Los Angeles is on fire. Israel is bombing Palestine, Lebanon, Iran, Yemen, and Syria. Generative AI is destroying the planet through its gluttonous consumption of electricity. From the political climate to the actual climate, matters are grim. Amid widespread pandemonium, Tamara Lindeman of The Weather Station tries to make sense of the insensible. In 2021, the Toronto indie rocker broke through with Ignorance and its companion LP, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, pairing ruminations on the climate crisis and capitalism with lush instrumentals that mirror the many natural habitats at risk. On the seventh Weather Station record, Humanhood, out this week, those motifs become even more pointed.
Blurring the line between digital and analog, organic and synthetic, Humanhood is ultimately a record about what it means to be human. It’s an idea that sounds lofty on paper, but Lindeman manages to communicate her ideas with a deft touch that instills beauty and humility in every breathtaking moment. Ahead of the album’s release, Lindeman and I spoke about the overarching narrative of her new record, the importance of protecting your community, and the song she’s most proud to have written.
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GRANT SHARPLES: Thank you for chatting with me about Humanhood. I was actually just listening to the album a minute ago. It’s incredible. When did you start working on this?
TAMARA LINDEMAN: Man, I really wrote it in 2023, I guess. I made my first bits of recording in May 2023, and then we mixed this past spring.
SHARPLES: Had it just kind of been looming in the background whenever you weren’t working on it?
LINDEMAN: It was a hard record to figure out and very all-consuming. I recorded a lot of songs that aren’t on there and worked really hard on things that didn’t make the cut.
SHARPLES: Now, when you say you made songs that didn’t make the cut, do you think you’ll do something similar where Ignorance had this companion in How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars?
LINDEMAN: It would be more like a part two or a deluxe. I thought about that a lot. Right now, I’m just a little tired. I don’t know how quickly that all happened, but it was tricky to get the album to fit into 45 minutes. That was a very small parameter for a record that really wanted to sprawl. But I think it’s also good to have a parameter. I really used every available second.
SHARPLES: Why did you feel the need to set that parameter?
LINDEMAN: Well, it was important to me to put it on vinyl. I love that format, so it was important to have it fit on the two sides. I wanted a really big canvas, but when I look back at the record, I do think that it’s stronger for not having more space.
SHARPLES: How did you go about the editing process, deciding what was going to be on there and what wasn’t?
LINDEMAN: It was really in the mix process when things started to narrow down. The songs that were definitely going to be on the record were mixed first and then, as the process went along, we started to dig into which of the remaining ones were going to work. I really thought about the story and the pieces I needed to tell. For me, I felt that it was a narrative record that needed to move from A to B, so I was making my decisions based on how things fit that story.
SHARPLES: What is that story to you?
LINDEMAN: I think it starts a little colder and a little cut off. In the first song, “Descent,” there’s a bridge about falling out of desire, falling out of the story. And I really do picture it—you’re falling downwards and you’re in the street. And then “Mirror” is really at the heart of what’s wrong. The album is more about a dissociation from the pain of feeling, and towards the end it becomes about reconnecting with that, making peace with brokenness or imperfection. Then, the last song is the beginning of the new story. There’s that instrumental that sort of opens up again. “Sewing” led me to a new understanding of this metaphor of patchwork, of drawing things together and making sense of things in a nonlinear way.
SHARPLES: Then you make it out, and you’re just reconnecting with what it is to be human.
LINDEMAN: Yeah, I think the record is presenting a lot of darkness and imperfection as well.
SHARPLES: Why were these ideas so important for you to explore and write about?
LINDEMAN: I mean, it was a great honor in my life to have people ask me about climate for a couple of years. I’m grateful that I got to play some tiny role chipping away at the silence around that issue. But it is a world that led me to this idea of Humanhood, trying to figure out how to be an activist and talk to people about this issue emotionally. One of the first things that came to mind with the record was the title. The title was really important to me from the beginning because it was sort of a question mark, or a knot that I wanted to untangle. And I think that’s only increased since I started writing. I mean, generative AI comes out. The world is becoming very unhuman and algorithmic and strange because we’re living in an increasingly digital space. Of course, the human condition is the subject of all art. Yet now, we think that art maybe doesn’t need to be made by people. I just feel like we’re being constantly dehumanized by our world, which was built by humans. And then on a more personal level, I like the song “Humanhood,” where I describe walking across the beach carrying my humanhood. I definitely thought of it as a garment or a rite of passage—that part of being human is carrying it, or wearing this messy thing.
SHARPLES: And I guess focusing on humanity is a way to reinforce the importance of climate, too.
LINDEMAN: This is where I’m just getting into my personal beliefs, but there’s always [people] on the fringes of a climate gathering who have this nihilistic viewpoint. And that’s not where that issue leads me. Wouldn’t you want to protect people and life? It’s a very humanistic thing to care about, and it’s not just about the environment. Most of the climate activists I’ve met are focused on community and protecting people. But it does feel like we are living in a science fiction novel. I find it really insulting, honestly.
SHARPLES: Speaking of community and the people we surround ourselves with, I read that you recruited a new group of musicians for this record. Is that right?
LINDEMAN: Half and half. The rhythm section is the same as Ignorance. Kieran Adams on drums, Philippe Melanson on percussion, Ben Whiteley on bass, and then Marcus Paquin, my co-producer, also plays a lot of percussion. Karen Ng and Ben Boye were new, and that was sort of the group in the studio. They really shaped the music and were very creative, wonderful people to work with. It was dreamy, and the band was a nice combination of people that do a lot of improvising and people who hold things down.
SHARPLES: You’re combining the free-spirited and methodical creative approaches.
LINDEMAN: Yeah, I like contrasts. There were a lot of intentions around the contrast of silence and loud, and also the organic-synthetic thing I wanted to play with. For example, the synth and the sax sometimes are so close in tone that you forget what’s what. But they’re flipping back and forth. To me, it was a little Easter egg of a human instrument that’s getting turned into this digital facsimile and then becomes human again. There’s a lot of moments where the drums are doubled by electronic drums as well.
SHARPLES: How do you feel like those instrumental themes of analog versus digital, or organic versus synthetic, are in conversation with your songwriting?
LINDEMAN: The theme was humanhood, and I do feel like on “Mirror” and “Neon,” there’s this rigid perspective. Especially on “Mirror,” I’m singing towards someone who is in a story and can’t feel it. I tried to paint that there’s light touching you even if you don’t feel it. I mean, now that I’m thinking of it, I should have thought of this question ahead of time. It’s funny because “Ribbon” is microphone metaphors, but I’m putting myself into—
SHARPLES: You’re learning as much about your music as I have.
LINDEMAN: I mean, it’s like I’m describing myself shaking in the reception of what’s around me. It’s funny talking about lyrics. I love talking about lyrics, but then it’s also like, what’s in the lyrics?
SHARPLES: Were you writing to this narrative that you had already mapped out, or did it just kind of happen as you were writing these songs and started noticing what you could piece together?
LINDEMAN: I wasn’t writing to a narrative. When I was writing, I was pretty much just in a place of trying to have anything that made sense. As time went on and I came to a better place, I was able to look at what I had and see the story. It was tricky because it did mean letting go of a lot of songs I really love. But the process of editing or curation after the fact felt like a way to have a complete album. It’s ironic, of course, because the fragments at the end, but I also thought about that a lot, leaving it in. I kept wanting to cut out pieces or lyrics or songs, but I have to listen to what my songs told me to do.
SHARPLES: “Sewing,” as you described it, is this quilt patchwork of all of these ideas that you had. It ties everything up nicely that way.
LINDEMAN: Yeah. My songs really do come at me. I don’t sit down with an intention to write a certain thing. It’s more something that just comes out, and then I try to make decisions about whether it’s meaningful. I wish I could sit down and write a song about a topic, but it just doesn’t happen that way.
SHARPLES: When those songs do come at you, as you put it, how do you go about channeling what you’re trying to say?
LINDEMAN: I mean, my process is I record everything. I write or transcribe what I said, and then I look at it and try to make sense of it. Every once in a while, something comes that’s very complete like “Sewing” or “Lonely.” The first half of “Lonely” was just straight improv. The rest of the time, I’m just a bunch of self-doubt. The more opportunity I give myself to write the song, the more versions of it I’ll write. I tend to create situations where I just have many unfinished verses and no complete song. But with this record, I really struggled because of where I was at the time. I brought the pieces to a friend and sat down with her. I needed a witness to make sense of it. I hope next time it won’t be as hard, but we’ll see.
SHARPLES: I was also curious, how do you feel like as an artist and a musician, you’ve grown since your last record? What are you doing differently here?
LINDEMAN: It’s more courageous. I think that the production is more complete. I just took it further. Ignorance was what it was meant to be—I always had that vision of the disco shimmer in combination with the lyrics that felt right to me. But I think with this record, I just got better at the production side, at creating the story in the music, and I got better at fighting for the things that mattered to me. I feel like it’s more fully realized. I actually really do want music to be a score. I want it to say what it’s saying in more ways than one. I also had help, and Joseph Lorge, the mixer, is really special. He did a lot on this record and made some important creative choices.
SHARPLES: Do you have a song on this record that you feel particularly proud of?
LINDEMAN: “Sewing,” for sure, is my favorite song. In terms of accomplishment or struggle, “Mirror” was so hard to produce, and I don’t fully know why. But “Sewing” is my favorite. It felt like a gift, like it came to me when I needed it. I feel like if I had to only sing one song for the rest of my life, it would be that one. It’s a performance. I sang it live with the band, and that ending is a happy accident. The band was supposed to stop, and then they just kind of kept playing so I kept singing and I actually had five more verses at the bottom of the page. The whole song’s about including things and not discarding, and then that happened. It was kind of beautiful.
SHARPLES: You gave into the themes of the song.
LINDEMAN: Yeah, it does feel like that song genuinely taught me something. It gave me a line out.
SHARPLES: What do you feel like it taught you?
LINDEMAN: As I said, I think it’s this thing of being in what is, right? We can’t exclude things that we don’t like from the fabric of the world or from ourselves. It’s this idea of making do with things that are terrible and things that are beautiful. They’re both there. Even if it clashes or it doesn’t fit, you’re still sewing it together. There’s a lot of love on the song as well. It’s about making a life with someone, making a home. I mean, there’s this reality that every piece of plastic ever made is still in existence. Things don’t disappear because you don’t like them. I’m jumping out on a bit of a limb there, but it’s just about not othering parts of yourself or the world.
SHARPLES: I did want to ask you one more thing, and that’s what you hope listeners take away from this record.
LINDEMAN: That’s a good question. I don’t think I’ve ever really thought of it, but I guess music is a way of seeing into someone else’s mind and experience. It’s about sharing something that’s invisible. If it’s honestly depicted, it’s like you feel seen. I think I’ve felt less lonely in the world because of music made by other people. Making this record was so painful and difficult because there were things I didn’t want to reveal or things I was afraid to say. But if you put those things in, someone can feel understood. Humanhood and the sort of aesthetic of the record is a choice that I am actively trying to put forth to the world—this idea of choosing the human, recognizing fragility or vulnerability.