Interview with Tamara Lindeman of the Weather Station

When Tamara Lindeman was choosing a name for her new album, she wanted to go big.

The last two records from her band, the Weather Station, were dominated by Lindeman’s concern for the climate. The new one sees her zoom out from that topic – but not move on. 

It’s called Humanhood.

“There’s so many layers to that word humanhood for me, and absolutely climate is in there,” Lindeman says, via video call from the UK, where she’s about to begin a tour. “It just felt like a way, like a door to talk about personal things and my own personal life, but also this broader question of, you know, the human condition.”

If that sounds grandiose, Humanhood in fact turns out to be an intimate experience, like eavesdropping on someone’s inner monologue. Tightly arranged songs weave in and out of looser instrumental interludes of flutes, sax and skittering percussion. Lindeman’s voice, generous in its vulnerability, lets us in on passing moments and throwaway thoughts, alighting only occasionally, as if by chance, on what might be universal truths.

Here and there her fears for the planet becomes explicit: on Irreversible Damage, we overhear a voice describing the emotional toll of the destruction of nature. And on the title track Lindeman ponders being “one of a generation that might end this world, I guess”.

“Nobody tells you how to bear this,” she sings, almost under her breath.

The mysteries of humanhood

There’s a clear thread linking Humanhood to the Weather Station’s last two albums, 2021’s Ignorance and its more austere companion piece How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars, both marked by the weight of climate grief, both making it on to multiple albums of the year lists.

They’re her “climate records”, she says, but they’re also just “records where climate exists”. “They just came from my heart, from what I was feeling at that time.”

Lindeman has had time to get used to being in the public eye. The Canadian singer-songwriter has been making music with the Weather Station for nearly 20 years, and before that had an extensive screen acting career, appearing throughout her teens and twenties in everything from the Tilda Swinton thriller The Deep End to the Disney Channel’s Stepsister from Planet Weird.

But before Ignorance came out, she hadn’t spoken publicly much about environmental concerns (aside from fending off the occasional climate-skeptic troll who would mistake her social media account @theweatherstation for the @weatherchannel).

“In this weird way, inadvertently, my whole album release turned into a climate conversation,” she says. Not what she had planned, but “why not”, she thought. It was partly through those intense conversations with friends and strangers – many of them over Zoom, due to Covid restrictions at the time – that Lindeman found herself considering the nature of humanhood. After all, “climate is obviously not just an environmental question. It’s a question that goes right to the heart of our very nature and our existence.”

For one thing, Lindeman was bugged by the persistent belief that human nature is just inherently bad, and that the crises and environmental degradation we see today are its tragic, inevitable result. She doesn’t buy that take on humanhood. Not only does it sound a lot like an excuse to shrug and give up, it’s also at odds with the picture Lindeman sees in, for example, the amazing community responses to the recent fires in Los Angeles.

“I always try to remind people, this is a systems problem, you know. There is a human nature component, but that’s not the only thing that’s happening here,” she says.

As if the truth was true

Most of all, the Weather Station’s music feels like a soundtrack to a toxic on-off relationship with reality itself – especially the weird sense of denial that Lindeman believes the world is in regarding climate, which she describes as “kind of like a mist that’s in the air”. 

In a 2021 song called Loss, she imagined the moment in the grieving process when we find the courage to live “as if the truth was true”. In the time it takes us to face those facts and feel those feelings, what marks are they leaving on our souls?

Living in an age where the natural world is under such threat, Lindeman says, “is this enormous, unexamined experience that is specific to my generation and younger… A lot of people can’t see these feelings and are in a sort of denial in themselves about these feelings. So it felt very meaningful to touch on it in songs. For me, the emotions of the climate crisis are so important to name and talk about and sing about. I think if there was more room in our society to feel, to grieve or to honor things, you know… but there isn’t. So people are caught up in a story that allows them to not have to feel what’s happening.”

It’s this kind of denial that makes it possible for the United States to elect a leader who promises to trample on environmental protections, she believes. (As we speak, Donald Trump is about to be inaugurated for his second term as president.)

In this uncertain moment, she feels at a loss as to where to focus efforts for the climate. But she’s pretty clear on what we need to stop doing, which is shaming ordinary people for their environmental failings. As she wrote in a new year’s eve social media post, shame often “does the opposite of what you think it does”.

Music, on the other hand, can provide rays of hope. Lindeman reveals she’s currently in a Bob Dylan phase, and “finding a lot in his lyrics I hadn’t caught before”. “He has a lot of lyrics that feel very relevant to what’s happening right now,” she says. “There’s a lot in there about the warping of reality and you know, power and force… The fifties was a very repressive time in America, and artists found a way to break some of those barriers. And, you know, he was one of them.”

Why musicians don’t talk climate

Lindeman is still learning to manage the toll of climate anxiety on her own mental health. “I’ve learned to be careful and be cognizant of the limits of my ability, the limits of my fortitude,” she says. “You can’t dwell on it all day… But I also think, by the same token, I feel the worst when I’m not saying anything or doing anything. You can’t ignore it, you know? To ignore it makes you feel worse.”

That’s why at home, she’s in the process of installing solar panels and electric heating, so she and her partner can be “not using carbon generally to live, which will feel good”.

In using her platform as a musician to speak out about the environment, Lindeman joins names such as Billie Eilish, Massive Attack, Aurora, Ellie Goulding and Coldplay. It takes courage.

“What I find mostly when I talk to musicians is a perception – that of course has truth in it – that we shouldn’t be talking about this if we’re touring,” she says. “And my belief is that that’s sort of short-sighted and not going to lead us anywhere in terms of the mass movement we need. The future I think most people would say they’re fighting for, is one where the things we care about, like music or shows, or maybe even travel, don’t come with this cost.”

The Weather Station’s current tour takes in Europe, Canada and the US. Lindeman has worked to cut down on “needless flying”, she says, planning shows to avoid back-and-forth trips, and driving as much as possible instead of flying in North America. But convincing others to prioritize carbon-cutting has been “an uphill battle”, she says.

She would love to see more musicians from all genres join the climate conversation – she was particularly heartened to see Corb Lund, the Canadian country singer, come out as a vocal opponent of coal mines in Alberta. “I do think the most important artists to be talking about this are probably country singers or people making music in a conservative milieu. Because I think they’re the ones who could have a bigger impact than, someone in, for lack of a better word, indie rock, like me,” she says.

In the meantime, could it be that the simmering tension of the climate crisis is already defining our culture more profoundly than we’re able to admit, even when we don’t name it directly?

“Sometimes I’m listening to the radio and I’m like, that feels like a climate song,” says Lindeman. “You know, I can hear it. It’s out there.”

The Weather Station is on tour in Europe and North America from February to June 2025. The album Humanhood is available now on eco-mix vinyl.