Lindsey Jordan opens the door to her one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan’s East Village with a puppy dog grin on her face. As her shower-damp hair drips onto the floor, the 22-year-old ushers me inside and plops down at her desk chair, beneath an art nouveau print of Fiona Apple. She moved in last December, and the spot is Jordan’s first adventure in solo living, filled with the trappings of early adulting: Ikea furniture, novelty mugs (including one that reads “World’s Greatest Lesbian”), a stray waffle fry from the previous night’s takeout hiding under the couch. Opposite a 70-inch TV that Jordan mostly uses to play games like Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption II is a gigantic poster for the beloved English jangle-pop act the Sundays. Books, from Simone de Beauvoir’s She Came to Stay to Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems, are shoved into every spare space; next on her list is bell hooks’ radical cry for empathy All About Love.
Over the last few years, Jordan—who performs under the name Snail Mail—has become one of indie rock’s most heart-wrenching artists by digging into the beautiful and ugly parts of being young, sensitive, and lovesick. The singer, songwriter, and guitarist’s upcoming second album, Valentine, continues this theme across 10 songs that find her trapped in romances that are frequently all-consuming and rarely healthy.
Produced by Jordan and indie vet Brad Cook, the new record pushes beyond the wistful rock of her 2018 debut, Lush. The first half of Valentine, Jordan explains, is “almost fun,” led by the title track, a soaring guitar anthem in the lineage of her faves Paramore. Side A also includes “Forever (Sailing),” a hallucinogenic ballad that could slip into a bizarro yacht-rock compilation and “Ben Franklin,” a surprisingly synth-forward track about trying to feign apathy in the face of breakup. When asked about that song’s blasé lines like, “Got money, I don’t care about sex,” Jordan explains with a chuckle that they are purely aspirational: “I really wish I could be that character, but I’m not.”
The album’s second half is “when the party’s over and I’m drunk and alone,” as envisioned quite literally on the last-call rocker “Automate.” As Valentine winds down, Jordan begins to realize that chaining yourself to love comes at a dark price, and there isn’t much fulfillment to be found in the scenes of excess depicted on the slinky “Madonna” and escapist fantasy “Glory.” But all the while, Jordan’s self-awareness is as sharp as ever. “Doesn’t obsession just become me?” she asks at one point on the album, poking fun at her readiness to dive headfirst into a relationship. “I’m the least apathetic person in the world,” Jordan says. “It’s almost a joke.”
As her music suggests, Jordan is an expressive person. She speaks with a throaty drawl, throwing in the occasional “dude” or “sick” for emphasis. Later, as we cruise around the nearby Tompkins Square Park, she practically does an entire reenactment of a recent encounter with her favorite Instagram-famous dog, Bertram the Pomeranian: With a green juice in one hand and a black coffee in the other, Jordan pantomimes her excitement over spotting the dog and then her melodramatic, wilted dejection as he trotted away. Apparently, on that particular day, Bertram was a busy boy and could not stop for an adoring fan. (But the dog gods were on her side: The day after our interview, Jordan ran into Bertram again; this time, plenty of pets ensued.)
For all of her youthful exuberance, there is also a poignant seriousness to Jordan and her music. On Valentine, she sings of seeking refuge in substances and a stint in rehab. When I bring up the topic, the color drains from Jordan’s face as her voice stiffens and she retreats within herself. For the only time all afternoon, she starts to stumble over her words and asks if we can take a break. As hurricane clouds gather in the distance outside her apartment, Jordan politely declines to get into some specifics of her experience but doesn’t shut down. Talking about why she decided to sing about rehab on the album at all, she puts it simply, “I’m already sort of naked so I might as well get completely naked, because the truth is going to come out eventually.”
Lindsey Jordan: I started trying to write immediately after Lush, but I was on tour and it wasn’t easy for me to work around others. We were children when we started that tour and adults when we came out of it. That was strange. I had just turned 20 and I was playing songs from when I was 17. I started to be like, “Shit, I don’t have an album.” I was getting really scared.
Even when I was young, I always thought that songwriting was a well, not a river. I used to think that every time I took a bucket out of that well, it would diminish. When Lush was done, I was like, “That’s it, I’ve run myself dry.” It takes me so long to write a song, and by the time I’m done with it I’m emotional and naked and need to be alone for a while. I know it’s going to be months before there is another. It’s like this weird thing happens, and I’m like, [gasps] “There’s another one?” That’s how I felt the entire time making Valentine. I didn’t really start working on it until I was back at my parents’ house in Baltimore at the beginning of the pandemic.
I had nothing else to do but make music, so that’s what I did all day long. My hands were covered in blisters. In a way, it was nice to regress, because sometimes I felt like I could transport myself back to when I was writing Lush. I was using a different guitar and amp but I was sitting on the same floor, and at times it felt like when music was literally just for me, when I was coming home from school and basically writing in my diary. So I had to figure out how to use songwriting to help myself again. That’s when I know the magic is back.
It’s definitely something that goes through my head, but whenever my mind goes there I just have to gently guide myself back, meditation style, to make it more about me and less about the subjects of the songs. But no matter what, I wanted the songs to be about me. People can think whatever they want but at the end of the day, I’ll know what’s what and no one else really will.
That is something I like to do, though not in all cases. I have better communication skills now, but there was a time when I would be like, “This is where I’m at—here’s an audio file.” I wrote “Light Blue,” which is light and sweet, for my girlfriend when I was 19 and I showed it to her. There’s definitely consequences to being open as hell. I want my music to create as little of a dramatic splash as possible, I don’t want to create chaos in other people’s lives. I come in peace. But writing about very real things that hurt or feel good takes me back to the actual reason I do it, which is catharsis.
When I used to be on stage, I would try to channel all the events of the songs—
Like a creep! There were tons of shows where I was crying, and if I couldn’t channel the actual events of the songs, I would try to channel whatever was going on in my life at the time, especially romantically. It was exhausting. My emotional boundaries are so different now. Like, they exist.
A couple of years ago I would have been ashamed to call myself a people pleaser; now, I’m actively working to shed that label. But pleasing people becomes kind of inherent in a job where you really want approval and honestly you want to be everything… you know what, I’ll talk in I’s: I used to want to be everything to everyone all the time. After Lush came out, I was driving myself crazy going to every single social thing.
Everything was a breakdown, like a hurricane ripping the foundation off a house. It was not sustainable. Eventually, I realized it wasn’t everyone else, it was me. I was not in good shape. I was like a baby in an adult job. I wasn’t emotionally maturing fast enough. I got to the point where I really needed to define what matters to me. I had to like the stuff on the inside before I was able to hang out with myself.
Being a yes man really takes you away from your inner voice, and that’s pretty much all we have at the end of the day. It was a big moment for me when I realized that I should listen to it. Now, I surround myself with people that tell me no. I don’t have anyone around me that would unconditionally tell me yes.
I used to go to everybody around me with my emotions but I have to be careful with who I take my truths to. Putting those emotional moments in the wrong hands puts you at risk of starting to hide that part of yourself. It’s been helpful for me to know who my safe people are and when it’s OK to talk. To be able to have a space where I can be entirely me so that no one will be like, [affects judgemental tone] “This is so Lindsey.” Because it’s always so Lindsey, but that’s what I like about myself most. I feel things really hard.
I like that I’m gentle. I love being a sensitive person and spending time with myself. My capacity to care and not be apathetic. Two things that make me feel in touch with myself are books and music. Those things can bring me happiness on any given occasion, and that makes me love myself.
Yes. In November 2020, I went to rehab in Arizona for 45 days. I was dealing with a unique set of circumstances and challenges rooted in being so young when I started. I needed to hit pause. I was not in any kind of shape to continue doing Snail Mail stuff. Luckily, I had people around me that love me, and the place that I went to had a lot of answers.
One hundred percent. I had to figure out how I felt about it, like, “Am I just going to tell everybody? Am I embarrassed? Am I ashamed?” I told my close friends in an Instagram story where I said, “Here’s the address, write me a letter.” There was a moment where I wasn’t going to put it in the album, and then I was like, “I fucking feel like it!” At the very least, if I’m putting this information out there maybe it will encourage other people to not be ashamed to get help or talk about it.
I had a bunch of books that I wanted to bring in with me for comfort, but you’re not supposed to be too distracted from the curriculum, so I made an agreement with my therapist there that if I finished a mental health book I could have one of my own books. I read 17 books while I was there. I brought Tenth of December by George Saunders, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver, and Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning. My friend mailed me Patti Smith’s Year of the Monkey.
I also got really into Joan Didion during the pandemic and was shredding through her books; on “Headlock” I mention “Mr. Death,” which is a reference to an e.e. cummings poem that she quotes in The Year of Magical Thinking. Reading is probably my biggest inspiration.
I was able to procure a pretty bad acoustic guitar that was initially covered in dust and had two strings and was really hard to play. I didn’t have my computer or phone, just my journal, a pencil, and six minutes before intimacy class. I had to think about the songs in the most abstract sense. But in the very few moments where I was by myself and in my room, I did a lot of messing with songs and untangling in my journal.
I’m a deeply sensitive person, and the idea of going all the way down into the pitch darkness and messing with those possibilities is liberating. To be able to talk about it and come out the other side is, to me, the ultimate form of recovery and growth. So that song let me go as dark as I possibly could so I could come out on the other side.
I edit my lyrics over and over until I’m 100 percent sure that everything feels right. It’s perfectionism, in a pull-my-hair-out type of way. On this album, it was really important to me that certain lines hit in certain places in the song. If something repeats, it’s absolutely for a reason—like on “Automate,” when I say, “I’m like your dog” twice.
All of the vocal deliveries are super intentional too. There’s certain parts that when you sing them soft, it hurts more, or things that when you sing them with projection or a little more rasp, it’s emotional in a different way. It’s theatrical as hell.
My family weren’t extremely devout Catholics, but we went to church most Sundays when I was growing up. My parents wanted to instill those morals in me. As complicated as it has made some things, I’m also grateful for that education.
Everything. There’s a crazy guilt complex, a lot of fear. I definitely had OCD as a child, and one of my compulsions was confessing.
I have a really hard time writing from any place other than complete honesty within myself. Sometimes I want to write from an emotion that isn’t there, or isn’t something I’m experiencing at that moment, but it never pans out. Maybe I do have a weird obsession with honesty.
Sometimes there’s an element of familiarity that can be alarming, because I don’t necessarily realize what’s going on in people’s own processes with the music. With social media, people do really feel like they know you by listening to your words and connecting to them. Sometimes you don’t even realize how hard people are relating at home. It’s a big “wow.” Making music that feels personal, you never feel like you’re going to be something to someone, ever.
The song “Valentine” used to be called “Adore You,” but then I came up with that chorus—“Why’d you wanna erase me, darling valentine?”—and I knew the record would be called Valentine. I was like, “Oh, that’s heartbreaking, that’s so Snail Mail.”
Absolutely. I love really hard.
On this record and in my past music, there’s the element of I’m gonna die if this person goes out of my life. Only later have I come to realize that it doesn’t need to be so life-or-death to be beautiful and evoke strong emotions. Love can be so many things. I’m obsessed with how much it changes the more that you learn.