The Weather Station: Humanhood Tour

It takes only 10 seconds for Tamara Lindeman to pull us to the floor on Humanhood, the seventh and most arresting album she has ever made as The Weather Station. “I’ve gotten used to feeling like I’m crazy—or just lazy,” she sings at the start of “Neon Signs,” her voice at once a soft whisper to a confidant and a full-throated confession to a crowd. “Why can’t I get off this floor? Think straight anymore?” If you don’t know this feeling, consider yourself blessed, because it seems these days like our true modern malaise, that unbound sense of not knowing how or what it is we’re supposed to contribute to this fractious world, or if we even have the energy or will to try. That disoriented sense is the emotional throughline of Humanhood, written during one of the most difficult periods of Lindeman’s life and rendered with a rock band with improvisational chops just as she began to recover by reckoning with a complicated truth: Sometimes, life simply tries to dismantle us, and we must accept that in order to survive.

From the outside, 2022 likely appeared a banner year for Lindeman. Her 2021 album Ignorance—a deeply personal but widely resonant reflection on climate change, or how we’ve learned to live alongside our own existential undoing—was one of that year’s most celebrated records. 2022, then, was a time of touring, travel, and activism alongside the release of Ignorance’s more austere companion, the beautiful How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars. But at an ostensible new professional peak, she was also going through a mental health crisis she mostly kept hidden. As Lindeman has done for at least 15 years, she turned to songwriting, combining pain, confusion, and flickers of distant hope with ideas about advertising, capitalism, and how we’re meant to feel very specific ways into pages and pages of lyrics. In the past, Lindeman mostly wrote about her past, turning backwards to gain perspective. But for Humanhood, she worked with the present as she tried to endure it. Humanhood, then, radiates with new urgency—and emerges as a sort of tether, offered up here for any of us else feeling disconnected from the vertiginous reality of right now.

Much of Humanhood is a riveting and real document of what it means to be lost, to be hamstrung by confusion, unease, and grief for a period so long you begin to wonder if there is an end. It is rendered in linear fashion, so that we start alongside Lindeman on the floor and slowly try to peel ourselves from it. There’s the spellbinding “Body Moves,” which toggles between an organ-backed hymn and a piece of elastic pop, the endless syncopations moving like a misfiring heart. It’s a song about the way we lie to ourselves and insist everything is OK, even as we’re breaking down from the inside. An anthem of escape, “Window” finds Lindeman actually crawling out of one, trying to find a way to anything that hurts less, that actually feels sustaining. The slashing guitar and spiraling electronics conjure a panic attack, the brain demanding answers. “I can’t explain right now,” she sings in a sudden tumble during one of the album’s most gripping moments, “just that I’m leaving.” Away, forward, better—what other explanations need there be?