emergency. “It was really heavy but it put a beautiful colour on that record for me. It felt like the last moment of being together.”
Even coughing and sniffling at the tail end of a nasty cold, Lindeman is fabulously expressive, with an ambivalent smile playing on her lips more often than not. The sadder the observation she is making, the more likely she is to cap it with a laugh.
Lindeman calls the new album the moon to Ignorance’s sun: hushed and nocturnal relative to its predecessor’s agile rhythms and broad pop canvas. Both albums, however, emerged from the same period of emotional
upheaval. In the autumn of 2018, burned out from touring the last Weather Station album, she read a New Yorker article by the environmentalist Bill McKibben called How Extreme Weather Is Shrinking The Planet and something inside her cracked open. Like most people, she had held back from confronting the reality of the climate crisis but now she plunged headlong into research and reflection, attending demonstrations and turning her Twitter account into a soapbox.
“It made me a little bit crazy for six to eight months,” she admits, “because it is a mind-crushing understanding when you’re reading about permafrost melting and tipping points. It’s fucked. Climate protests were the only place where I felt I wasn’t insane.”
Now, she says, there’s much more understanding of what psychologists call “climate grief” but back then it was this “unseen thing” that her friends didn’t talk about. The songs she wrote during that period were her way of making those feelings public, using a different musical strategy to serve each lyric.
“I think people have a messed-up relationship with climate change,” she says. “The first emotion they experience is guilt. I felt that nobody was seeing their own loss and sadness. That’s one of the foundational emotions of my generation and the generations younger. I don’t think anyone’s reckoned with what happens to people when you tell them in grade school that the world is going to end and that it’s their fault.”
ON STARS, FROM THE NEW ALBUM, LINDEMAN sings: “When I was a child my mother would send me outside on a moonless night to see the light.” It echoes a line from a 2017 song, Complicit: “I was raised to hear the curlews, I was raised to notice light.”
Her childhood really was like that, she says. In the back-to-theland spirit of the 1970s, her parents (an airline pilot and a painter) had left Toronto for Duffield County in rural Ontario, where they raised two daughters to appreciate nature. Lindeman remembers once being taken out of school to watch a brood of snapping turtles hatch in the driveway. The first time she saw Greta Thunberg speak in 2018, she says, “I saw in her my child self.”
Noticing is one of Lindeman’s great skills as a songwriter. She can extrapolate a profound meditation on the world from a vividly observed moment or image. On Parking Lot, for example, the memory of watching birds fly over venues on tour leads to an outpouring of climate grief. “My forte as a writer is the small event,” she says. At school, she played piano, sang in choirs and half-wrote songs that she was too impatient to finish, but turned to acting instead of music. What changed? “High school.” Hideously bullied, she discovered that a schoolmate was allowed time off because she had a job on a TV show. “I thought if I get an agent I won’t have to go to school. So I decided to be an actor. I didn’t think about music again for years.”
Under the name Tamara Hope, Lindeman secured a few TV gigs and made her movie debut in the 2000 thriller The Deep End, alongside Tilda Swinton. “Coming into contact with someone like that when I was 15 gave me a different viewpoint of what you could be as a woman in the world. I was like, Oh, I didn’t know this was possible.”
Lindeman decided to resume music when she was at college but “didn’t have the guts” to fully quit acting for another decade. Her 40 credits include the president’s daughter in Earthquake: The Fall Of Los Angeles, “Society Girl” in Guillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak, and the lead role in a high school fantasy series called Guinevere Jones.
“There’s a handful of films that I’m not unproud of but as an actor you’re just one little piece,” she says. “You’re not a creative partner. Part of why I’ve become so single-minded and intense as a musician is a response to how obedient I was as an actor. As an insecure teenager, that wasn’t good for me because I disappeared into whatever people wanted me to be. I struggle to feel ownership over that time in my life because I literally wasn’t myself.” She laughs. “My whole job was to not be myself. There’s a person with your name and your face in the world that you don’t relate to.”
When Lindeman started releasing music, she switched back to her original surname but shrouded it in the Weather Station alias. That was partly because she had been spooked by creepy fanmail from older men and partly because she wanted to avoid any impression of dabbling. “I didn’t want anyone to think I was a child actor from the Disney Channel launching my little side project,” she says. “Music to me was an entirely separate thing. I had to divorce myself to be myself.”
“THE SONG IS ALWAYS SHAKING ME AND SAYING, HEY, YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THIS BUT YOU HAVE TO.”
Tamara Lindeman
Unlike acting, music gave her total agency. Her idiosyncratic debut album, 2009’s The Line, emerged from four pressureless years learning how to make records. She had bold ambitions for the follow-up, involving percussionists and loop pedals, but didn’t know how to execute them and was considering giving up music altogether until the singer-songwriter Daniel Romano convinced her that it was OK to keep making intimate folk, hence 2011’s Romano-produced All Of It Was Mine. “I didn’t know how to do anything else that felt honest,” she says.
After that, her crisis of confidence returned with a vengeance. This time her friend in need was the Toronto musician Afie Jurvanen, AKA Bahamas, who invited her to tour Europe with him as a back-up singer. While in France, they were offered an off-season discount on a studio housed in a 19th century mansion, where she and Jurvanen recorded Loyalty in 2015.
“That was beautiful chance,” she says. “I’d completely given up on myself. But because I had to make a record, I did.”
LINDEMAN’S LIFE WAS STILL unsettled by anxiety and her parents’ divorce (“My dad was raising a child in Nairobi,” she sang in 2017’s breakthrough single, Thirty. “She was three now, he told me”) but she embraced a more muscular, extrovert sound on her self-titled fourth album.
“I pushed through that through sheer force of will: This is what I want to do so I have to figure this out. It was the first one where I had a vision.”
And it was also the first time she found a substantial audience. One reviewer praised her “inexplicable, capital-S Star Power”.
Lindeman only appreciated how far she’d come when she agreed to teach a songwriting workshop at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta two years ago, a job she took so seriously that she ended up writing a 30-page handout which she is currently trying to expand into a book about lyric-writing.
“When I look back at my struggles, a lot of it is because I had no understanding of what I was trying to do,” she says. “Editing is the danger zone. You can ruin everything. Most of my songs I’ve destroyed in trying to finish them. I’ve always thought of songwriting as this sad process of destroying the original spark.” Craft, she says, means learning how to “safely shepherd this little spark out the door”.
Lindeman says she is pleasantly “shocked” by Ignorance’s warm reception but she has also noticed that its themes haven’t resurfaced in her most recent songs. While she’s no less committed to climate activism, she is less inclined to write about it.
“Things bubble up that I didn’t know, and that’s 90 per cent of why I find songwriting so painful,” she says. “The song is always shaking me and saying, Hey, you don’t want to see this but you have to. So the moment I start talking about something, my brain says, Cool, it’s out.”
Whatever she does next, she finally understands what she’s doing. Tamara Lindeman has seen the light.
Ignorance (Deluxe) is out now on Fat Possum. How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars is due in spring 2022. To find where Ignorance places in MOJO’s Best Albums Of 2021, turn to p58.