The Weather Station's Tamara Lindeman: 'My new record comes from a place of struggles with mental health and my parents’ divorce'

Tamara Lindeman, the 32-year-old Canadian who records as The Weather Station, had just put out ‘Thirty’, the first single from her self-titled fourth album. The Toronto-based singer-songwriter and actress made an audacious breakthrough with 2015’s Loyalty, which perfected her soulful, impressionistic folk-pop, and drew comparisons to fellow Canadian Joni Mitchell.

The Weather Station is an even bolder and more beautiful statement: an untrammelled move in a rockier and more experimental direction, with touches at times of Neil Young, more than Mitchell. As she explains from her home in west Toronto, her “louder, stronger” new sound and new role as her own bandleader is in part an act of assertion, after working mainly with male producers – including the Ontario country musician Daniel Romano – on Loyalty and 2011’s All of It Was Mine.

“I’ve always been surrounded by amazing male musicians,” she says. “But I started to realise that part of the problem I’d had in the past was that everyone was just speaking this language to each other that they all understood. They knew the rules of engagement, how to talk about things, and be in a band. And I just sort of finally realised that I didn’t know how to do that because I hadn’t had that training and been a part of that world.”

Tellingly, the video to lead single Thirty has Lindeman playing before a panel of apparently bored and antsy men. “All these years I have followed you; it never occurred to you to follow me,” she sings on opener Free. “I joke about it being a ‘rock and roll’ record, and I say that not because it is, and not because I think I know anything about rock and roll – I clearly don’t,” she says. “I’m in my thirties, I’m a woman. I feel like I’m supposed to be renovating my apartment and having children, but I’m doing this instead.”

It’s thrilling to hear Lindeman hit her electric stride, accompanied by lovely string arrangements and gospelly backing singers, and kick against having to, as she puts it, “know every Tom Petty album”. “It comes from a spirit of desperation mixed with joy,” she says. “Lots of people tried to dissuade me from various aspects of that vision, but I stood my ground.”

And The Weather Station is as lyrically bold as it is musically, with Lindeman openly confronting a prolonged period of mental illness. “This record comes from a place of happiness and joy, but also from disarray – from having come through struggles with mental health, my parents’ divorce. Pretty much everyone I know has had struggles with it,” she says.

“I had a struggle with it about four years ago that really was interesting because when I reflect I’ve probably always struggled with it but I just didn’t realise it or have a name for it. Our society right now – my friends, my generation, my milieu – we’re living in a very, very uncertain time, where there’s a crazy amount of anxiety and despair in the air. When I look at the lyrics, that’s in all of the songs.”

Now in a “good space”, she’s been able to reflect on a period, she says, that “I’m really glad I came through”.

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This may sound hardgoing but Lindeman is a brilliant, opaque storyteller, with a writer’s eye for natural landscapes and the shifting, momentary microclimates of relationships. “I think what’s interesting about a long-term partnership,” she says, “is that it’s many different relationships. You have a friendship, you have a relationship, and a partnership, and all those different relationships are fluctuating under the umbrella of your coupledom.”

She says her other career as an actress – appearing in films such as Guillermo De Toro’s Crimson Peak and Laurent Cantet’s Foxfire – encourages her to take a different approach to her songwriting, to be “scrupulously truthful”. She first started recording her own music when she was 19 after borrowing music software from a rapper friend. “I really love words,” she says. “I’m always trying to get a point across.”

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That poetic slant to her songwriting includes a lucid sense of place, often evoking Atlantic Canada’s raw and desolate beauty, serving as a powerful metaphor for her internal states. “In a song like ‘Black Flies’, for instance, I was trying to describe my encounters with the natural world, and sometimes how you step into a situation where you feel incredibly impacted by it,” she says, “then you leave and you get in your car and close the door and you drive away, and it’s as though it didn’t matter.”

The album, she says, is “haunted” by ecological breakdown. “I was thinking of my relationship to nature,” she explains, “which in childhood was a very deep and emotional relationship, and now is one I am less comfortable with. I was wondering how other people relate to it. I think people feel a sensation of fear and confusion. That’s the only way I can explain or even begin to understand where we are now. I think that’s connected to the epidemic of mental illness. It’s how to metabolise that level of despair and uncertainty.”

If the album was made by someone meditating over a state of turmoil, its confidence and transporting quality leave the listener struck by an artist exhilarated by new possibilities. “This record walked into my mind fully formed,” she says. “I knew how I wanted it to sound, what spirit it would embody. I was in charge of it and I followed my desire. It was embracing the fact that I’m a kind of an outsider and I’m going to come at things in my own way.”

The cover of previous album Loyalty features a shot of her taken from behind; the cover of this album has her front and centre. “The record reflects back on darker times and darker realities,” she says, “but if it has a theme that ran through it all it’s the idea of really looking things in the eye and not being afraid.”

‘The Weather Station’ is out now; she plays The Lexington in London on 23 October and The Eagle Inn in Salford on 24 October