Right after the Lush victory tour, I had time off, and I just went through some real-life shit, then the pandemic - the real-life shit just kept coming. I was like, I wanna write about real emotions that aren’t angst. I’m not against people writing about tour, I just don’t wanna do it. I was like, I guess I need to get off of tour to have a real-life experience to have things to write about. So I was just like, How long can we push this off?! I still feel that way about the next one: I don’t know how I’m gonna do this.
#Long bumpy road full
I need full privacy in order to come up with lyrics, or I have so far. People are usually able to write on the road, so it seems, and I just can’t. And nobody ever pushes me, which is cool, but everyone around me was like, “On your own time, but you should understand that you can’t just take forever.” That was what I wanted to do, ’cause just completely switching gears is so scary. We would’ve reached a point where we couldn’t have just kept touring the old songs. So it ended up working out really well, because if we hadn’t been forced to stop, I think the album probably would have taken even longer. I literally can’t think of writing something in a hurry. The way that I was operating, which didn’t work that well for me, was that I was going to tour as much as I wanted and then just write when I felt like it. It scared me a lot, and I think it also kicked into high gear that I needed to work. I never expected to take a break for as long as I did during the pandemic.
She outlined some of those influences on Valentine, from Paramore and Bon Iver to her “disgusting” taste in film.
#Long bumpy road movie
“Whenever I see a movie that inspires me or read something that makes me feel some type of way or listen to something, I’m like, Okay, this is all contributing to something, but I don’t know how or what,” she says. It helps that Jordan is a voracious consumer of culture, from music to literature to film - mentally storing things from her media diet throughout her own creative process, often unintentionally. The sound is fuller and bolder, incorporating synthesizers and strings, but the lyrics still shine: “Fuck being remembered, I think I was made for you,” she proclaims on the colossal title track. Waxahatchee), and workshopping its music videos with director Josh Coll, in addition to writing and performing all of the songs. Now 22, she was involved in every step of the album’s genesis, co-producing it alongside Brad Cook, who has worked with both her hero Bon Iver and mentor Katie Crutchfield (a.k.a. If Lush proved Jordan was something of a prodigious singer-songwriter, Valentine confirms her as the complete artistic package. I was not in any kind of shape to continue doing Snail Mail stuff.”) On the second single off Valentine, she sings, “Post-rehab, I’ve been feeling so small.” (“I was dealing with a unique set of circumstances and challenges rooted in being so young when I started,” she told Pitchfork in September. During that period off the road, Jordan went through a breakup and spent 45 days in rebab. Her canceled 2020 tour gave her time to focus on writing Valentine she moved back to her family’s home in Ellicott City, Maryland, for a time, before getting an apartment in Manhattan. “I went from being a teenage indie rocker to a young-adult indie rocker, and that’s kind of weird,” she says over the phone. Jordan had struggled to write songs on the road, and she also struggled to figure out who she wanted to be as an artist after Lush. She was planning a final tour for spring 2020 - then, like everyone, had to go quiet, before emerging a year and a half later with a follow-up Snail Mail album, Valentine, released in November. Jordan toured heavily around Lush, playing nearly 200 shows in 2018 and ’19. In a Best New Music review, Pitchfork’s Ryan Dombal wrote that the album “encompasses the once and future sound of indie rock.” “Or are you still not sure what that means?” By the time Lush came out in June 2018, Jordan, just shy of 19, was the toast of the indie-singer-songwriter scene, thanks in large part to her pen. Take “Heat Wave,” a single off her 2018 debut album, Lush, when she tells an ex, “I hope whoever it is / Holds their breath around you / ’Cause I know I did.” Or “Stick,” one of the first standouts from her 2016 EP, Habit, which she rerecorded for Lush: “And did things work out for you?” she wails. The incisively intimate rock music she makes as Snail Mail stands out for its ability to put the most difficult emotions to words in sharp, piercing phrases. Lindsey Jordan made her name as a songwriter. “I went from being a teenage indie rocker to a young-adult indie rocker, and that’s kind of weird.”
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