featuring the very best of americana, alt.country and roots music
January 20, 2025
Scott Foley, purveyor of dust
I swear to god, this world will break my heart, Tamara Lindeman confessed on her last album, 2022's How Is It That I Should Look At the Stars. That still, centered piano-based session was a companion piece to the rhythmic, full-band Ignorance, the closest Lindeman has come in her Weather Station guise to a pop record. Lindeman has never made the same record twice, beginning her recording career as an acoustic folk singer-songwriter, gathering vocal confidence and stylistic variation with each LP.
The Torontonian's seventh collection, titled Humanhood (Fat Possum), finds the multi-instrumentalist composing at the keyboard, joined by familiar accompanists including Ben Whitely on bass, Philippe Melanson and Kieran Adams on percussion, Ben Boye on keys, and Karen Ng on woodwinds. With co-producer Marcus Paquin, Weather Station returns to the ensemble approach of Ignorance, but emphasizing improvisation for what Lindeman has deemed a very joyful recording experience. Powered by a steady bass pulse, "Neon Signs" mirrors Weather Station's '21 project, Ng's flute fluttering across the mix. Lindeman sings, Nothing needs you so badly as a lie, noting our complicity in looking to flashing lights and cheap promises for fulfilment. Elsewhere on Humanhood, the band's rhythms are less fixed, the arrangements owing as much to jazz as to folk-pop.
Over the years, Tamara Lindeman has evolved as a vocalist, never showy or pretty by standard definitions. On "Body Moves", she occupies her low register, a soft but sturdy fabric that flows across the song. Sam Amidon adds strings to the cut, exploring the project's theme of how we embody trust: Was it truth? Was it lies? / Was it some kind of trap that you devised / To keep yourself from getting out. On "Ribbon" she moves between a speak-sing and an upper register as rhythms stop, start and evolve, until finding a melodic resolution, with Lindeman's vocal flowing upwards into a confession: I had to drive cross country just to / I had to drive three highways just to get away from you.
The arrangements on Humanhood can be relatively complex, but there is little melodic dissonance. Especially on recent records, Weather Station lyrics juxtapose our human bodies with the nature surrounding us, addressing climate especially as a force for dis-integration and re-integration. The limber "Window" dances between escape from and into the world: My heart is racing as a window opens / Somewhere to let me out, to let me in / To somewhere I already was. While lyrics point to the consequence of climate change on our natural world, Lindeman impressively locates these effects as we encounter them in our daily lives. Slow to unspool, the beautiful "Lonely" explores separation and our need for connection, if only to gather at a jazz club with friends.
The formal songs on Humanhood are interspersed with brief improvisational passages, allowing this special iteration of Weather Station to expand into new territory. Ng's woodwinds are as essential to the sessions as the restless percussion and the soulful piano, cleaving to produce sounds that are lovely, provocative, and moving. In Lindeman, we have a songwriter whose ideas and intentions are true to both the heart and mind, whose lyrics are intelligent without being obtuse, heartfelt while avoiding preciousness. With its emotionally fragile delivery, "Sewing" sums up her calling: This blanket I seem to be making / From private shame, beauty, and guilt / Sewing together a quilt. Ohe primally rhythmic title cut, Tamara Lindeman sings of the existential balance - connection and distance; awkwardness and grace; diving deep and surfacing.
When I write about the natural world, which I do on every record and often every song, it's returning to the source or connecting back to the deepest thing for me
She sings: Sacred though / Precious, oh ...
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