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.

For Lindeman, the hardest part might have been accepting that deeply personal suffering happens, that it is entirely human to feel as if you’re detached from yourself, from your world, from your humanhood. Most of us have been there, maybe all of us. So during “Sewing,” as piano slowly rises over the drums’ gentle trot, we hear her stitch together her life—bad days to good, shattering pain to little triumphs. It all constitutes existence. “All I can do is sew it into this undulating thing, whatever it is I’m making with you,” she sings, voice so faint it’s as if she were whispering to the air itself. “A life—I’ll sew in tonight, too.” The band lifts into a rhythmless, roaring crescendo, then goes silent. That was supposed to be the end, but Lindeman kept singing. They drifted back in with her. “I’m taking pictures of the sky again,” she offers. “I don’t know why. I guess I wanted to.” She closes there with a hint of volition, however slight it may sound—up off the floor and ahead into life, no matter what shape that strange quilt may yet take.