Interview: The Weather Station

Tamara Lindeman is known as The Weather Station. She has been collaborating with artists like Dan Romano as well as putting out great solo work.

Known by the moniker The Weather Station, folk artist Tamara Lindeman has been steadily growing a name for herself on the Canadian folk scene, touring with Timber Timbre and Bruce Peninsula and collaborating with artists like Dan Romano. Her literate, introspective songs have been featured in places like Pitchfork, CBC, and NPR, and she has just released a new EP called ‘What Am I Going to Do with Everything I Know.’ The Weather Station will be at The Broadway Theatre with Bahamas on October 22^nd.

Lindeman’s honeysuckle voice is the perfect vehicle for the introspective melancholy heard on ‘What Am I Going To Do.’ Half-jokingly, I asked her if she was a sad person. Does it take a sad person to make such wonderfully sad music?

“I’m not a sad person,” says Lindeman. “I think I’m just a thoughtful person. For better or for worse I find that what tends to come out in my songwriting are things that I’m uncertain about. Or confusion, or cognitive dissonance, you know? I don’t write about things that I know or that I’m sure of. I write about the one question mark in the day.”

A live show with such a focused, slow and quiet songs can be a hard thing to pull off. However, energy in front of an audience doesn’t have to mean loud guitars and scissor kicks; The Weather Station harnesses more power by not being afraid of a hushed dynamic. Sometimes, quiet is the new loud.

“[On this tour], we’re going to be playing a lot of really beautiful venues and I find that you can work in those sort of venues with silence. [Where you can] allow a room to be quiet, when people are interested in having that kind of experience. I really like playing my quiet music and allowing people to think and hear the words, hear the subtleties. If you watch a show and something’s happening emotionally, or if an artist is incredibly present as a performer, you can get sucked into that. Almost more sometimes than with a loud rock band.”

This article originally appeared in an edited for in Planet S Magazine.

Tags: canadian music, dan romano, folk, tamara lindeman, the weather station, what am i going to do with everything i know

About the Author

Craig Silliphant is a D-level celebrity with delusions of grandeur. A writer, critic, creative director, editor, broadcaster, and occasional filmmaker, his thoughts have appeared on radio, television, in print, and on the web. He is a juror on the Polaris Music Prize and the Juno Awards. He loves Saskatoon. He has horrible night terrors and apocalyptic dreams.