For folk rock singer-songwriter the Weather Station, the outlook is bright and clear | Canada Voices

There’s a lovely daydream of a song on the new Weather Station album, Humanhood. Called Lonely, it’s about community as much as anything else. “We all just sat there just listening to a song being sung,” Tamara Lindeman intones in a breathy, dusky voice. “A simple recipe, this medicine really. … Like some old wives’ tale nobody tells you about, just this thing that usually works – somehow.”

The song references the small freak-folk scene in Toronto to which Lindeman (who records under the name the Weather Station) once belonged. She leads an indie-rock band and plays in big rooms now, but there was a time when she presented miniature bluegrass music solo, in intimate and informal spaces. She released her first album in 2009, which seems like an awfully long time ago in the rapidly evolving music business.

Lindeman is what the industry calls a mid-level artist. For a Canadian indie singer-songwriter, maintaining that status is dogged work. Transcending it is nearly impossible. Now seven albums into her career, the 40-year-old Lindeman is still proving herself, as if a sophomore slump remains a possibility even this deep into her career.

“Every album since my first has felt that way, that I have to top this somehow” she says, speaking in her home in Toronto’s west end. “It’s been a lot of self-imposed pressure for me: It has to be better, and it will be better. But what does better even mean?”

The goalposts shift. Record sales, you say? Radio? Okay, boomer. Positive album reviews? Passé. Rolling Stone magazine and Pitchfork have lost cultural relevance. A late-night television spot on one of the major U.S. networks used to be a benchmark achievement, but viewership is plummeting.

Though social-media prominence is still important, platforms are in flux. Twitter is now X, and everybody hates X. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering a ban on TikTok, an important marketing tool.

Today’s key measuring stick, for better or worse, is Spotify. Getting a track on the homepage or one of the streaming giant’s playlist is the goal. But not for Lindeman.

“I don’t listen to playlists,” she says. “I never have. I like albums.”

Petite with straight blond hair, Lindeman sits on a second-hand couch in a sun-drenched living room, her record collection right beside her. Classics such as Gordon Lightfoot’s The Way I Feel, Roger Miller’s A Tender Look at Love and a Willie Dunn compilation share space with music by contemporary singer-songwriter Bill Callahan and Toronto’s Robin Dann and Jennifer Castle.

The turntable hooked up to an old Marantz receiver represents a bygone analog, flesh-and-blood era, when radio programmers and record-label bosses held sway. Today, the gatekeepers are machines.

“It’s a very weird time now, and I do think that people will eventually rebel against the robotic playlists,” Lindeman says. “I don’t know who it’s really good for right now.”

These are definitely not good times for independent record labels. Fourteen of them, including Montreal’s Secret City Records, recently formed the Organization for Recorded Culture and Arts. Their goal is to impress upon policy makers music’s economic, social and cultural value.

Lindeman signed with a number of indie labels over the years, beginning with boutique operations You’ve Changed Records in Canada and Paradise of Bachelors in the United States. For the past decade domestically she’s been with Toronto’s Next Door Records, an imprint of Outside Music.

For international distribution, in 2018 she signed with the Mississippi-based Fat Possum Records, a step up in leagues for Lindeman, who was at a career crossroads. Fat Possum’s Sam Gilbert was intrigued about Weather Station’s possibilities.

“We thought it was an interesting moment to be involved with Tamara,” he says from London, England. “It felt like she was just coming into a creative peak, and it was a nice time to be stepping in with an artist who quite clearly is a career artist.”

At the time, Lindeman had just released her self-titled fourth album, which saw her moving from indie folk to a more rock-orientated direction. “Something like Talk Talk, with elements of Fleetwood Mac,” as Gilbert characterizes it.

For the 2021 Weather Station album Ignorance, Fat Possum put on a promotional full-court press. Lindeman was featured on National Public Radio, appeared on Jimmy Kimmel Live! and taped an episode of Austin City Limits with a fellow ascending Canadian, Allison Russell. The New Yorker’s Amanda Petrusich rated Ignorance as the best album of the year.

The Weather Station hit the road hard, headlining in North America and Europe. Opening slots on tours with Mitski and First Aid Kit exposed Lindeman to new audiences.

Outside Music financed the recording of Ignorance, but it was a long process for Lindeman’s former management to find an international home for the record. The Fat Possum partnership clicked.

“We’ve worked with every U.S. label, and I can say that Fat Possum is probably the most on top of things in terms of not only giving the artist space, but they also have deep pockets,” says Outside’s managing director, Evan Newman.

Fat Possum brought important connections. The high-powered Chicago-based music publicity agency Pitch Perfect PR landed a New York Times feature profile of Lindeman in 2021.

“That piece moved the needle a great deal in the United States,” Newman says.

Ignorance not only wound up on the year-end top-10 lists of Pitchfork, Paste and Stereogum, but Uncut magazine and the Guardian newspaper overseas. Addressing climate change and a romantic breakup, Ignorance was a sophisticated album marked by melody and Lindeman’s elegant anxiety.

Still, as critically well received as the album was, the last popular music inspired by heartbreak and violent meteorology was Etta James’s 1961 cover of Stormy Weather. (Mind you, Miss Anthropocene, a concept album from Canadian musician Grimes about a goddess of climate change, placed 32nd on Billboard’s Hot 200 in 2020.)

“It’s so weird that caring about people surviving disasters is considered niche,” Lindeman says, laughing (which she does easily and often). “I mean, it would be strange if people think it’s bad that I tried to talk about the most consequential events facing humanity.”

Niche or not, the album’s subject matter attracted attention. Without a compelling angle, it’s easy for music to get lost. According to figures cited by Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group in 2022, an average of more than 100,000 songs are being uploaded to digital service providers daily.

“It’s quite refreshing to have an album with such a clear narrative,” Gilbert says. “And it’s important.”

The successor to Ignorance, 2022’s jazzy How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, isn’t considered a true follow-up in the minds of Lindeman’s team. “It was really a companion album,” Newman says. “Something to keep the momentum going.”

Which brings us to Humanhood, another significant step in Lindeman’s musical evolution, with its modern beats, woodwind moments and radiant ambiance. The songs act as encouragements, in an age of mistrust, overconsumption and digitization.

Prior to its Jan. 17 release, the music press pounced on the advance single Neon Dreams, about misinformation. Stereogum said the song “unfurls enchantingly,” while Paste wrote that the beat “throbs like a siren asking you, slowly and quietly, to dance and keep going.”

Promotionally, Lindeman’s team looks to keep up the momentum. “We’re building on all that success of Ignorance and hammering it home on this record,” Gilbert says.

A British and European tour begins this month with a series of record-store appearances in England. A North American tour kicks off in late March at Montreal’s 900-capacity Beanfield Theatre and ends at Toronto’s 1,200-capacity Concert Hall.

The goal in the summer is to move the Weather Station from a solid second-stage act at major U.S. festivals to a mainstage artist, at the level of St. Vincent or Mitski.

“As independent labels, we cater to the 10 per cent of the public who actually explore music,” Newman says. “The other 90 per cent consumes what’s given to them by radio or algorithms. With Tamara, we want to expand beyond that 10 per cent.”

Creatively, Lindeman sees Humanhood not as a career launchpad, but as the completion of an album trilogy – the light at the end of a personal tunnel. And, like most recording artists, she’s already thinking of the next record.

“These three albums dealt with something internal, a spiritual battle for lack of a better term,” she says. “I think the next record will be lighter. I’m no longer where I was when I made those albums, you know? I’m in a better place.”