In the 1970s, Tamara Lindeman’s parents moved from Toronto to a part of Ottawa so remote that “snowploughs had only started running there 10 years earlier”, says the Canadian songwriter. A national reforestation initiative prompted them to plant thousands of trees on their 25 acres. By the late 80s, Lindeman would sing in the young forest, cherishing the feeling of safety it gave her. Now the woodland is the setting for the music videos from Ignorance, Lindeman’s fifth album as folk-rock outfit the Weather Station – hailed by many critics as an early album of the year. “I feel like all the pieces of my life came together in this beautiful way,” she says, calling from Toronto.
There is nothing surprising about finding a folkie in the woods. But a renewed obsession with the climate crisis prompted this songwriter, who kept company with contemporary Americana greats such as Steve Gunn and William Tyler, to make a more direct, pop-facing record 12 years after her debut – swapping Dylan’s influence for the lucid and surrealist British art-rock of late 80s Kate Bush, Avalon-era Roxy Music, Christine McVie and post-charts Talk Talk. “When I connected that what I was writing had to do with climate grief, I felt it was imperative to express that emotion in a very blunt, raw way,” says Lindeman. “I love avant-garde music. But there is something to be said for a song that cuts straight across, that there’s no barriers to accessing.”
Lindeman has spent lockdown focusing on small pleasures: her neighbour’s tulips, taking piano lessons and “learning to express myself better and to say what I mean the first time”. She is thoughtful and cautious in conversation. Ignorance is poetic and refined: “I never believed in the robber / I figured everything he took was gone,” she sings on Robber, a song about the climate being so devalued that its destroyers escape scot-free.
Lindeman was raised to value nature and recognise animal tracks in the snow. But as a kid she would struggle to sleep at night, terrified and angry at what was then known as global warming: “I remember my mother trying to comfort me, but me being like, you don’t have the answers.” She grew to avoid the problem, especially once she started touring as a musician of growing renown. “It brings up really heavy feelings of sadness and anxiety, and shame and guilt: I was one of the bad guys.”
But in 2018, back home after a long stint on the road, Lindeman became newly obsessed. The IPCC published its report warning of the effects of a 1.5-degree temperature increase; Greta Thunberg began her protest. “I saw my young self in her,” says Lindeman. After months spent reading about the environment “made me a little crazy”, she concluded that showing up was more important than feeling guilty. She organised some talks in Toronto, petitioned her representatives and attended rallies. Lindeman doesn’t see herself as “a useful or good activist”, but decided: “If I have a small platform, I should push this into the consciousness.”
Her new album conveys the depth of her feeling. With fearful lyrics juxtaposed against her ambitious, even romantic musical vision, Ignorance’s expansiveness acts like a gesture of hope and determination. Lindeman becomes bashful at the suggestion, but admits that the bolder the music became – fleshed out by musicians from Toronto’s jazz scene – the safer she felt “expressing these very negative, sad things”. She’s proudest of “the moments where I let passion show through in this way that would have made me feel very embarrassed in the past.”
The shift came from being “humbled” by the climate crisis but also finally getting respect as a woman in a male-dominated profession. “When you feel as if you say something it’ll be believed and understood, you feel so empowered to express the things you didn’t think you could when you were just seeking respect or power.” It also involved breaking up with the “western, solitary-man narrative that pervades country and Americana,” she says. “Questioning this narrative that my younger self had adhered to, of travelling and being alone as being free. I now put much greater emphasis and value on connectedness as being the highest truth in some ways.”
Her approach recalls Bjork’s eco-futurist mantra: not going back to nature, but forward to it. One of Ignorance’s most moving lines comes in Tried to Tell You: “I cannot sell you on your own need,” Lindeman sings insistently. It was written for a friend who was ignoring their desires, she says. “But I felt like so many of the personal situations described on the record became a metaphor for what a strange society we’re trying to force ourselves to live in where I think we all feel so uncomfortable.” Making Ignorance was often terrifying and exposing, she says, though she has learned to value that form of discomfort. “The softest feelings within us are the most important,” she says. “The harder we try to push ourselves aside, the more unwell we are, the darker we get as a species.”