The Weather Station reflects on Humanhood and climate change
The Canadian singer-songwriter’s new album, Humanhood, is out now
"This record is very of its time," Tamara Lindeman tells Q's Tom Power about her seventh album, Humanhood. "It's dark. There's a lot of heaviness."
The Canadian singer-songwriter, who performs under the name The Weather Station, is known for making music that confronts the impending doom of global climate change. But on her latest record, she chronicles a personal mental health crisis while also reckoning with the larger question of what it means to be human.
"It's been hard to figure out how to talk about the record because it is so personal and it is very much this personal journey that I went through of losing my sense of self," she says. "But I also think that, you know, this record is a depiction of me trying to figure it out."
Though Humanhood doesn't focus on climate change to the same degree as her widely acclaimed 2021 album Ignorance does, Lindeman says the subject was a starting point for her to think more deeply about the human condition.
"A lot of people, when they encounter this reality, their first response is this nihilism or this doom," she says. "Of course, we are the problem … but anyone in the climate movement who's actually working on this, the further in you get, the more you realize it's not human nature. It's a systems problem…. I think climate causes you to have to think deeply about vulnerability and loss and what all of this means."
Humanhood, at its core, is about Lindeman's healing journey as it documents her personal process of reconnecting with herself.
"I just have to hold very softly all of the good and the bad of human nature and not turn away from any of it," she says.
The full interview with The Weather Station is available on our YouTube channel and on our podcast, Q with Tom Power. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Interview with The Weather Station produced by Mitch Pollock.
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