The Weather Station

Tamara Lindeman helms the Weather Station, where songs move with agility across both sonic and feeling-based terrain, anchored by her translucent vocals and incisive songwriting. Early recordings such as the 2011 release All of It Was Mine showed a grounded approach shaped by her immersion in Toronto’s folk community and centered on guitar, banjo, and personal storytelling. Loyalty, issued in 2015, marked a shift toward greater abstraction in sound alongside more precise and reflective writing. Subsequent work paired this verbal density with increasingly ambitious arrangements: the 2017 album The Weather Station brought rock energy together with feminist perspectives, while Ignorance in 2021 and its subdued 2022 counterpart How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars wove climate themes into rich jazz and soft-rock textures; Humanhood, arriving in 2025, used spontaneous playing to mirror the disarray of contemporary life. Through these shifts Lindeman’s output stayed gripping, confirming that parallels to Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen as well as to Weyes Blood and Bill Callahan held real substance.

Raised in rural Ontario, she often sang outdoors and later joined a school choir. During adolescence she tried acting but stepped away upon sensing the field’s inauthenticity. At age twenty she reached Toronto, capturing songs via her roommate’s programs while drawing from Earl Scruggs and the Books. She quickly integrated into the local folk circuit, supplying harmonies and banjo for assorted groups and linking with figures including Basia Bulat.

Lindeman launched the Weather Station name in 2006, introducing its introspective character via the self-released East EP in 2008. The 2009 full-length The Line broadened that earthy, word-focused approach through her signature fingerpicking on guitar and banjo. For the following record she enlisted longtime associate Daniel Romano; All of It Was Mine appeared on his You’ve Changed Records imprint in August 2011, earning praise and inviting comparisons to Doc Watson and Bert Jansch. The positive response widened her reach, prompting North American tours alongside Bulat, Bahamas, and Timber Timbre plus a Japanese run. She also guested on projects by Doug Paisley, Siskiyou, and Field Report. In 2013 she collaborated with Baby Eagle—Steve Lambke of the Constantines—on the single “Mule in the Flowers,” which earned a nomination for the SOCAN Songwriting Prize.

After the 2014 EP What Am I Going to Do with Everything I Know, Lindeman joined North Carolina’s Paradise of Bachelors and headed to France for her third album. Loyalty was tracked with Robbie Lackritz and Afie Jurvanen inside a nineteenth-century mansion outside Paris and surfaced in May 2015 as the first Weather Station title issued in both the United States and Europe. It became a critical success in those territories and reached the longlist for the Polaris Music Prize. For the next album she adopted a franker lyrical stance, addressing personal encounters with mental health alongside feminism and relationships. The Weather Station, released in September 2017, pushed further into rock territory and carried Lindeman’s own production and string charts.

After touring behind that record, Lindeman’s focus on climate change deepened; she joined Fridays for Future actions and convened musician-activist talks under the banner Elephant in the Room. These concerns also steered her writing. Working on a toy keyboard, she composed the fifth album in early 2019. When recording began she pursued a expansive sound recalling Talk Talk, Fleetwood Mac, and Roxy Music, enlisting players from Bernice, Tegan and Sara, and Toronto’s improvisational jazz community. Fat Possum issued the resulting Ignorance in February 2021. It earned the strongest reviews yet, landed on numerous year-end lists, returned to the Polaris longlist, and received a Juno Award nomination for Best Contemporary Roots Album of the Year. Lindeman followed it in March 2022 with How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, an acoustic, inward companion drawn from material written during the Ignorance sessions; the album again secured a Best Contemporary Roots Album of the Year Juno nomination.

The attention surrounding Ignorance heightened Lindeman’s visibility yet triggered ongoing depersonalization. She chronicled her gradual reconnection through the restless yet empathetic songs of Humanhood, released in January 2025. Cut in the same room used for Ignorance and How Is It That I Should Look at the Stars, the album’s blend of electronic and acoustic elements emerged from live improvisations involving Lindeman, drummer Kieran Adams, keyboardist Ben Boye, percussionist Philipe Melanson, flautist/reedist Karen Ng, and bassist Ben Whiteley, then expanded with input from Sam Amidon, Joseph Shabason, and James Elkington.