FILTER ALBUMS
Mortal combat
Eco-friendly auteur documents her journey back from the frayed edge. By Jim Wirth. Illustration by Jane Sanders.
The Weather Station
★★★★
Humanhood
FAT POSSUM. CD/DL/LP
PUTTING TOGETHER a metaphorical patchwork quilt on Sewing, the closing song from her seventh studio album, The Weather Station’s Tamara Lindeman looks up from the tongue-in-thecorner-of-the-mouth task of stitching herself back together and breaks the fourth wall. Her voice a fragile tinkle, she sings: “I’m trying to show to you something I saw and can’t explain.”
A folk-meets-jazz-meets-1980s-Pretenders parallel to Fellini’s 8½ or Pulp’s This Is Hardcore, Humanhood is an eye-witness account of how the Canadian former child star went from debilitating despair to a new understanding of what it is to be. “It felt like a second adolescence, like puberty,” she tells MOJO of her bleakest hours. “It’s ugly. It’s rotten. It’s bad. It’s yucky. You don’t feel good. But you come through it.”
In the wake of 2021’s rapturously received Ignorance and its enigmatic half-sibling, 2022’s How Is It That I Should Look At The Stars, Lindeman was in theory in as good a place as she had ever been, having reached the kind of audience she had longed for ever since she self-released The Weather Station’s 2009 debut, The Line. However, as she went through the motions of touring and making videos, she found herself riven with self-doubt and battling mental health issues.