Episode 8 - Reflecting Climate Grief Through Music
Tamara Lindeman of The Weather Station. Photo by Brendan Ko.
Music can help us make sense of, and deeply feel, our climate grief. Tamara Lindeman’s acclaimed album Ignorance about climate grief struck a chord with citizens and critics. Performing as The Weather Station, Lindeman’s 2021 poetic, thoughtful, and highly danceable album was named album of the year by The New Yorker and Uncut. Tamara joins Alice Irene Whittaker, the host of Reseed, for a conversation that starts with climate grief before spanning to art, selfhood, rootlessness, connection, and the heartbreaking beauty of birds.
Tamara Lindeman emerged from Toronto’s vibrant folk scene, and as The Weather Station, she has released five albums and toured extensively across Europe, the US, Canada, and Australia. She has been nominated for a Juno, a Socan Award, and shortlisted for the Polaris Prize, and garnered extensive praise from Pitchfork, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Rolling Stone and The New York Times.
Our climate change narratives are often overfull of information and despair. Our human souls also require art and stories, and our climate movement needs storytellers and artists. Art, stories and music don’t need to have the answers to the climate breakdown we are facing - there are other mediums for that, and we need to push for those answers and solutions - but art, stories, and music do have this role to play in helping us process, dream, imagine, feel, connect, release, and grieve. In a time of climate chaos, art can help us to dream of a different world while connecting with each other.
Episode Show Notes
The Weather Station Album Ignorance
The Guardian: The Weather Station: Ignorance review - a heartbroken masterpiece
Uncut: The Weather Station - Ignorance
New York Times: Climate Change is Worsening. So the Weather Station Is Singing About It.
Transcript
Alice Irene Whittaker (intro): Welcome to Reseed, a podcast about repairing our relationship to nature.Reseed tells the stories of a RE generation: the people embracing repair, redesign, reuse, and reduction. The people who are uprooting the extractive status quo and rooting the future in justice, wellbeing, resilience, and care. This is a podcast for those of us who are re-imagining our relationship to the natural world and to each other. I am Alice Irene Whittaker, the host of Reseed. Together, let's plant the seeds that transform us from being takers to caretakers.
Alice Irene: Welcome. Today, I speak with Tamara Lindeman, a singer-songwriter who performs under the name The Weather Station. Her beautiful 2021 album Ignorance explores the anguish and grief of living through the breakdown of the natural world. As The Guardian put it, “bone-deep grief sits inside music that’s very easy to tap a toe to”. Tamara and I dig deep into art and the need for storytelling amidst climate chaos. We explore selfhood, and connection - even as deeply feeling introverts. We discuss climate grief, breaking up with the dangerous notion of the solitary-man hero narrative, and we talk about the heartbreaking beauty of birds.
Tamara Lindeman: I really think my engagement with climate is for me about a real radical acceptance sort of viewpoint of human nature. And it's about understanding reality in all of its pain and heartbreak.
Alice Irene: Our climate change narratives are often over full of information, data and despair, and our human souls also require art and stories to make sense of it all. The climate movement needs storytellers and artists just as much as it needs scientists and politicians. It needs all of us. There is a Maya Angelou quote, “A bird doesn't sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song.” Art, stories and music don’t need to have the answers to the climate breakdown we are facing - there are other mediums for that, and of course we need to push for those answers and solutions - but art, stories, and music do have this role to play in helping us as human beings process, dream, imagine, feel, connect, release, and grieve. The Weather Station album Ignorance does just that.
Tamara: As much as the world is in such a befuddled place right now, I do feel like there is this strain of really exciting, modern thinking that feels really regenerative and healing in this way that I'm very excited and nourished by.
Alice Irene: Tamara emerged from Toronto's vibrant folk scene, having found songwriting and singing after a teenage career as an actor. As The Weather Station, she has released five albums and toured extensively across Europe, the US, Canada and Australia. She has been nominated for a Juno, a Socan Award, and shortlisted for the Polaris Prize. Her debut was described many years ago as moody and introspective. And one could argue that years later, she is still those things in her music. Though it's changed and Ignorance is different than any other album.
Alice Irene: The sound is really quite lush and striking, with folk, jazz, pop, and something unnamable all coming together - I think of it like an estuary, where differences intermingle and converge. It is soulful, and it is danceable. The words are beautiful. I went to hear Tamara and her band in Ottawa in November, and their music was even more powerful live, and her voice was really striking.
Alice Irene: I'm not the only one who was taken by Ignorance. It was named the number one album of the year by the New Yorker and Uncut. And it made the album of the year lists of Pitchfork, the New York Times, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, CBC and Cosmopolitan, and many more. Richard Williams of Uncut magazine wrote about Tamara, “No one else is writing true life songs with such a command of nuance and ellipsis with such generosity of unguarded emotion and careful economy of means.” Today's episode is called Reflecting Climate Grief Through Music. Words are important. And you might notice that it is intentionally not called reflecting on climate grief, because it is really about how The Weather Station album Ignorance has reflected back to many listeners and fans like myself, the climate grief that they are feeling.
Alice Irene: Tamara wears that heaviness of what we bring to our work. You'll hear about that in our conversation in a few moments and how she's also energized by it. As she sings in the song, Wear the World, “I tried to wear the world like some kind of garment.” Plus - she wears a suit of mirrors on the album cover of Ignorance, and in the music videos, and you’ll hear about that garment, too. And about her interpretation of reflection.
Tamara: I’m constantly searching for rootedness and stability and homeness, because I feel a lack of those things and definitely for me, I find it in nature.
Alice Irene: I've been listening to Ignorance pretty well nonstop - I can be a bit obsessive - and I want to share her music and inspire others to also dance wildly and sing soulfully in their living rooms as part of their journey of feeling climate grief. We're going to have to find ways to feel it. So, this week, I will be giving away two copies of Ignorance on vinyl. Go find me on Instagram at @AliceIreneWhittaker to try your hand at receiving one of the albums I'm giving away. I also have some truly awe-inspiring and thoughtful guests who you'll hear from in the upcoming episodes and I have some great giveaways of their work as well. Often books. Follow along at @AliceIreneWhittaker, and you can also subscribe to my newsletter at reseed.ca for much less frequent updates. Here is my conversation with Tamara Lindeman, singer-songwriter, who performs under the name, The Weather Station.
Alice Irene: Hi Tamara, thanks so much for being here with me today. I wanted to start at where I always start, which is at your relationship with nature as a child. Can you tell me a little bit about what that was like?
Tamara: I had a very, very deep relationship to nature as a child. It was really important to me. It was a really intimate relationship. I spent a lot of time outside, alone. Yeah, I was grateful. My parents really did give me a strong love of nature and a curiosity about it. But a lot of it was just my own. I felt safe in the woods and just really spent as much time outside as I could essentially.
Alice Irene: That resonates with me. I was just writing yesterday about how safe I feel in trees. I think the tallness of them and being able to focus on a mushroom or moss or something that's so small and I don't know something about the smallness and the bigness.
Tamara: Yeah, it's true actually. Cause I grew up in trees in Ontario, rural Ontario, and I love desert, I love meadow and big openness. It's so exciting to me, but there is something so peaceful about a classic deciduous forest and the quiet of that.
Alice Irene: It's true. And different people are drawn to such different habitats. Like my son, who's four. I have three kids and my son who's four asks almost every day to go to the desert with me. He's never been to the desert. And he says today, when can we go to the desert, Mommy? I want to go with you.
Tamara: That’s amazing.
Alice Irene: Ignorance is about climate grief. I love the album by the way. And I was a little breathless when we started the interview cause I was dancing to Parking Lot before we started. Ignorance is about climate grief and that's something that people are feeling increasingly, or at least talking about more and more and will be part of our lives and lives to come it would seem. So many of us are facing this anxiety and this deep grief about what we're losing and being a part of that and our role in it but also it happening to us at the same time. When did facing climate grief start for you and what has the journey been like to go from experiencing it and putting words to it and then turning it into music?
Tamara: Yeah, I mean, it's interesting how it kind of gets reduced down to this praise - it's about climate change. I didn't think I was writing about climate. I wasn't trying to, I was kind of trying not to, but at the time I was writing the album, I mean, that's just where I was. I was in that rabbit hole where you really realize that everything is true, it's going to happen. You know, like when you understand the severity of the situation. And this was a couple of years ago when people around me just weren't really that engaged in climate.
Tamara: It was very unspoken, undiscussed. And I was really just in a lot of genuine pain and existential hurt. And I think I was also very angry. Like there was a very different feeling that I never allowed myself to feel before of just anger, like just a lot of anger that this has happening, that it never needed to happen. You know, betrayal. There just was a big stew of emotions. And as I was writing this album and a bunch of other songs, it just all came out in these subtle ways. And when I looked back at the songs, I realized, oh, this is what this is about. It's about my relationship to the world and the pain of that confusion, of having a relationship to the natural world and to the world itself.
Tamara: That is, the natural world is in such a state of flux and change and loss. And then the sort of human world is sort of, I mean, at the time I was writing the album, the human world felt like it was very much in a state of denial. Now I feel like we're all kind of crumbling at the same time. It's different. I think that if I tried to write about climate, I think I wouldn't have done a very good job, but I think because I tried not to, it came out in a better way.
Alice Irene: Interesting. And it's true - we're all crumbling at once. I feel like usually tragedies or hardship are located to a certain geography or a person's life and between climate change and COVID and other things we're all experiencing it at once, which is, it's tragic. And I hope it's also that change of going from denial and guilt and individual action as the solution to the anger that you're feeling. In one of the previous episodes, Erica Violet Lee, was talking about rage and love and how they're connected with rage as a form of love.
Tamara: That's really interesting. Yeah, it's true. And for me, it really was just quite simply moving past the individual responsibility narrative that I’d sort of absorbed through my life and, and just moving past it is how I would say, moving past that as a useful narrative for understanding like an incredibly complex and enormous problem. It's just not very useful. Once you move past that, you can really understand there's so much happening. And for me, anger was the next place I got for sure.
Alice Irene: Right. I recently heard you play in Ottawa in November I think it was. Which was, between being a parent of three young kids and a pandemic, this was suffice it to say the only concert I have been to in a very long time. And I was like, I can't believe I'm leaving the woods right now to go out into the world. And then when I got there, it was more people that I’ve seen collectively in two years. It was so full and at first I was a little bit scared I guess just not having been around so many people and like, is this okay and everything. And then once the music started and you started singing and performing and playing by the end of it, it really felt like this full body experience and it seemed to me from the outside that you were like just so connected and really joyful playing together. And there was just people, all in a place with music. It was really beautiful. So thank you for that. And I'm wondering what that experience was like for you touring again, and being out there, performing and sharing these songs with people?
Tamara: Wow. I mean it was a lot. It's funny that you brought up that Ottawa show cause I too felt really strange that show. Cause that was the first show we played that was a small room that was full. And I hadn't really realized that until I stepped out and I was like this is the closest I've been to this many people. We played a pretty big club show in Montreal, but I guess the stage was a little higher, a little more distant or something. There was just a bit more space. And it was interesting because I love to be around people, but we've all been so taught that you can't be and it's this negative thing. So, I mean, it was a wild ride. Like I was so grateful that we got to play any shows at all, given everything. It felt like we got to play shows in this one window.
Tamara: It was as good as it could be essentially from a COVID perspective. Feeling that connection with the band has been so beautiful to me. Like I just am so grateful for it. And I mean, I was playing with them last night. We had a rehearsal and I just went from like being in a dark sort of shutdown space to being in this state of joy and openness. And I was so grateful for that connection. The shows were a wild ride, we almost got stuck in Vancouver and we went through that, the mudslides and it was really scary. We had a really scary, dangerous drive through the mountains. So that was a lot. It's all made up by the joy of being able to connect with people in a room.
Tamara: I don't feel like I've fully figured out exactly how to play these songs. I don't think I'm like a hundred percent there, but when I am there, I feel like I'm sort of like a channel or vessel or something, you know, and that's my role and understanding that and leaning into that it's really, really been powerful. It's like letting go of myself, I guess, and just focusing on absorbing and transmitting the emotions that are in the songs, but also that people have brought to the songs and have brought to the show. Right. So it feels very sacred to me and like a huge privilege to be able to do any of that.
Alice Irene: That really seems like the role of artists – and maybe I'm projecting - being very open and sensitive, being the channel for things to go through. And sometimes it's hard or dark, but it is needed. And you know that we need storytellers and artists and I believe poetry right now, as much as we need science, the scientists’ stories and the facts and the information, all of these important things. But, it's a human experience too what we're going through right now.
Tamara: Yeah, it's true. And I think I do appreciate that, you know like anyone, I can be rational, and try to understand things. Right. My mind is always trying to understand things, but I do appreciate, like you say, poetry and art for being a place where our human irrationality kind of lives in a way that's really helpful to the psyche.
Alice Irene: Yeah. And the body too. I think, especially in music, there's a coming into your body or coming out of it or release, I don't know - something about music that I feel nothing else can access.
Tamara: Yep. Absolutely. I think there is a deep human thing about music and rhythm and connection. It's actually so powerful and it's a really interesting medium to work in.
Alice Irene: I felt like I loved the way that you performed a song. So I don't know when you said you don't feel like you're there yet or something I felt, and maybe everyone brings their own thing, but I really loved it. I felt like you were just in it. And so, I didn't feel like it was performative, if that makes sense, which is an awful thing to say about performance
Tamara: Performance shouldn't be performative. I mean, that's the hard part, right? It’s like how do you to me performance? And it's hard because that word means multiple things. It means a performance, but it also means to be fake. Like that's what we say, like a performance, but as a performer performing, to me the right definition of that word to strive for is authenticity. Is to find a reality within the moment, no matter what's happening. Right. Which is very difficult because sometimes the sound is strange or you're distracted by something. And it's like trying to find a presentness in yourself so that you're experiencing the music yourself, again, anew. When you feel like when you start performing, and this is just me, I think there are people who, as performers, they perform, that's what they do. You know, they put on a show and there's an honesty to that too.
Tamara: But myself, I feel like I have to be in a state of authenticity and emotion within the music in order to be what I want to be on stage or, you know, if I'm performing like recording or whatever it is. I feel like when it's the best, I'm experiencing it again as I'm singing or playing. And that's where the magic is for me.
Alice Irene: I was thinking about this today because I used to be a dancer and I was thinking, how there was this thing when I was becoming a choreographer and more of a creator of like stripping down all the things you've learned as a dancer, like all the tricks, other people's things that they've taught you, to actually find your own voice. And I think writing is similar and maybe songwriting. I'm not sure where all of the things that you've learned or put on or try on other people's voices and finding your own. You have to strip some of that away.
Tamara: Yeah, absolutely.
Alice Irene: Do you find it exhausting? Talking about these topics a lot and performing about them and trying to feel it anew, like you're saying? Or what what's the sort of emotional experience or toll on you with delving into climate grief and the other topics that you explore?
Tamara: Yeah. That's an interesting question. It is tiring. Like there is a weight that I feel, but to be honest, whenever anyone is engaging honestly with me, I also find it very energizing and connecting. I think what I find difficult is more of the other things that people bring to the topic. For example, that sort of puritanical viewpoint I have a real allergy to that at this point. Because I really think my engagement with climate is for me about a real radical acceptance sort of viewpoint of human nature. And it's about understanding reality in all of its pain and heartbreak. I think a lot of people bring a really different energy to the word climate that's about idealism or their own sort of, we could fix this if we just...
Tamara: I agree with those statements when they're like, if we just spend the money that it will take to bring renewable energy to the world and you know, like that I'm into. But it's weird how people come to this reality as like a project to change human nature. I really struggle with that. And it's everywhere. And I think that the thing that I feel the most stressed by or worn out by is when people think that because I made an album that sort of talks about the climate crisis I'm somehow a paragon of virtue. Or I have it all figured out or I automatically align with their belief systems and I often don't, and I'm not. And you know, I like driving a car. I really wish the car was electric. Like I really truly do. It doesn't mean that my desires are any different from anyone else. You know? Like I would like to fly to Thailand right now. I’m not going to but I would like to, you know? People bring this very puritanical sort of Calvinist thing to climate change for some reason, I think, cause they're scared.
Alice Irene: I think a lot of that is this extension of the individual story that puts all this perfection and weight on a person to be perfect. And oh, you can solve it if you do X, Y, Z in your own life versus us talking about what would it look like if we created a culture of care in our society? What would it look like if we weren't set up with this power? All of these really big thorny, challenging topics, and instead make sure that you don't use plastic or whatever this piece is.
Tamara: Yeah. I mean to me, what I find so exciting about the climate movement right now, and part of what draws me to pay attention and to read most days about what's going on is it's all this beautiful politics that I find so exciting. Ideas like care is climate work. That is so exciting to me and feels so real and, you know, as much as the world is in such a befuddled place right now, I do feel like there is this strain of really exciting, modern thinking that feels really regenerative and healing in this way that I'm very excited and nourished by.
Alice Irene: Me too. And I feel like there's an illustration of what it looks like versus all of the evils of what we shouldn't be doing. Or a lot of the environmental narrative, I think is a lot about the negatives about what we don't want versus what we do want to create.
Tamara: Exactly. It's so ingrained in people that climate action means this dark, you know, withholding. It's like a diet, you know? And you know it's actually to me taking the focus off of stuff and putting it back on humans and all the things that we could celebrate.
Alice Irene: We talked about it a little bit, but what do you think the role of music and/or art plays in creating this community of care or that radical acceptance of human nature?
Tamara: I would say I've learned a lot from art myself or from writers. You know, like Rebecca Solnit, I guess she's a non-fiction writer. It's not poetry. But to me it is. I think that it's just the idea of imagining another world and transmitting that imagination to others is so powerful and it doesn't work on everyone, right? Maybe it doesn't work on most people, but there's something there. And I believe in that. I think it's hard because some people kind of have that. Once again, that sort of puritanical viewpoint of like art has to be political and it has to like push forward the cause. And I don't really believe that at all. I think it can be just fun or whatever it wants to be. It's just a companion, but of course it has a role to play in just imagining another world.
Alice Irene: I love that – art is a companion. That's so lovely and comforting.
Tamara: I think it is. It's companionship in many ways. I mean, that's what I find the most helpful about art sometimes is feeling accompanied by another mind, you know, feeling less alone. Just being like, oh, I'm not the only human that thinks this way. It's emotional connection when it's good in my mind.
Alice Irene: I love that. I'm intrigued by your mirror suit. And I think when we first connected, I reached out to you on Instagram. It was around clothing and garments. I'm very fascinated, riveted by clothing and fashion as this intersection of gender, labor, materials, expression, all of these things that come together and it has in the past been disregarded, I think because it's seen as a frivolous and female endeavor. Your suit brought me into Ignorance. I’d love to hear more about the creation of it. If you can tell listeners what it is, what it looks like, how it came to be and anything around fashion or garments, dyes, textiles, anything in that space?
Tamara: I mean, I'm not really a clothing person. I really struggle with clothes, honestly. I have to really force myself, but for this record, obviously my goal, and it's been very difficult to accomplish, but I've just been trying to have more conceptual clothing that sort of has a meaning or purpose and that's not just an outfit. It's been hard cause I have a lot of ideas. It’s so hard to make exciting things on a low budget. The mirror suit is definitely the coolest thing I made. It looks like a shattered mirror. It looks like I broke a mirror and then stepped into it. It's actually Plexiglas. It's not glass. So I wouldn't die if I fell though I think I would be hurt. It's like shards of mirror glued onto a suit and it's really wild. I love it because it makes me like the invisible man. It makes me blend in with my surroundings and when I'm in nature, it's amazing because it reflects.
Tamara: I mean, it's funny because I had this song called Wearing the World and I was taking photos for the first time with it and I was like, oh, I'm literally wearing the world. And it also reminds me of this fairytale that I remember as a child, where there was a woman, princess, who had a dress that became the sky, like changed with the weather. It’s a very magical, strange thing. And it was very labor intensive to me. When I made the Robber video, I was up really late the night before, like gluing the last bunch. I never finished. I don't know if you noticed, like in the video the pants, it doesn't come all the way up because I just ran out of time.
Alice Irene: Oh, I thought that was on purpose so that you could walk.
Tamara: Yeah. I mean, it's also helpful for walking, but I can't really walk in the pants. It’s not a very wearable garment but it's amazing. And I'd like to find a way to make something because I do think mirrors are so interesting. I think like the first sort of idea that people think of with mirrors is beauty or narcissism. But to me, I find it more about reflection and a lake, you know, when a lake reflects, these are things I think of. And also I thought of projection and being a performer and what people projected onto me and how that was very psychically tiring. You know, and maybe the mirror suit was like a hex that I put on that where I was like, it'll just get reflected back out. It's not going to stick to me anymore.
Alice Irene: This is yours, not mine. It's really striking in the video when you can see the forest reflected on it. I do think that when you're saying that being a channel as an artist. It's like, you wrote the lyrics and you created the suit and then they connect, but you couldn't have planned that. Like it kind of came to be. So, oh, this is so funny. You were just saying like people projecting things onto you. And then my next question starts with, I see parallels between us. I'll tell you why, and then don't feel like you have to take any of it. So we're about the same age. We're both sort of Toronto-based and rooted at points. And I was a dancer and actor in childhood and trained to be a professional dancer and performed and everything up until I was 30. And it was a real, like shedding of that art form and finding that it actually wasn't me.
Alice Irene: And I thought it was. It was so baked into my identities since childhood. And then I found writing, which is much more, it brings me joy, like it feeds me back much more. And I feel a lot more freedom and authenticity when I'm writing. And then when I started reading about you in preparation for this, I learned that you were a child actor, and then you found songwriting, at least that's how it's written in other places. In songwriting, what has it been like to find your voice? Do you feel like you have “found your voice” and what is it like seeing that resonate with people, especially with this album?
Tamara: I mean, I'm so grateful. I started acting as a teenager, mostly as an escape from small town Ontario. It was exciting to just go and be somewhere else and meet different people and be around art or artists in any way, shape or form. Cause I was going to this rural high school that was extremely close-minded and it was really hard and I felt very lonely. So I was really grateful for that escape. But then of course acting itself is, I mean, you enact someone's vision. You're like a tool that the director uses to create their vision.
Tamara: And there is something very beautiful in that, but I was far too young to feel that. I just felt it as a very, I wanted to do it, but it felt very painful to me I think, to be like a tool, essentially. And to not be able to be myself because I was a teenager and I was forming who I was and it was hard while being really good. When I was 19, I went through a personal loss and I started writing songs as a way of coping with my feelings and I started recording. And that was how I found myself and self-expression. Also music was really how I found community because being in bands and playing with people was really helpful for just bringing out another side of me and it's coming out of my shell. So music was all the things together and I've never felt so, like just this album and all the things I've said in public. I just can't believe that I've actually been able to live as myself in real life. It's so exciting and meaningful to me and I'm so grateful to it. This album, I'll never forget what happened with it. It's really incredible. And I can't believe it.
Alice Irene: It is really incredible. And just seeing how it's resonated - New York Times and The Guardian, and it's on so many top album of the year lists and rightfully so. It’s really incredible. Congratulations. Speaking of the article in The Guardian, it led me to want to ask you a question about self and our connectedness as species in that experience of self. From different answers that you've answered in the past I'd seen this idea of selfhood come up a few times. One quote from that Guardian Article that really stood out to me was that you wanted to break up with the Western solitary-man narrative, that pervades country and Americana and quote “this idea of aloneness as freedom, as opposed to putting value on our connectedness.”
Alice Irene: You know, we've seen this so much in climate and beyond climate, environment, biodiversity, everything. This idea of usually a white, wealthy Western man, who's going to solve the problem with philanthropy and technology and don't worry, that's the solution it'll be okay. And I really see that as that, that narrative, that Western cowboy solitary story that we heard. I'm sure it's an ongoing process, but how have you gone about breaking up with this solitary-man narrative and cultivating a relationship more around connectedness?
Tamara: That's a really interesting question. I don't know. I mean, I think that's something I'm still working on. I think I struggle to connect. I'm a loner and an introvert.
Alice Irene: Likewise.
Tamara Yeah. And it can be hard. I think connection is something I value even more because of that. It is hard for me and yet I really deeply value it. I think I just noticed that it is this very like solitary viewpoint. And I resonate with that on some level, but I know that it's not really true. Nobody is an island and maybe I'm in a place in my life now where I'm trying to figure out how to navigate connection and how to navigate healthy connection. And it's a good question in my life actually.
Alice Irene: And maybe connectedness, we need to collectively redefine too. Like maybe it doesn't look like the extrovert version of connectedness. It doesn't necessarily mean being hyper social. Actually, that's something I've found through these interviews on the podcast. Also over the last few years is before every single one, I'm like I don't want to talk to someone. I don't want to do it. Why did I think this was a good idea? Every time when I'm like driving up to someone's farm, like a regenerative farm and I'm like, I could be at home not doing this. And then I go and an hour later I'm like, oh, I love this. And I do feel that connection. But it's talking about like deeply shared values or interests versus a party where I'm just meeting people and don't have that way of connecting, I guess. So maybe it just looks different.
Tamara: No, and you're right. I feel the same way. I like deep connection. I like a deep conversation. There's times where it's the sort of lightness can be really nice too. But I think it just depends on how you define connection. I think I derive a lot of friendship, honestly from books and music and feeling connection with another soul and another mind. It is really nourishing to me. And I think to a lot of people. Well, I recently read The Body Keeps the Score about trauma and pain and in the book, it just keeps returning to the thing that connection is the antidote. And that so much of the pain of these things is related to disconnection and trouble in relationships. But it was also pointing out that you connect to people, whether if you're watching TV, you're connecting to people in this different way. You know, we're all just constantly trying to connect basically. However we do it.
Alice Irene: And then art can be the conduit sometimes. For my writing, I'm researching birds a lot and I've just found them looking back. And sometimes it's what you're looking for. But looking back, I just see how they've popped up in my life for a long time and also exploring how they pop up in art and how they're really prevalent in art music, literature. So, I've just been loving learning about them and all of these interesting facts about them as well. Like reading old field guides to birds and that kind of thing. So that might be why I have pulled out this question. I wanted to ask you about birds and we've been seeing them in your art and your articles as well.
Alice Irene: So in the New York Times article, I loved this line about you and your singing: “Atop that sturdy, percussive foundation, Lindeman’s nimble voice moves from airy falsetto to an earthy alto with the grace and daring of a diving bird.” And then in Parking Lot, which is probably the song that resonates most powerfully with me from Ignorance. When you express the intimacy of watching a bird fly in the city and saying, “you know, it just kills me when I see some bird fly, it just kills me and I don't know why.” And finally, in Trust you sing, “Bring me all the evidence, the baskets of wild roses, the crumpled pedals and misshapen heads of reeds and rushes, the bodies of the common birds, robins, crows, and thrushes, everything that I have loved and all the light touches while we still have time.” Is there anything about birds that speaks to you or inspired you to write those words? And what about them has inspired you to include them in your lyrics?
Tamara: Oh man. Yeah. I mean that line from that song still affects me. I haven't tried to play that song in real life cause I can't. I can't do it. It's too much. Birds, I mean, so many things, I don't know. I think it's partly their commonness, honestly, it's that they're everywhere. And I'm so grateful for that because they're this constant reminder of the non-human world. That there's another world, you know, there's other worlds. There's other ways of being there's other creatures that exist. And even in, you know, the City of Toronto, biggest city in Canada, there are birds everywhere. And I see birds all the time. They just come in and out of your consciousness and half the time you don't pay any attention to them. And then every once in a while you pay attention to them and you can enter that alteration.
Tamara: I remember feeling sitting in Berlin one day and I was really tired and jet lagged, and I was just watching a bird, a crow come in and try to get food off the pavement. And just the way that it was navigating the world, I was just thinking, man, I feel like I live in a 2D world with gravity and they're living in a 3D world, you know, with the ability to fly. And I mean, I'm not the first person to feel all these things about birds and the fact that they sing and they fly and they're beautiful. And they're so common. They're also so small and have that delicacy that just brings your heart up. I think too, I do have like a bit of a climate anxiety feeling with birds from like, am I gonna remember, are there gonna be empty skies? Like I fear the loss of birds. I know that there's lots of birds that will probably do just fine, but you know, there's a lot of songbirds that are in danger and that's really hard. It's a lot there.
Alice Irene: Yeah. It's heartbreaking. There's a lot there for me too. I also I love to sing, so I think it too, but that when you talk about its chest, like rising and falling, I don't know. There's just something about that song that really, really hits me. I think there's something about them with finding home too. Like they're very connected to home. My last question is one that I always close with and it's around ancestors. And through the past interviews I've done, I didn't start with having a set beginning and ending question, but as I spoke with people this idea of ancestors and generations came up sort of organically. Oftentimes people have something in their ancestry that has impacted them and maybe they didn't learn it till later, or the idea of being connected or disconnected to ancestors. And then also being an ancestor. Our generation right now being ancestors to who comes next. So I wanted to ask you if there's anything in ancestry that has impacted your journey and your path or anything around the topic of ancestors that resonates with you?
Tamara: That’s interesting. Not really. Like I don't have a strong connection to, you know, like a lot of Canadians. My ancestry is all over the place. Lots of people from different places in the world. And I don't know a ton about my dad's side. I know my mom's side fairly well. I feel a strong connection to my grandmother, my maternal grandmother. And I sometimes really feel her essence and energy as like a very grounded. She was a very grounded, dignified, you know, lovely human. And I feel like that's like a strength that I draw on sometimes. A grounded strength, like my maternal matriarch side. I would say more that I think a lot about not having a sense of ancestry or culture.
Tamara: I think that I feel a sense of sort of loneliness and solitude like an existential solitariness, because I think that I don't really have a culture. I don't have a heritage. And I think that's common in the new world with those of us who are, you know, descended from immigrants, you know we're rootless. And I think that that's something that I noticed when I, when I look for it is like this rootlessness and this shallowness that we can't really overcome. I think we don't notice that it's there. Maybe it's projection to imagine that if I lived in a place that my family had been for generations, I would feel a rootedness that I don't feel, but I find that I'm constantly searching for, for rootedness and stability and homeness because I feel a lack of those things. And definitely for me, I find it in nature a lot. I think that's too part of my climate grief is finding, I struggle to find that sense of stability and in nature as well, because I'm worried about it. I'm in the woods and I'm like, oh, everything is okay.
Tamara: Oh wait, is there too much fungus? Like, it's, what's going on with these trees? You know, it's hard too. The lack of ancestry, I think it's a thing for me. And I think for a lot of, a lot of us new world immigrant descended people were just right. Descendants of a bunch of people who got picked up and moved and we're trying to make this place home and also trying to grapple with the fact that it's stolen. That's a pain that I think we haven't, I think in Canada, we've just scratched that surface in the past couple of years, we have no idea what to do with that feeling like maybe I'm not even supposed to be here. What do I do with that? How do I navigate that? But I think for me, I can be prone to a feeling of rootlessness and drawn to anything that can make me feel more, more rooted.
Alice Irene: Right. And what does it mean to make home and put down roots in a place that's stolen? Like you say, we haven't scratched the surface. And when you talk about rootlessness, I think about around here, there's a lot of really clay soil and different things like chicory and dandelion that have these really intense taproots and roots that go and like help to nourish that over a long period of time. And maybe we'll have to be those like very hardy, hardy plants and wild flowers that do some really hard work to root ourselves.
Tamara: I think that's a good metaphor. And I can really see that for sure.
Alice Irene: Well, it resonated when you said about your grandmother. So my paternal grandmother, I suppose, my dad's mom, I really feel her presence as well. And her piano is here in the room with us and I've carted it to Toronto Island, out to a small town, up here in the top of this barn. So, if you're ever in the area and need a little barn to escape to with a piano, a mother's piano, it's right here.
Tamara: Oh, that's so sweet. Maybe sometime I'll be visiting my sis and come.
Alice Irene: Yeah absolutely. Open invitation.
Alice Irene: That was today's episode of Reseed. I'd love to hear what you thought about our conversation. Reseed is created on unceded Algonquin land. Thank you to this place. Thank you to Rebecca Ryvola for podcast cover art and Teghan Acres for being an outside eye. And thank you for listening. Together, let's plant the seeds that transform us from being takers to caretakers.