I was like, ‘I think this portrays me as a piece of shit, but it’s true!’” ‘Sometimes I hate her for not being you’ is a nasty line. “I realized being as genuine as possible meant portraying myself in an ugly way. Working on the string arrangements to make sure they were elevating the song I was like, ‘If we’re gonna put anything on here, let’s make sure it’s actually right.’ Hearing somebody’s song and a random flute comes in, like…OK? It just doesn’t need to be there.” “I wanted an elevation, but only if it was an actual elevation. The second album’s process was one of trial and error. The title track and lead single show a clear sonic evolution as murmurs of synth stalk in the shadows and Jordan switches from a hushed tone to an almost blood-curdling scream of, “So why’d you want to erase me, darling Valentine?”Īs she reaches into greater emotional depths, the Snail Mail sound has only gotten bolder. That album, Valentine, takes the deepest blows found on Lush and presses hard on the wounds. One of the last great ripples from Jordan’s social media presence was a live stream performance where she told fans that her second album would be even more depressing than the last. “Walk that out for real connection and I’m interested, but I don’t know what that would be.” Authenticity can be hard to come by, so how can artists connect with their fans in a genuine way? “That’s the golden question,” Jordan sighs. “It feels calculated, like an equation.” Artist social media profiles often feel as if every tweet and well-groomed selfie was designed in a boardroom with scope for increasing awareness and marketability. “It’s branded connection-it doesn’t resonate with me, it doesn’t feel genuine,” she tells me. It got to a point where she could no longer see it as a conduit for authentic fan connection. Jordan no longer controls the Snail Mail social media channels, instead preferring her team to look after them. I choose to be away for a lot of the time, which changes how you sit in people’s lives.” “ you miss birthday parties, weddings, funerals-they’re hard. I think to do the job with longevity you just have to be clear-headed and focused.” “Being at a festival and watching someone treat their band kind of badly, I’m like, ‘OK, I really know how to treat my band now.’ Just having your head screwed on is number one. “You learn how to do everything, like how to treat people on a stage,” she explains. Initially wanting to be at every single party or industry event and to make friends with all the other bands around her, this couldn’t be sustained and she soon came to realize the unique skill set that being a touring musician demands. Transitioning into your twenties is hard enough, but with a hectic touring schedule, Jordan had to learn to grow up quickly. “You miss birthday parties, weddings, funerals-they’re hard. Everyone would be like, ‘How am I supposed to relate to this?’” For all musicians who tour relentlessly there are consequences for traveling the world, which you have to accept. If you heard my ‘tour album’ it wouldn’t be anything anyone asked for. It was big for me to wait until I had things to write about. “I was putting pressure on myself and I had nothing to write about, either. “The tour really fucked me up,” Jordan says. Inevitably, a relentless tour cycle started, with years spent on the road while quickly transitioning out of her teenage years. Lindsey Jordan’s poetic post-breakup examination perfectly portrayed how absorbing love can be, reaching a wide audience for whom the songs resonated as they began to assign their own meaning to Jordan’s scriptures of fading romance. It became an outlier in an incredibly strong scene of American indie rock stars that came to the forefront in the late 2010s, including Phoebe Bridgers, Soccer Mommy, and Lucy Dacus. Snail Mail ’s 2018 debut album Lush had the power to ease the pain of a breakup six months before it even happened, and would still be around to patch up the wounds six months after.
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