Wrestling with ‘climate grief’ in angry and melancholy songs, Tamara Lindeman created an album that was pure blissThe 50 best albums of 2021The best songs of 2021More on the best culture of 2021Ignorance was not an album that came out of nowhere. Former child
Actor Tamara Lindeman has been making great albums as the Weather Station for more than a decade, developing her sound from down-home acoustic guitar and banjo to atmospheric folky alt-rock and earning comparisons to Joni Mitchell from some critics in the process. While the latter seemed to have more to do with her vocal phrasing than her actual songwriting, it gives you an idea of the regard in which she was held. Nevertheless, her fifth album under the name had a perfectly of-the-moment, lightning-in-a-bottle quality that none of her previous work could quite prepare you for.
At the end of 2018, she said, she was driven “insane” by reading a New Yorker article by environmentalist Bill McKibben, written as
California burned during the most destructive wildfire season in history. She subsequently poured her anger and grief into the 10 songs on Ignorance. The lyrics occasionally slipped into something approaching straightforward protest songs (as on opener The Robber, whose titular villain had “permission by laws, permission of banks / White table cloth dinners, convention centres – it was all done real carefully”) but, for the most part, they entwine “climate grief” with what sound like words about a failing relationship to startling effect. “I’ll feel as useless as a tree in a city park,” ran a characteristically powerful line from Tried to Tell You, “standing as a symbol of what we have blown apart”.