The New Yorker Radio Hour - Amanda Petrusich Talks with the Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman

Episode Date: August 10, 2021

Amanda Petrusich describes herself as a “die-hard fan” of folk music, but not when it feels precious or sentimental. That’s why she loves the Weather Station, whose songs, she thinks, “could take a punch to the face.” A solo project of the songwriter and performer Tamara Lindeman, the Weather Station’s new album, “Ignorance,” focusses on the theme of climate grief: Lindeman was responding to a devastating report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change about the consequences of elevated carbon levels for human societies. If that sounds heady, Lindeman tells Petrusich that it may be her heritage. “There’s this thread in Canadian music of philosophical songwriting, and that’s how I like my lyrics to be. I like them to be about ideas as well as stories. . . . Most people want songs that just tell a story; they don’t want the complicated ideas. But I do.” The Weather Station performs “Robber” and “Tried to Tell You,” with Evan Cartwright on percussion and Karen Ng on saxophone.    This segment originally aired February 5, 2021. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. One of the year's most exciting releases in indie music comes from the group known as the Weather Station. The record is called Ignorance, and it came out early in the year. But if all goes as planned, the weather station will go on tour with it, starting in September with Bonneroo and then the Pitchfork Festival. One of their biggest fans is our music critic, amend. Linda Petrusich, and she's been singing the praises of the Weather Station for years. So my first introduction to the Weather Station, fronted by the singer and songwriter Tamara Lindemann, was incredibly, I think, almost a decade ago now. I am a dedicated diehard fan of folk music in all its varied forms, but for me, a lot of contemporary iterations of the genre can feel a little precious, a little sentimental, and what I love the most about Lindemannes,

is that it contained a bit of grit, a bit of toughness. I think the first time I wrote about the band, I said one of the things that I loved about them was it felt like these songs could take a punch to the face. There was a time you put your hand on the small of my back. I was surprised that you touched me like that. But there in your hand was occurring of life I could hardly stand. The Weather Station's new record, which is called Ignorance,

is an even bigger departure from that traditional folk sound. And in some ways, it still resembles the folk music that I love so much that I know has been a formative influence for her. But in other ways, it just feels like a whole other universe of sound. Thank you so much for doing this, Tamara. I'm thrilled to talk to you. I'm such a fan, and I find the new record to just be extraordinary. It's been such a gift to have during this time. So thank you for doing this.

Oh, my God. Well, thank you so much. I'm really honored to do it. This should be fun. So with each of your records, I feel like I can hear you kind of gently reinventing your sound and really rethinking all the ways in which a person can communicate through melody and rhythm and silence and language. And I think that feels especially true of ignorance, which at least for me, kind of feels like

your biggest, your poppiest record to date. There's almost this sort of late 80s kind of Kate Bush vibe to certain tracks and I haven't necessarily heard that in your work before. I'm curious if you started writing with the idea of change in mind. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting because I feel like there's always the part that I can't take credit for because it was just, you know, intuition. But I think, yeah, I mean, it just began in like I was playing guitar and I wasn't really feeling I felt unspired like everything I played. I felt like I was repeating myself. So I switched to keyboard and that changed everything right away. And that changed everything right away.

then I switched to writing with a drum machine, which changed everything. So I got pulled in that direction, but I think that this, like, very emotional, passionate music was the right move to convey this extremely, like, emotional, passionate record and leaning into some of this pop ideas was really empowering for me, because, me, pop is where we go for these big emotions. You've talked about how the deepest emotional experience you had while writing this album was reading the IPCC special report on 1.5 degrees, which is a fairly dense policy report on the impact of climate change. Maybe you could tell me a little bit about what it was like for you to read that report for the first time and how that experience maybe sort of shaped or changed the direction of the album.

Yeah, I mean, if you actually read it, it's like incredibly dense and hard to understand. But, you know, the summation of it, I mean, it is, like I say, I mean, I think I had this really wild experience in 2018, 2019 when I was writing this record that a lot of people have had and people call, you know, have given names to it of just like experiencing climate grief or like experiencing, you know, you've known this your whole life. And then all of a sudden you really realize and it really hits, it really hits you that this is going to happen. And like, you know, hundreds of millions of people will die, you know, X amount of refugees. You know, the, when you read it laid out, it's so heavy. And yeah, like, I, I had this funny experience with this record where it's like, on the one hand, it is personal and it is emotional, and there's relationships in it. But when I was writing it, what I was really truly experiencing was this experience of climate grief. And I feel like people don't, or what, I didn't feel like people would believe me that, that some of the songs came from that place. So you're going to perform a song for us. It's called robber. And I wanted to ask you, what are you writing about here? Who is being robbed?

And of what? I mean, I feel like it's more like, what am I not writing about? You know, I don't know. I mean, I think obviously we live in a time when the literal future of life on Earth is in peril. And it's so difficult to hold that in your mind and to understand that, you know, there are people who are, choosing to make that worse people with a great deal of power. So I guess that's maybe what I was thinking of the most. I know just to sort of make it even more specific, I know you have mentioned on Twitter that you also had, you know, a company or a corporation like ExxonMobil in mind when you were writing about this. Yeah, well, it's interesting. And it's something that I've been thinking a lot about the last couple years. You know, I was born in the 80s. And, you know, I learned

about climate change when I was a small child. And, and, you know, as all of these documents have come out, and this, this truth of, like, ExxonMobil in particular and several other fossil fuel companies that they knew that, that they knew that this was real, that, like, their own scientists discovered it, like, before NASA did, and chose, you know, actively made a choice to create this misinformation campaign and, like, bury the science, like, for their own business model. Like, that to me is just the most insane decision in human history. And I mean, I often think of if I was a historian looking back, you know, what would I think about the 80s when there was this choice made to do the wrong thing, you know, actively? Yeah. Okay. So I have a small

ensemble with me. Evan Cartwright on percussion, Karen Ing on saxophone. Um, um, two. Okay, Evan, you want to countess in? I never believed in... Saw nobody climb over my fence. No black bag, no gloved head. I never believed in... I figured everything he took was gone.

Never believed in the robber. Divided into... Shovel lover, I never believed... That's Tamara Lindemann of the Weather Station performing the song Robber. Her new album is called Ignorance. Stick around. We'll be back with more music in just a moment. So you didn't start out your career as a musician. You're a successful television actress during your high school years.

I know you acted in some HBO dramas. How did that happen for you at such a young age? It was all just by accident. I really love singing. I was in a choir and then that led me to a community theater. I knew I met a couple other kids who had gotten agents and gotten into TV. And I was like, well, I'll try that. Why not?

So, yeah, I just sort of fell into it when I was 13 and I really hated high school. So it was very attractive to me to not have to go to school as much, you know, if I got a job. But yeah, it was a strange, it was a wild ride. I mean, you know, I feel like there are ways that I'm still like recovering from being an actor. But there are ways in which, you know, I learned things from it and it gained a lot of independence from it. What were some of those things that you feel like you're still sort of working past or still metabolizing? Some of maybe the bad things that were associated with that career that inspired you to, you know, take this left turn. Well, you know, I think most of all having no agency, you know, as an actor, you are a tool.

you know, for someone else's imagination, which I think is beautiful, you know, and as a band leader, for example, now I ask other people to do the same for me to bring their talent and allow me to direct it. But yeah, for me being an actor was just strange and that I had no boundaries and, you know, people touch you all the time and move your body and you have no, you have no personal space and you're not allowed to, you know, assert your selfhood. You have to literally embody someone else. So I think for someone And it's a recipe for disaster in terms of finding yourselfhood and being able to have boundaries. Right, especially at that age. Especially at that age.

Yeah. I think as a teenager, yeah. You've been pretty open on social media about how the income from your work in television, the early work in television made it possible later on for you to kind of really establish the career in music that you wanted and to sort of stay afloat in that way. do you think it would have been possible for you to make it to this point if you had not had those early work experiences that maybe allowed you to get a little money in your bank account? Well, I think that's a really important question, and that's why I wanted to bring that up on social media because I feel like people don't have a lot of knowledge about how dire the financial situation is for artists in general. And yeah, for example, for me, you know, having that underpinning of, you know, income and savings from working in TV, like, allowed me to, when I started becoming a musician, I had all this freedom that my friends didn't have because they were working, you know, debilitating jobs in bars and restaurants. And I feel like people look at artists and think like, oh, they must be making tons of money. And they're not. Like, you know, and it's only going to get worse, you know, if we don't figure out a way to monetize.

art, you know, it'll increasingly be that only artists who have like a trust fund basically can be musicians. And I don't have that obviously, but, but, you know, even just having that little safety net of like, I can pay my rent, you know, like I'm not going to, you know, be homeless if I, if this tour doesn't go well, you know, is a huge, huge safety net that a lot of artists don't have. Well, I'm so grateful to you for being open about this because I think, you know, any kind of talk of money. And I, I don't know if this maybe functions. a little bit differently in Canada than it does in the U.S., but any talk of money is sort of considered very, I don't know,

taboo or sort of, it's just ground upon which none of us should tread. And I think, you know, in the end, that protects people other than artists. And from what I understand about streaming revenue and tour economics, it seems, as you were saying, kind of borderline impossible for a new artist to really make a living if they don't have some outside income stream. And I'm curious if you've seen. that kind of play out from within the industry, you know, folks who have had to maybe abandon this as a gig because it just was no longer feasible. Yeah. I mean, I think most people I know,

you know, I mean, in Canada, we do have like some grant money that does come into the system, so it's a little less insane than it is in the U.S. But yeah, for sure. I mean, people, once they have kids or once they, you know, need to make a better living and live less hard, it can be very difficult to be a musician. And the thing that I noticed, too, is, like, I was, like, a middle of the road actor. Like, I didn't, you know, I was never famous or anything. Like, I was just, like, a middle class actor. But the, you know, I made enough money to, like, save some money, you know, and musicians, even when they're doing so well, I mean, I know a lot of musicians who've been very successful and well-known. And, and all that that really amounts to is, like, two or three

years of being able to pay their bills, you know, and, and that's kind of I wanted to ask you a little bit about your writing process and your lyric writing process in particular. And I think you do it so well, which is why I wanted to sort of ask you about your tips and tricks, you know, getting the feeling or the idea to sort of exist in just a few beautiful words. I'm curious if there's lyricists or, you know, poets or novelists or other writers who you have found inspiration with. Yeah. I mean, like everyone I have, like, you know, I return to Bob Dylan. and Leonard Cohen. But yeah, I feel really lucky to be surrounded in this community in Toronto and Canada in general that actually really shaped me as a lyricist. And I didn't understand that it was unique to Canada. But yeah, there's a ton of musicians like Sandra Perry, Ryan Driver, Gord Downey.

Like there was this thread in Canadian music of like philosophical songwriting, Stephen Lamke. And that's how I like my lyrics to be. You know, I like them to be about ideas as well as stories. And I just, yeah, I've been realizing lately that that's a product of my music scene. And it's not actually that common in the rest of the world. Most people want stories, they want songs to just tell a story. You know, they don't want the complicated ideas, but I do. Right. And not simply just a story.

I think people want autobiography. You know, I think there's this presumption that every time, a singer opens her mouth, it should be, you know, it should be coming sort of directly from her immediate experience. Right. I mean, like, and I, I do write, like, personally and honestly, but I think I've realized something in the last few years that hopefully will make the next few records I write a lot easier, which is that I never, I never was here to just talk about my life. Like, that was never what I was trying to do. I was always trying to do something else. I was always trying to express something more complicated because the simple songs that are just dioristic never made the record.

Yeah, very cool. So we're going to end on another track off the new album called Tried to Tell You. Yeah, I mean, I was really just trying to write a simple song. You know, I was thinking of a friend, but then I felt like I was thinking of everyone of just like wanting my friend and anyone to allow themselves to feel their own mystery and stop trying to. to pin it all down. But yeah, yeah, it's like the most pop song I've ever written, I feel like. But, all right. It was getting late.

You were afraid of yourself. Afraid that you might call her that you could not help yourself. I say, I lived in you all day I washed and passed across your feet I tried to tell you that is the way that you want to tell you your soul to try and pull apart

endless rain you thought of as your heart I've ever felt the twilight that you want in a city park Tamara Lindemann performed Try to Tell You with Evan Cartwright and Karen Eng from the album, Ignorance. Weather Station is set to tour in the fall. That was beautiful, and thank you to your band. Yeah, thank you. Have excellent weekends, everyone. Friday.

Yeah, thank you. We made it. All right, take care, everybody. Thank you again so much. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Emily Boutin, Ave Carrillo, Riannon Corby, Calalia, David Krasnow, Gauphin and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.