The Weather Station Is Opting Out of the Algorithm

All over the Weather Station’s new album Humanhood, people watch each other from across chasms of despair and struggle to breach the gap. In bandleader Tamara Lindeman’s empathetic but unflinching view, the root of this disconnection is both interpersonal and societal—the way a blank stare can feel like the end of the world. On the moonlit standout “Mirror,” she uses images of climate destruction to evoke relationship strife—or is it vice versa?

I don’t make the rules, I just watch them unfurl
Like the smoke always rising from the fires of the world
You were dousing your fields in chemical rain
You were cutting my arm to transcend your own pain.

Some people write love songs, others write protest songs. For Lindeman, there is little difference between the two.

Lindeman, 39, recorded Humanhood in the same Toronto studio and with many of the same players who contributed to her astonishing 2021 breakout album Ignorance, which turned the Weather Station from a folk-rock project with an uncommonly poetic songwriter to a more ambitious endeavor that drew influence from avant-garde jazz, electronic dance music, and anthemic pop. Both records combine the mechanical propulsion of contemporary dance and pop with vocal phrasing and improvised instrumental passages that flow and meander across the rhythm section’s rigid barlines. They hold all sorts of apparent contradictions in delicate balance: rigidness and flow, composition and improvisation, the mechanical and the human. 

Though Lindeman’s songs are often solemn, she is a lively and enthusiastic conversationalist, peppering trenchant societal critiques with jokey asides, and departing on occasional tangents whose relation to the subject at hand only becomes clear in retrospect. At times, her brain seems to be 10 steps ahead of her mouth, waiting around the bend for the pace of talk to catch up.

The rollout for Humanhood involved some discussion of a mental health crisis. In my experience, one of the most pernicious things about depression is the way it can take away your motivation or even your ability to do something like write a song. Was it ever difficult for you to find the will or the joy to continue doing this?

Tamara Lindeman: For sure. And that’s part of why there’s such a gap between records, honestly. I definitely wish that I hadn’t had that experience, and that I'd been able to just make a record right away. It’s been hard to talk about the record, because every song is about that. It was very hard to write, and I couldn’t focus, and I felt like all my songs were so disjointed and didn’t make any sense. I felt like I was operating at 60 percent of my capacity for most of the record. But as the record was happening, I was coming out of that hole. The song “Sewing” was the one where I described to myself, in the writing of the song, the path out, which also was the path for the record. It felt like a gift from the sky.

It’s hard because you don’t really want to remember that, and you don’t really want to talk about it. But I had to accept that I do believe that songwriting has to be honest, and if it is, you can’t reject that. My job as a writer is to not shy away. With the lyrics on this record, I’m sometimes like, ugh! But I know that, at that time, that was all I had. I’ll make a joy-and-contentment record someday. [laughs] I’m looking forward to it. 

Between the self-titled album and Ignorance, there was a pretty distinct leap, both in terms of the Weather Station’s profile and the ambition of the music itself. At the time, did you have a sense of, I’m going to take a swing at this bigger thing? 

I’m always trying to destroy what came before. Making Ignorance, it felt like I needed to reach out of my comfort zone and let go of all of these beliefs about what independent music has to be, which seem so quaint now. I wanted to go as far as possible from the rock’n’roll, Neil Young, lo-fi thing that I’d been around. It felt mildly transgressive in my little world, to be like, I’m going to make it sound good. It’s always an energy to break a rule. At the time I was like, This person’s gonna hate it, that person’s gonna hate it. But then everyone loved it. What I thought people were obsessed with was all in my head. 

That record and Humanhood were both very close to my vision, but they also really speak to the musicians in the room and their sensibilities. I give them a lot of credit in terms of that sound. Kieran Adams, the drummer, in my mind, is a dance drummer; he’s a DJ and a programmer and he’s into electronic music. I have a very loose and changeable sense of rhythm, and I find it interesting to put that up against a really straight dance rhythm. I hit on the idea that the more rigid the rhythm section is, the more I could just float on top, ramble, and be discursive. It’s like a yin-yang thing. They need each other.

One of my favorite things about your music is the way it balances that discursive quality, which allows it to be so detailed and personal, with these big, poppy moments that are reaching out to the listener in a more accessible way. Those can feel like two diametrically opposed approaches to songwriting. How do you make them work together?

As a North American person, my sense of melody is totally shaped by, for lack of a better word, pop music. Your mind just holds onto those hooky choruses, and there’s always a part of me that wants to grab that powerful energy. But I love avant-garde music too, and there’s the other part of me that’s fucking with things and pulling against them. Lyrically, it took me a long time to understand that what I’m trying to do—talk about ideas, observations, or revelations—is not a pop-music thing. But the two things together make me feel the most satisfied as a listener and as a musician. 

I’ve seen you play shows solo, with a small band, and then, around Ignorance, with this big ensemble with winds and strings and auxiliary percussion. All the shows were great, but I have to imagine the latter one cost a lot more money. And of course touring has only become more expensive as your music has grown into this bigger thing. Do you ever feel like, If I made a record that I could just tour with a power trio again, that would make my life a lot easier?

It’s been a joke I make at least once a day. I’m like, Well, the next record has to be the folk record, because that’s all we’ll be able to do. It’s fucked. I am going all out and putting on a very expensive show for this record. I’m making bad financial decisions for my art. So people gotta come, because it’s not gonna happen again. I feel like I need to articulate that very loudly: If you don’t come to this one, that’s it, that’s all you’re getting. [laughs]

In the last few years, I kind of feel like I’m a not-for-profit organization, and my goal is to give money to people I like. If I’m going to spend money I shouldn’t be spending, at least I can pay musicians. I cheap out on everything else. I’ve always been very cautious with touring in the past. I’ve always broken exactly even. But this one feels like a big moment. I’m so frustrated with the internet, and I want to put all the resources into being onstage and with the people in the room. Making a dent on the internet feels kind of meaningless right now. It all feels so ephemeral. 

Ignorance was such a hard tour, because you have this record that’s doing as well as an independent record can do, and the rare event where you’re able to draw a crowd in every city. But COVID and inflation were happening. And my fees had been negotiated in 2021, and we were touring in 2022. Now ticket prices have crept up a little bit, so it’s a little more doable. But the math does not math. It’s not affordable for people anymore. 

In the past you could maybe say, I’ll take the risk on this expensive opportunity now, and maybe it’ll pay off and lead to this other thing later. Now all of those connections are broken. I wouldn’t recommend anyone do it the way I’m doing it now. The best way to approach music is the way I approached it for the first 15 years, which is to never spend more than you have, be very frugal, and always do things DIY. 

How has the landscape changed since those early DIY days?

I feel a lot of nostalgia for the early 2000s, when I had just moved to Toronto, and I was a music fan going to every show. We were all reading music blogs and talking on message boards about bands we liked. There was this immense level of care and consideration, and people were hungry for challenging music. I do think a time like that will come again. That scene I got to experience was a response to this mainstream, major-label thing that had been happening before, and I think there will be a similar backlash. 

Right now, it feels like we’re at this peak of disposability in all art. And the A.I. thing is like the final slap in the face, not just to artists but to all people. If this trend continues, I don’t want to participate in that larger music world. It’s so counter to everything that I do this for. But because I did come up as a music fan in the early 2000s, and I do know all of these musicians, I can see another model, another way. Those sensibilities have raised me in a way that I’m grateful for. I’m not coming up as a 20-year-old thinking that music is all about influencing on TikTok. I’m lucky. 

Obviously, I don’t think music should feel ephemeral—especially when people have spent thousands of dollars and years of their life on something. I find it healing to just not behave that way as a fan: To really just like what I like, and dig into it as deeply as I did in 2004. Why not? I like to move slowly through art, and I just don’t want to participate in the algorithm. 

I’ve been reflecting this year, with all of the generational and political shifts happening, and have recognized that I had a sense of wanting the world to reflect me: I wanted to feel like I was a part of the world and that I understood why people feel the way they do. I think trying to put myself in other people’s shoes is a positive trait, and I don’t want to stop, but I also was like, I need to stay in my own perspective and not be as troubled or expect others to feel the same way I do. I’ve always existed in a counterculture, but because there was this moment where the counterculture became culture, we forgot it was always a counterculture. We’re not supposed to be mainstream. 

That reminds me of the lyrics to one of my favorite songs of yours, “Wear.” 

“I tried to wear the world like some kind of garment.” I tried! It really didn’t work. It didn’t fit. 

One of the themes in your work is the ways that these big-picture things that are happening in the world at large—whether that’s the destruction of the environment, or the constant pressures of commerce and the media—can manifest on a more personal scale, like in a relationship between two people, or a person’s relationship with themselves. What keeps you returning to that idea? 

I think that’s the theme. I believe the collective unconscious is real: We’re all experiencing stuff together, and things that are in culture are also in our psyches and our personal relationships. The dark energy that powers these last three records—the thing I was trying to understand—was both in a relationship that I was in, and out there in the world. Now I’m no longer trapped in that personally, but it’s fucked, because now the world is in it. A relationship can be a little personal fascism. It doesn’t really feel very different to living in a world where there’s absolutely no concern being given to the biggest planetary crisis. We’re not being protected. We’re being gaslit. It’s the same fuckin’ thing. 

It’s really weird for me right now, because I’m watching the world fall into the same traps that I just got out of, falling for charismatic cult-leader people who tell you what you see is wrong, and they have the answers. That’s why all this stuff drives me so crazy, because it’s personal. I’m not putting myself above anyone else. It’s just horribly sad that a lot of folks are getting caught up in something on a cultural level that affects us all, but at the same time is no different from someone getting pulled into a bad relationship. 

There are all these negative feedback loops happening in the world right now. Climate is the biggest one. It’s a literal negative feedback loop, where the way we’re responding to it is just continuing to make it worse. But there are also positive feedback loops, and good things in us that we naturally do, and those things can snowball too. I don’t have any sense of when or how that will make an impact on the world, but I can see that same personal-cultural resonance in the positive as well as in the negative. What’s hard right now is that the first act of people who want to control others is to try to convince you that good is bad and bad is good. And that’s where we’re at right now.

Do you think that things like songs and albums can play a role in the positive version of the feedback loop?

There’s always this thing of, art will save us!, and I don’t agree with that. Maybe laws can save us. But there is an intimacy to music that is very healing. And I’ve been reflecting a lot on my first experiences with music that felt like it saw something in me, and how meaningful that was. Music is so intimate, so when there’s something in you that you can’t understand, music might give you that little window. On a personal level, it can help.