The Weather Station translates climate anxiety into musical poetry

As a child, front woman of folk-rock outfit The Weather Station Tamara Lindeman loved to look at the stars, but the enchantment of yesteryear has given way to climate anxiety. That fear fortunately led her to produce two ­enchanting records.

For more than a decade, Tamara Lindeman has been making waves with The Weather Station, but it was only with Ignorance, her fifth album released last year, that the Canadian singer-songwriter reached a wider audience. The album, wavering between folk rock, pop and jazz, ended up on many an end-of-year list, Lindeman collected letters of honour and compliments, sometimes from unexpected quarters.

“The most bizarre thing was FaceTiming with Elton John,” she laughs via Zoom from a club in Manchester, where she is kicking off her European tour. “He told me how he kept listening to it, and how he gave the record to all his friends. All that praise felt unreal until I went out playing shows. Because of the pandemic it all happened online first, and online always has an unreality to it. I think that I haven't even processed it all yet. I'm just really shocked and grateful.”

Yet at first nobody seemed to want Ignorance. “I was out of my contract with my US label and looking for a new one, but everyone turned me down. Once the record came out, they suddenly all loved it. (Laughs) It's nice when you feel vindicated, that you followed a weird instinct, and you were right.”

Lindeman also followed her instincts for her new album, How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, which came out barely a year after Ignorance. She recorded the album in three days with a new band of jazz musicians from Toronto, without rehearsing and without involving her record company. “I decided to self-fund it,” she says. “I wanted to be free of expectations and not have to worry about what anyone else might think. I've always had total artistic freedom, but like so many people, I have a desire to please. So it's not that somebody would tell me what to do, it's just that perhaps I would unconsciously alter what I was doing, when I knew that someone else was paying for the record.”

What is striking about her new record is the intimate character of the songs and the lack of percussion. “I didn't want drums, because I imagined the music as falling endlessly through clouds. Drums are so grounding.” The smooth feel of Chet Baker Sings was an inspiration, she says, as was Dylan's take on the American Songbook, Shadows in the Night. And her compatriot Joni Mitchell? “I don't like it when people say that I'm actively trying to sound like her. Actually, I've always been trying not to sound like her. But I do. I can't help it.” (Laughs)

The songs for How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars were born in the same writing session as those for Ignorance, but Lindeman found them too quiet and gentle and too intimate to be included on that record. “Ignorance was a record I made for people. I wanted to communicate. I made How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars just for myself,” she says. Did she ever consider not releasing the songs? “Totally. Recording them was an odd move, I've never done that with the extra songs that don't end up on the record. But I think they're some of the best songs I've written, so I felt that not releasing them would be a shame. Lyrically there were things I felt were unsaid.”

Lindeman can express a whole world of feelings in a few poetic words. In “Stars”, she sings about how, on New Year's Eve 2019, she sits in the desert looking at the stars, and how the fireworks of nearby Salton City light up the night. “I hear fireworks go off / As though they're celebrating all another year has cost / Or is it carelessness? / Send another star into the sky / Only to watch it die / Fall across the black in a shining arc / I swear to God, this world will break my heart.”

“It's part of our human heritage to look up at the stars, and wonder and dream and think. As a child, the stars, universe, space were concepts that got my mind turning. I wrote this song because I realised that with my feelings around climate change, I can't look at the stars the same way. So how is it that I should look at the stars? With everything I know about the universe versus earth, how unusual earth is, and how imperiled it is, every word in that song is a complicated question.”

In the face of the pandemic and the war in Ukraine, you would almost forget that our biggest battle is climate change. The songs for Ignorance and How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars were born out of climate anxiety. “There's this nameless dread around our generation, whereas our parents were able to think ahead and have these starry-eyed views of the future. We don't have that. I don't know what kind of world I'll be living in when I'm old and grey. I think it was a real strain that we all felt when we went through the pandemic, when you can't imagine the future in a positive light.” Many people see climate change as a change of nature, while the effects are felt on every scale, she says. “It's not about polar bears, it's about our society. We need to acknowledge the human repercussions, the refugee crises, wars.”

Lindeman particularly blames the betrayals of the recent decades. “There have been so many times in history where something could have happened. It's not that it wasn't wanted, but institutions like the American Petroleum Institute actively stopped us from taking action. It's not that people don't want to solve the problem, we've been prevented from solving it at many key junctures.” That treachery was a big shift in the way Lindeman saw authority and government, and people around her. “I don't share the nihilistic view of human nature that you often find in environmental circles, but I do feel a sense of betrayal and loss. How many forces have aligned to prevent our safety.”

A recent study by the Catholic University of Louvain says that more than one in ten people suffer from climate anxiety in everyday life. “That doesn't surprise me. I think that everyone is feeling some low-level anxiety about it. How could you not? The reason why I talk about it so much, is that I really don't believe that my experience is in any way unique. I want other people to recognize the same things in themselves, so we can all acknowledge how we feel about it.” Many people do not want to talk about it, though, because it is so polarising. “A lot of people, especially in North-America, associate climate change with personal responsibility and guilt. They don't want to bring it up unless they don't burn fuel.”

Lindeman also sings about it indirectly, through themes such as the passing of time, change, saying goodbye and love. “It's not easy to fit the world into a song. I think most of us write somewhat unconsciously. When you try to do it consciously, ninety per cent of the time you fail. The best songs have a humility to them. It's just about finding the right button to press, and hoping that the listener will do the rest. That's what's happened with Ignorance, and I'm really grateful for that. If I had known that there is such a hunger and thirst for this topic, I would perhaps have written about it a bit more overtly.” Does she hope to inspire people? “I don't think that my songs are inspiring at all. (Laughs) They're certainly not protest songs, but I do think they hit a nerve.”

In the video for her song “Endless Time”, Lindeman depicts the bonding she evokes by hugging people in the street. “I was living in Toronto at the time, it was very dark and cold, and dreary, and there was another wave of Covid. Everyone was just eyes down. I imagined, what if everyone on the street could read each other's mind and just feel like, oh, you're struggling, I'm gonna tell you something kind, you're going to hug me. That was it. It was just honest emotional connection."

THE WEATHER STATION
25/3, 19.30, Botanique, www.botanique.be