It has become fashionable to dismiss John Lennon’s Imagine as the ramblings of a deluded millionaire (that Gal Gadot singalong didn’t help). But the Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman believes Lennon’s 1971 plea for peace, love and universal group hugs deserves a second chance. Listen to what Lennon is saying – and why:
“Imagine is actually pretty interesting if you read the lyrics,” says Lindeman over Zoom from her apartment in Toronto. “It begins with, ‘imagine there’s no heaven’. Right? Like that’s what he’s getting at: all there is . . . is here. I really resonate with that song.”
The meaning Lindeman takes from Imagine is that there is only one world – the one we are in the process of pumping full of hydrocarbons and greenhouse gases. And that if we squander it, there’s no back-up. There is no planet B. This is also the message, more or less, of Ignorance, the extraordinary fifth album by Lindeman’s indie-pop project the Weather Station, which receives a deluxe re-release on November 19.
A concept record about the climate emergency, Ignorance pulsates with anxiety and anger. Above all it articulates the confusion Lindeman experiences when she switches on the news and sees a world lurching from crisis to crisis. Lindeman is no prophet: she doesn’t have any easy answers. And so with Ignorance she is, along with the rest of us, trying to make sense of the terrible environmental reckoning hurtling down the tracks.
“I wasn’t intending to write about climate change,” she says, brushing a stray hair from her face. “It was just where I was at when I was starting. It was a strong climate anxiety. This strong feeling.”
Capitalist machine
With rising global temperatures increasingly impacting on our day-to-day reality, it is of course important artists speak up. One thing we don’t need, however, is music that makes us feel doomed and helpless. Or which wags its fingers and tells us we should hang our heads because of our participation in the capitalist machine.
Ignorance isn’t that kind of album. Rather than wallow in her traumas, Lindeman has instead grafted her anxieties to a gleaming soft-rock chassis. Channelling the hippy melancholia of Christine McVie and Stevie Nicks, Ignorance sounds like late-1970s Fleetwood Mac soundtracking the end of the world. Soothing vintage synths and washes of jazz are set alongside Lindeman’s gorgeously emotive voice. It’s a sad record that will fill you with hope and courage.
“I know there were some people who would respond to the glossy production, And I knew there would be pragmatic listeners who listened to the lyrics and thought about the words,” she explains. “And there are the people in the middle who maybe heard the record and felt something of the sense of disorientation and that resonated.”
If it’s the pristine pop that grabs you, Lindeman’s lyrics are what imbues Ignorance with that sense of loss and mourning. The LP isn’t didactic: it doesn’t tell you how you should emotionally respond to the climate crisis. It’s a mood-board where Lindeman shares her own sense of rising dread.
“I feel as useless as a tree in a city park,” she laments on I Tried To Tell You. “Standing as a symbol of what we have blown apart”. Elsewhere Lindeman interrogates her desire to filter out bad news about the environment – an instinct with which many of us will be familiar. “Thinking I should get all this dying off of my mind,” she declares on Atlantic. “I should really know better than to read the headline.”
Spectrum of emotions
“My goal is that everyone is able to look at what’s happening and pay attention and feel all their feelings,” she says. “Whether or not that’s having a day of being just shut down and exhausted by the whole topic or a day of being frustrated at the lack of progress or feeling insecure and ashamed or feeling joyful. It’s a full spectrum of emotions.”
The 36-year-old native of rural Ottawa came to music after a career in acting. In her teens, Lindeman starred opposite Jennifer Love Hewitt in the TV movie, The Audrey Hepburn Story. She later shared the screen with Richard Gere, Jennifer Lopez and Susan Sarandon in Shall We Dance? and appeared in Guillermo de Toro’s Crimson Peak.
“It’s an interesting experience,” she says of acting. “On the good side, it taught me empathy. Right? Because I had to embody other people – whether I played the murderer or a cute girlfriend. There is another side of acting which is that it always felt deeply inauthentic to me because I was paid to show up and be someone else. My authenticity and who I was as a person were not welcome.”
Lindeman is eager not to be seen as a Greta Thunberg with a guitar. As with practically every other artist on the planet, she must tour to make a living (she plays the Workman’s Club on March 18th, 2021). Does that make her an imposter? Or someone trying to do their best in testing times?
“People have this weird moralising sense when it comes to climate,” Lindeman offers. “It’s just a foolish way to manage emotions or look at complicated things. I find it interesting that people think that because I happen to talk about climate change on Twitter and care about it, that I’m somehow a perfect paragon of activism and that people put me on a pedestal that I don’t deserve to be on.
A dangerous thing
“And that is a dangerous thing because there is this thing with climate change where, if you care about it, or you say you care about it, you’re expected to be a certain kind of person. And that is a great way to just completely shut down the conversation about it.”
She is speaking to The Irish Times several weeks after Coldplay very publicly went back on their 2019 pledge not to tour until climate change had been solved. “I don’t really care what Coldplay does with their life,” says Lindeman. “I do care that they’re a band with a massive reach and probably a lot of money. I’m glad they’ve shown an interest. I hope they would use their cultural capital and financial capital to be pushing things forward in terms of change.”
Whatever about Coldplay saving the world, she isn’t placing huge faith in international leaders achieving much as they meet at the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow. And she thinks this institutionalised reluctance to take meaningful steps to combat global warming has fuelled the hopelessness many young people feel about their future.
“For everyone under 35, it’s like waiting, wondering do you [politicians] respect us? It does so much damage to 20 year olds, watching this unfold. That failure to act is so corrosive to your belief in the world. There’s no good reason not to act. There’s no excuse. It’s absurd.”
The deluxe edition of Ignorance is released on vinyl on November 19th. The Weather Station play Workman’s Club, Dublin on March 18th, 2022
