Screaming cars, snarling fluorescent advertisements and the thunder of construction batter the senses. The unseasonably warm breeze smells like fryer oil and the trampled pulp of browning leaves — for a moment, it feels like an approaching death.
This is the frantic vortex swirling outside as Tamara Lindeman sits across from me, tucked into the warm chatter of a coffee shop in Toronto's West End. It's the same vortex that spit out "Neon Signs," Lindeman's aching ode to the lie of city life, the way it pushes the body to the trembling edge of collapse — water on the lip of a cup.
"I'm somebody that has been very not-embodied," she says, briefly checking my phone to ensure that we're still recording. "I think, in my life, I've been a pretty dissociated person, and I'm pretty heady, and I can really be stuck in my mind. When I'm under stress in particular — I can't embody."
She reflects, "I think this album was a time of really reaching the limits of that, where your body just starts rebelling and breaking, and you have to pay attention, because it's like a rebellious child. It's like, 'No!' And I think coming full circle out of that, to embody is to recognize your fragility and failing and need and hunger and loneliness. It's hard to do."
Humanhood, Lindeman's seventh album as the Weather Station, manages the feint of ease. Over the most fluid — and arguably embodied — music of Lindeman's career, she and her band introduce a drop of oil into the pellucid cool that coursed through her 2021 breakthrough Ignorance, disrupting those ordered molecules with slick iridescent black. On wax, at least, she sounds every bit in control of the chaos that careens through these songs.
"And at the end of the world / Your eyes, they fool you," Lindeman sings gently on "Body Moves," a pigeon-strutting pop song that belies the tender terror at its heart. How do we see this world for what it is, when what it is makes increasingly little sense? How do we parse the alarm bells when alarm is the only frequency left?
"For whatever reason, my musical self is sort of dark," Lindeman says. "I don't know whether that will change, but I think the thing that causes me to write a song is a tangle, or a brokenness, a confusion — it's not where I go to celebrate. I wish it was… Like, I wish I could just be brat and have fun and not care, not have to be careful of what I say."
BRAT it is not, but Humanhood does share something essential with Charli XCX's party manifesto — it prizes honesty above all else, and asks that you face reality in all its painful embarrassment and flagellating fears. No more smoke and mirrors.
On Humanhood, Lindeman brings the earth-swallowing scope of climate change and social collapse to human size — this is a record as much about heartbreak and community and the body as it is about our slump toward catastrophe. Lindeman, in her refusal to deny, makes the argument that it's all one and the same.
"I do feel like I really struggled with this record and Ignorance. The lines that always stress me out the most are the most intense ones," she says. "Should I change this line? Should I not say this? Should I include it in the song? Should I leave it out? And I ultimately always come down on the side of: suffering is real and darkness is real. To not include it feels wrong."
Across Humanhood, pain blooms like dandelions through the sidewalk, always making itself known. The record's power is in the way Lindeman tempers that pain with an abundance of light — Humanhood is a document of fear and loss, but never of defeat.
"I personally went into the climate world as this sort of rigid, very Western person who was like, 'I am very upset about this, and that is the only feeling I can have, and I'm not supposed to feel any other emotion' — almost a puritanical feeling," she says. "And I think that I've let go of that. You can feel incredibly sad, and then you can also have a joyful experience right next to it. I think the only thing to avoid is denial."
On the dusky, sliding "Lonely," Lindeman heads to the Southern Cross and listens to friends play, discovering "A simple recipe / This medicine really" in the fight against her shattering isolation. A hot, shitty day is turned briefly transcendent on the title track when Lindeman sheds the sweaty weight of her humanhood for a cold swim. On closer "Sewing" — which Lindeman calls the mission statement of the album — she is crafting a wild, patchwork blanket, "from pride and shame, beauty and guilt." Joy sits next to pain, medicine next to poison; the only real failure is to deny one for the other.
Water runs through Humanhood, a stretch of songs toward its end — from "Ribbon" to "Lonely" — fixated on the mutating power of water, a preoccupation mirrored in the liquidity of the record's improvised, jazz-tinged art rock.
"Water feels kind of psychic. That is kind of the reality of everything. Everything can be good and bad, and everything can be destructive or healing; it depends on what's happening. It depends on the context. It depends on you. It depends on what you're bringing. It depends on the reality of the situation," Lindeman explains. "With water, it's really pretty easy to slip more into metaphor. It reflects, it submerges, it's a habitat, it's an ecosystem. It's moving, it's sensitive to atmosphere, to energy. It's a beautiful metaphor for the mind. I think of that. It's like we're all swimming in our own little oceans."
She continues, "Since the Ontario Place thing, I haven't been going to the water very much. I kind of stopped, because that was my place where I went. That beach was, like, the place in the pandemic. It was like a vacation, a getaway. And it's crazy that it's gone, you know? That it's literally boarded up."
The loss of Ontario Place may feel small in the grand sweep of the world's current problems — even Toronto's current problems — but it's a small symptom of a much larger sickness, a vindictive and bullish kind of denial, an obsession with vanishing what's left. There are no trees left to wander beneath, no water's edge to touch — the birds circle overhead, unsure of where to go.
"I definitely think the cruelty of that, I feel like it pushes my brain outside of any understanding I've had in the past," Lindeman says. "And I personally have turned a lot to myth and Jungian ideas, this idea that myths are about the human psyche; they're not about princes and princesses. It's about the mind. And there's something going on there that's a self destructive urge — it's about fear, or not wanting to face the truth. So you just have to bury it. You don't want to admit you were wrong about climate so you're like, 'We're gonna act like it's not happening, or we're gonna just destroy all these regulations so that we don't have to face that it's real, because that would be hard,' you know?"
Of course, the world continues to move beyond the cities. Myths play out that have little to do with Ford-ian cruelty and endless development. This year, Lindeman headed north, spending her summer in northern Labrador and Nunavut. She documented some of her travels on social media, and today, as on Instagram, she describes the trip as transformative.
"It's another world. It's another universe. It's totally outside of our frame of reference. Our Canadian identity is predicated on the north, but we don't know anything about it," she says. "I just felt so ignorant — I was hanging out with teenagers, and they were educating me, you know? Primarily I was supposed to educate them, but they were educating me! And just the breadth of cultures, languages, ideas, mythologies — I struggle to find the one story [to tell]."
After a brief moment spent contemplating a ceiling corner, she finds one.
"I asked [an Inuit throat singer who had come to perform] where she'd learned her song, and she said her mother taught her, and then just kind of mentioned, offhandedly, 'Breathing is quiet. And when you're out on the land, [with the polar bears], you have to be quiet,'" Lindeman says. "And even that was so fascinating to me, and made me understand throat singing in this whole other way. It's a sound that sounds natural, because you're living on the land with an active predator, and you're creating music in that situation."
She continues, "And I don't even know if that's considered [the real origin], that was just what one person told me. But I was like, 'I know nothing.' And I found it so invigorating. It was very healing, it was very spiritual, it was very beautiful. It was hard too — it's sad as well. But to be on that land, it was just a dream come true."
And there it is again — the fluidity of everything, the movement of water, the teeter between wonder and devastation, the attempt to make them one. The music on Humanhood feels in a state of constant transition; the record shifts with the sunlight through your eyelids, that greasy breeze through your hair.
It's a rallying cry and a gentle whisper, a blade and a blanket. Like the world it speaks to, change — sometimes beautiful and small, sometimes terrifying — is inevitable. Like its maker, it will continue to evolve.
"I don't present myself as a fully formed person," Lindeman says. "Because I'm not."