SNAIL MAIL
Sometimes life catches you by surprise, as was the case for Lindsey Jordan when she was a Baltimore high-school student with only a vague idea what her future might hold.
“I had a college picked out that I really wanted to go to—i wanted to study English and literature,” the 19-year-old singer-songwriter says, on her cell from a Pittsburgh-bound tour van. “I didn’t really have a career path—i wanted to take English with some sort of minor in music. I wanted to be a writer. And it’s cool now because that’s what I am now—a writer.”
Cool is indeed a good word for where Jordan finds herself today, as she tours for her just-released debut album, Lush. Having studied music right from childhood—including years of jazz guitar—she began writing songs on her own in her early teens. It didn’t take Jordan long to strike serious gold under the name Snail Mail. The beautifully slackeresque “Thinning” lit up the blogosphere big-time in late 2016, winning the singer equal amounts of praise for her dream-hazed guitar work and vocals that were an improbable mix of bored-by-everything and thrilled-to-be-alive.
The resulting spotlight led to a flurry of label attention, the singer eventually signing with Matador, the long-running indie heavyweight that has helped bring the world everyone from Cat Power to Pavement. Before Jordan knew it, she found herself having to rethink what she’d be doing postgraduation.
“It was right when I was about to commit to college that I had to make a decision, because things were starting to get insane,” she says. “That was right around the end of senior year. But still, I didn’t really anticipate going from a buzz band with one good song to this becoming my day job and it becoming my whole life.”
So, while most of her classmates were thinking about college, Jordan went all-in on a life in rock ’n’ roll. Having the world wait for a follow-up to “Thinning” would eventually end up being megastressful. Jordan wrote that song—and the subsequent EP, Habit, it appeared on—as a teenager in her bedroom, not thinking anyone other than her friends would hear it.
She went into the writing and recording of Lush knowing plenty of folks were paying attention, which led to pressure that at times became overwhelming.
“Obviously, the attention sort of seeped into everything, but my biggest concern was just making a record that mattered to me,” she says. “It took me a lot of time to figure out what that meant. I really had to separate myself from the industry businesspeople— that’s not who I wanted to please.”
What Jordan—who’s been vocal about her love of guitar-hero acts like Alvvays, Kurt Vile, and Mary Timony—eventually locked on to was a sound that mixes synapse-frying distortion (“Heat Wave”) with a serious determination to push indie rock in new directions. (Swoon to the morphined horns in “Deep Sea” and the soft-focus strings in “Pristine”.)
On the storytelling side of things, there’s plenty to suggest that, even as she was becoming an indie-nation It Girl, the singer was navigating some turbulent emotional waters. Her great skill is that lyrics like “In the end you could waste your whole life anyways/ And I want better for you,” from “Anytime”, are sharp enough to resonate with anyone who’s ever sat in tears wondering what happened with a relationship, yet vague enough to leave things open to interpretation.
“I wanted the songs to be contextualized in any way that the listener wants,” Jordan says. “I find the songwriting process to be really personal, and all these songs are really personal, so, to be honest, I didn’t picture people assigning the songs so many different meanings. The songs are, in many ways, about what you want them to be about.”
Snail Mail plays the Biltmore Cabaret on Sunday (June 24).