T e Weather Station

tryingtousetheunexpectedtimeinherofficewisely. “Itsoundsverypresumptuoustosay,butIhavebeen tryingtowriteabook,”shesays.“It’saboutwriting lyrics.ButI’mscaredtomentionitincaseInever finishit…”

Sinceher2009debut,TheLine,Lindemanhas establishedherselfasbotharemarkablelyricistand anarrestingvocalist–addressingsubjectsfrom lovetoclimatechangetomentalillnessandthe peculiarityofadvancingadulthoodwitha resonanceandprecision.“Herwritingisjust incredible,”saysBenWhiteley,whohasplayed bassinTheWeatherStationforthepastsixyears. “Thewayshecanpaintpictureswithwords,andthe wayshecancaptureamoment,orreallymundane things,ornormalinteractions.Ilovethewayshe juxtaposesreallybig,abstractlanguagewithsuperplain,super-simplelanguage.”

WhileLindemanmightoftenpayherduestoher country’srichmusicalheritage–NeilYoung,Gordon Lightfoot,theTorontopiasceneoftheearly2000s, alongsidemoreimmediatecontemporariessuchas JenniferCastleandBahamas–ashercareerandher

“I’MSTILL LEARNING HOWTOBE MYSELF”

TAMARA LINDEMAN

onfidence have gathered pace, her work has come o display a great singularity. Today, according to aquin, she stands as “one of Canada’s greatest ngwriters, and one of the great Canadian voices”.

For Lindeman, the emboldening of that voice, the pur that led not only to Ignorance but also to bookriting, is tethered to a broader cultural shift. In the ast she has spoken about the peculiar male minance of the music world – being the only man on her two previous record labels, the verbal orthand of male musicians, the shortage of women und engineers, producers, label heads. Now, she speaks of the recent explosion in female artists, thinkers and essayists, of the new confidence this movement has brought to her own work. “Post-MeToo there’s this blossoming of women such as myself trusting their voices a bit more,” she says. “I’ve found it really empowering.”

“I think as a young person in my twenties I was very shaped by the intellectual and artistic writing and film and music of men,” she continues, “which is great, and I have no qualms about any of the stuff I absorbed… But I feel I’m still learning how to be myself, because the programming is so powerful. And as I read all of these women writers it just gives shape to my experience.”

LINDEMAN grew up in Dufferin County, Ontario, a rural area of swampland and dairy farms and soybean fields, her nearest town famed for holding the Annual Canadian Championship Fiddling Contest. As a child she spent a lot of time alone in the woods, though she also snowboarded, and took piano lessons down the street with a teacher, Mrs Hildebrand. “I loved piano,” she remembers. “I hated piano lessons. I never wanted to actually learn the theory or learn the songs – I was like, ‘This is bullshit!’”

Instead at home she spent hours making up her own pieces on the family piano. She recalls the intensity of it: “The piano is bigger than you, and it makes so much sound, even if you give it the lightest touch. It’s a very overwhelming, lovely, lovely, sensual experience to play piano, I think.”

She also sang: to herself, and at school, and to accompany piano recitals in Mrs Hildebrand’s front room and then joining a nearby choir. The choir led to youth theatre and then to a succession of fêted screen roles: performances in made-for-TV movies, Elizabeth I in an HBO drama, Tilda Swinton’s daughter in The Deep End.

Lindeman was in her late teens when she began playing music again, she took up guitar and taught herself banjo and borrowed music software from a rapper friend. Now living in Toronto and studying at the university, she began exploring the city’s music scene, then giddy with the emergence of bands such as Broken Social Scene (and associated acts, including Feist, Emily Haines and Kevin Drew), and a new collective spirit captured by the record labels Arts & Crafts and Constellation Records (Montreal based, but with a strong Toronto presence).

Around 2004, she first visited the Tranzac to see a band called the Sunparlour Players. The Tranzac, a community arts venue in downtown Toronto, had long nourished the

Going electric: The Weather Station at the Brudenell Social Club, Leeds, January 2018

city’sindiemusicscene and Lindeman was immediately smitten. Here, she developed the songs that made up her first EP, “East”, playing acoustic shows throughout 2008 in the venue’s smaller Southern Cross room. There she first saw the Polarisnominated folk-rock band The Bruce Peninsula, with whom she later sang, as part of the band’s choir.

The city seemed to open up to her. “It was this thriving living scene,” she remembers, fuelled by a DIY aesthetic, with selfreleases and house tours, and where folk and punk and jazz and experimental music overlapped. By the time she released the full-length The Line in 2009, Lindeman was intimately entwined with Toronto’s music community.

Look through old profiles and reviews of The Weather Station and with each new release comes mentions of Lindeman’s growing confidence. Her 2011 album, All Of It Was Mine, was a warm, finger-picked beauty, produced by Daniel Romano. But by 2014, and the arrival of an EP, “What Am I Going to Do With Everything I Know”, followed by Loyalty, there was something keener and more clear-eyed about her songwriting; something perhaps less eager to please. Recorded in France, in midwinter, with just three players, Loyalty had a quietly revelatory quality, its songs intimate but measured, dealing with friendship and loneliness and uneasy relationships.

Two years later, The Weather Station’s self-titled release was a sturdier prospect – a testament, she explains, to a new feeling of self-assertion after many years of finding herself the only woman in the recording studio. It also carried some of the toughness of Lindeman’s preceding years: the challenge of her parents’ divorce, a difficult period of mental illness, the sudden anxiety of turning 30 and wondering what she was doing with her life – surprised, perhaps, to find herself still a touring musician, rather than settling down and starting a family.

When she looks back over her career, Lindeman, too, can see a gathering of power – a sense that she knows her craft and can raise her voice. “I feel I’ve just been on this steady trajectory towards greater and greater control,” she says. “And greater and greater acceptance of following what initially felt like whims and now feel like instincts.”

LINDEMAN began writing Ignorance during winter 2018, recording the following spring. Its slow passage to release, she explains, was due to her need to find a new label – she has since signed to Mississippi-based Fat Possum. Already Lindeman feels some distance between herself and the record (she has already recorded its successor) and looks faintly hesitant when discussing it at all. “I listen to the record now and feel embarrassed about all kinds of things!” she says. “But I know that I had to let the songs be that naked, because that’s where I was at the time. I think this record was a lot more vulnerable and messy. I feel like it was a lot more just like ‘heart on the floor’ a little bit.”

It would be easy to mistake the vulnerability in these songs for romantic disappointment, but in fact their sense of loss is connected to global concerns. One of the presiding forces in Lindeman’s work is a reverence for nature – it was there abundantly in the lyrics to “Everything Was Mine”, heavy with lilacs and columbine, petunias, lilies, lobelia, and more recently in the

THE WEATHER STATION BUYERS’ GUIDE

ALL OF IT WAS MINE

YOU’VE CHANGED RECORDS, 2011

Sparser than her debut, this is Lindeman’s most straightforward folk album – led by voice, fingerpicked banjo and guitar, and with a determinedly pastoral bent to the lyrics (porches, lilacs, jars of honey), it captured the reigning nu-folk feel of the time. Recorded at the home of producer Daniel Romano, there’s a captivating intimacy to this short, simple record. 8/10 LOYALTY

PARADISE OF BACHELORS, 2015

Lindeman decamped to a deteriorating French mansion to record her third album in the company of engineer Robbie Lackritz and Bahamas leader Afie Jurvanen, sharing both production duties and instrumentation. It’s an elegant, hushed recording that sometimes belies the new sharp confidence of Lindeman’s lyrical style, grown more concentrated and precise and unsparing. 9/10 THE WEATHER STATION

PARADISE OF BACHELORS, 2017

Self-producing brought a fullness and a clarity to Lindeman’s fourth record, setting aside the fingerpicking and rustic imagery for electric instrumentation and subject matter that ranged from the introspective – depression, the loss of self in a relationship – to more external concerns: climate change and mass shootings. It was the clearest indication of Lindeman’s ambition to date. 9/10

talk of floods in the lowlands on “Complicit” and the song’s quiet observation “I was raised to hear the curlews, I was raised to notice light”.

It is here once again on Ignorance – in the sense of sorrow, fear of the future and particularly for the environment, that underscores many of these tracks, from “Robber” to “Atlantic” and “Loss”. In “Parking Lot”, for instance, which finds Lindeman sitting outside a venue watching a small bird, “its small chest rising and falling, as it sang the same song, over and over again, over the traffic and the noise”. It kills her, she sings, to see a bird fly. To think that “everywhere we go there is an outside, over all these ceilings hangs a sky”.

It is a tangibly different ecological perspective to that of the previous album, Lindeman feels. “I think, like a lot of people, up until a few years ago I was totally buying the line of ‘climate change is all my fault; if I hadn’t been so selfish and wanted to drive a car we wouldn’t be in this situation!’” she says. “I think I had eaten all of the shame that

was the defining narrative through the ’90s and early 2000s – of the Inconvenient Truth generation.”

Her stance began to change in 2018. “I went through this experience that was really strange, but I guess the words are ‘climate grief’,” she says. “Where I peeled back the layers, and even though I wasn’t a climate denier, I absolutely accepted the science, I couldn’t actually accept it. And when you actually, actually accept it it’s a very profound experience.” Across the screen she starts to cry.

“It has to change you,” she says after a moment. “Because you can’t not be changed by it when you look at it honestly and truthfully, and you don’t try and hide from it. Then you start to see our whole society as a giant project in denial. Historians of the future will be looking at our culture and they’ll be so confused. They’ll be like, ‘What?! They’re going to be clinging to life in remote regions where they can still grow food… but they were really obsessed with the Kardashians?!’”

Songwriters rarely manage to tackle serious global issues without seeming uncomfortably sanctimonious, but there is a sincerity and a beauty to Lindeman’s lyrics that proves convincing. “She’s very earnest, which is something that I seek out in the music that I listen to,” says Paquin. “I think Tamara has preserved that sense of self-reflection without trying to pander or be something that she’s not. Lyrically she’s so thoughtful. She’s somebody who asks a lot of questions of herself and us as people, and has this beautiful way of never being pedantic, but telling a story that is both relatable and expands on subjects that we might not think as much about.”

IF her last album was about Lindeman’s fascination with guitar music, and the “freedom and solitude and machismo and being the lonesome hero” that guitar music has come to represent, then Ignorance brings a new interest. Over the last couple of years Lindeman has listened to a lot of pop music. “Eighties pop music,” she clarifies, “which was, I think, the best pop music.” She has tried to contemplate why that might be. “I was thinking it’s the music that’s about longing and desire and despair and unrequited love, and I think that’s why I was really drawn to it.”

Crucial to this development was coming to appreciate her partner’s differing musical tastes. “At first he would put on Kraftwerk and I’d be like, ‘I don’t like this!’” Lindeman laughs. “It was so antithetical to everything I felt music should be. And then it turned slowly into accepting it. And then it turned into really loving it.” In the early days of their relationship she had what she describes as “the folky’s dislike of synthesiser” but with time and cohabitation this softened too. “I live with someone who plays synthesiser every day, and is constantly working with drum machines, so I think it forced me to hear the humanity in that music that I didn’t want to hear, because I wanted everything to be acoustic, organic music.”

Her great realisation was that “this is music that inhabits a physical space really differently than delicate, creaking music that can’t really be heard. You could put some of these songs on the worst sound system of all time – you can put them on a single speaker in a really loud van, and you still get transported somehow.”

To try this in her own work, Lindeman kept her lyrical approach much the same, “but I thought the music underneath them, what if it was a bit more muscular?” she explains. She grew interested in rhythm – in particular, straight rhythm. “Because personally I have really bad rhythm,” she laughs. “I can’t play in time! My rhythm is always flowing around. Which I think is really beautiful actually – in the earlier records it’s a critical part of my voice that I think I’ll go back to.” But playing live, she had come to feel trapped by that meandering feeling. She had a thought: “What if I just abdicate rhythm to someone else?”

She hired Kieran Adams, who she describes as “a human drum machine” to provide a succession of disco and rock beats. “Then I could flow on top of it, like it’s the stream bed and I’m the stream,” she says. “I got excited by the idea of ‘one element is really orderly, and one element is very disorderly’. You match them together over and over again.”

The other defining influence of the record was the experimentalism of the contemporary jazz scene. “In Toronto I go and see a lot of music, and a lot of music I see is jazz,” Lindeman says. “I don’t understand jazz, it’s completely strange to me, but I was able to start being curious and allowing a couple of those people to come into the band and just do their thing.”

She started writing on piano and with drum machines, using simpler chord sequences. Paquin recalls receiving her earliest demos. “Tamara and I have had laughs about that,” he says. “They were filled with great ideas but having heard her material from the past these demos were basically midi piano, vocals and midi strings and I think just a beat box from GarageBand. I remember getting the demos and thinking, ‘Oh my God, what is this?! What are we doing?!’”

His role was to take these ideas and help create them more organically in the studio, with a live band. It was an ambitious project, and with so many players and such differing rhythms, Paquin worked hard not to lose the emotional heft that has characterised Lindeman’s more lo-fi recordings. “I’m not a particularly technical producer,” he says. “I know the technical stuff, but all I really care about when we hit record is that I feel something, and I get goosebumps, and cry. I did a lot of that in these sessions.”

“LYRICALLY SHE’S SO THOUGHTFUL”

MARCUS PAQUIN

Christine Bougie… Kieran Adams… Ignorance is bliss: Lindeman and (left) her players on the new album

Ryan Driver… Johnny Spence…

Phillipe Melanson… …andBen Whiteley

Throughoutitallhervoicehasremainedherfocus.It isafterallLindeman’svoicethatprovesmoststriking uponfirsthearingTheWeatherStation.Itcarriesthe samecoolclarityofherlyrics,butwithititsown mysteriousrhythm,andanintimacythatisdefiant ratherthanfey.“Singingloudfeelsreallyuncomfortable tome,”sheexplains.“SoI’maverysoftsinger.”

Live,thishasthestrangeeffectofmakinganaudience leanin.JohnDarniellefirstheardLindemansingwhen shesupportedhisbandTheMountainGoatsatashowin Londoninlate2015andwasstruckbythequietresolve ofherperformance.“Ialwaysthinkit’sreallybravetodo stuffthatcountsasgenuinefolkmusicinfrontofbig crowds,”hesaysdowntheline.“Forthelongesttime thatsortofmusiccarriedthestigmaofnotbeingreally uptempo,notrunningouttograbtheaudience.Many performers,myselfincluded,think,‘Ihavetogoand takeeverybitofattentionIcanget!’Butfolkmusicoften assumesthattheaudienceisalreadylistening.The WeatherStationplayedlikethat;theyplayedslowand patientmusic.”

Inthestudio,workingwithsuchavoiceofcourse presentschallenges.“Withsomebodywhoselyricsand voicewantstobethemainsubjectintheartit’sreallyfor meaboutframingthatstorywithoutsteppingonits toes,”Paquinsays.Lindemanherselffoundher gentlenessoftoneprovedsomethingofaboon.“Itwas justquitebeautiful,becauseIcouldsingextremely softly,”shesaysoftherecordingsessions.“Andwhen IsingsoftlyIfeelIhavemyfullrangeofexpression, andIcansingthewordsthewayIwantthemto.”

BACKinheroffice,inthequietcornerofthecity, Lindemanisstillwonderingwhatlightherbook mightthrowontheartoflyric-writing.Sherecalls thephasesofherownwriting:theeasyearlydays,

“SHE’S KIND OF CRAFTY”

Bassist Ben Whiteley on the close-knit Toronto scene

“THIS feels in a lot of ways like a really Toronto record. This is where I have to give Tamara credit – she’s kind of crafty like that, she doesn’t always tell everybody all her plans, intentionally or unintentionally, and she really assembled people from different Toronto scenes. The two drummers: Kieran Adams, who plays in Diana and with tons of other people – he’s an incredible drummer, and he’s a producer as well. And then Philippe Melanson who plays in Bernice, he’s like a freefloating, exploring drummer. She said we’re going to bring in Brodie West (The Ex) to play saxophone because he comes from the free jazz scene, but we’re also going to bring in Ryan Driver (Eric Chenaux) on flute and Christine Bougie who plays guitar with Bahamas, and Johnny Spence the keyboard player who toured with Tegan and Sara. So she says I’m going to put together all these guys who respect each other as artists but bring very different things to the table… And she’s just like: ‘Go!’” followedbyaperiodofquestioning–atimewhereshe thoughteverylineshewrotewasbad,andwhenshe foundithardtodetermine“doIdislikethislyricbecause it’svulnerable,ordoIdislikeitbecauseit’sbad?”

Somewhileago,shetookateachingpostatBanff CentreForArtsAndCreativityinAlberta.Sheheld workshopsandtutorialsonsongwriting,guidingher studentsthroughtheprocessofcraftingtheirown material.Itwas,shesays,thebestjobsheeverhad. “Itchangedmywholeperspectiveonwriting,andmy ownwork.”

Whatshecametofindwasadegreeofself-acceptance –akindnesstoherselfwhenshedoesnotwriteas quicklyasshe’dlike,ortolookatasongandthink, “Yeahthisisamess,that’sOK.”Morethananythingshe haslearnedtofollowhersongwritinggut.“Ididn’t understandthatwhenIwasyounger,”shesays.“Iwas like,‘Whatdoesitmeantohaveaninstinct?’Iwasjust sounacceptingofmyself.”

Thelastfewmonthsoflockdownhaveofferedher achancetoliefallow,toenjoy“aperiodofrelative stabilitythat’sactuallybeenverygoodformentalhealth andphysicalhealth”.Shehaswrittenessays,notsongs; shehaswalkedtoworkandwalkedhome;shehasbeen inoneplaceandtakenstock.

Todayshelooksbackoverheralbums–fromthe “loopsandrecurringpieces”ofherdebuttoIgnorance’s “technicolourfantasyofsound”,andnoticeshow“I seemtoalwaysgoinanewdirectioneverytime”.Itisnot chanceorcoincidence,notaimlessnessorindecision, butrather,sheseesnow,amatterofartisticchoice.“I’ve realisedofcourseI’vehadinstinctsallalong,”shesays. “IthinkI’mlearningtoacceptthewaythatIthink.”