Sometimes, maybe even oftentimes, the best way to deal with the problems life throws at us is to remember to stay in the moment. It’s an approach captured by Weather Station mainstay Tamara Lindeman on the title track to her seventh album, Humanhood, a song that details diving into Lake Ontario off Toronto and being shocked into a sense of the present. Lindeman has, she realises, been too long “carrying a body that’s tired from carrying a mind”.
It’s a song that reflects the wider concerns of Humanhood, a collection where the theme of Lindeman’s mental health struggles is introduced on the first line she sings. “I’ve gotten used to feeling like I’m crazy, or just lazy,” she declares on ‘Neon Signs’, before asking, “Why can’t I get off this floor?”
You can hear Humanhood as an exercise in Lindeman tackling this question by using her songwriting as a way to work through a personal crisis and thus raise herself up. If this is an idea that suggests an album that’s deeply personal, that’s certainly not a misleading impression. Yet for all that Lindeman’s music is rooted in folk, this isn’t an album that’s intimately singer-songwriter confessional. Rather, in part reflecting the way the basic tracks were laid down by Lindeman and her band over two sessions where the emphasis was on improvisation, on reacting to what was happening in the room – being in the moment from a different angle – the songs are expansive, seem to stretch out and morph as the musicians find ways to deal with a distinct lack of conventional verse-chorus structure in the lyrics.
Overdubs add further light and shade without detracting from the sense of immediacy. If Lindeman’s songs sometimes recall Joni Mitchell (and in truth they often do in their melodic shifts), then this is the jazz-fixated Mitchell of the mid-late 1970s, more Hejira than Blue. It’s perhaps revealing how Karen Ng’s woodwind and sax contributions are so often to the fore.
Whatever the influences at play, Humanhood works gloriously as a song cycle. Highlights range from skittering single ‘Window’, where the understated edginess of the music recalls the panic attack seemingly detailed in the lyrics, through the reflective ‘Body Moves’ and towards the LP’s final track, ‘Sewing’, which stitches together what’s gone before. It’s an album that, as much as it looks inwards lyrically, is finally just as universal as Weather Station’s climate change-themed breakthrough album Ignorance, a remarkable achievement in itself.
