Lindsey Jordan is a Slytherin. The 19-year-old Baltimore native behind rising band Snail Mail has many remarkable qualities about her, but, really, the most important one is that she is a bona fide Slytherin. “I identify with Slytherin,” Jordan says. “Then I took the Pottermore test — and I take that very seriously cause J.K. [Rowling] wrote that test herself — and I got Slytherin. I think that’s fair.” Jordan is sitting in the courtyard of the Bootleg Theatre in Los Angeles, with a sly smile. To the casual “Harry Potter” fan, hearing that one of indie rock’s brightest new voices would be slotted into the same Hogwarts house as Lord Voldemort and Draco Malfoy might be upsetting, until you realize that Jordan might be one of the best examples of the house to date (apart from Snape, of course).
Besides sharing a platinum blonde look with Malfoy and gravitating toward the color green, Jordan’s unbridled ambition is her strongest Slytherin trait. After releasing “Lush,” her piercing full-length debut (and one of the best albums of 2018 so far), in June and embarking on an extensive tour, Jordan’s already thinking about how to step outside her comfort zone again. “I’ve been listening to a ton of electronic music lately — and hip-hop — and I’ve just been listening to the production techniques on all this music that sounds nothing like my own and just sort of figuring out what it is about those records that are really interesting to me,” she says, head nodding as she gets into the specifics of her research, which includes repeat listens of Princess Nokia, Tycho, John Maus and more.
“I’m excited to just experiment and see what it becomes,” she continues. “I feel like I can get better and be different.” These sounds started seeping into Jordan’s consciousness toward the final stages of “Lush” and nearly got a synth line on the record: “The last thing I brought to the studio was like a fragment of something that was unfinished and I kind of wrote out a synth arrangement and … I just [wanted] to hang out in the studio and mess around with synths. That feels really right to me now and I’m always changing what it is that I want, what it is that I’m interested in, and I hope that the next record is completely different [from ‘Lush’].”
While her mind’s two steps ahead and in the studio, Jordan reacquaints herself with the honest, driving tracks of her debut album every night on tour. “It’s a lot easier to feed off of people’s excitement now,” she says, feeling relieved that “Lush” is finally out in the world. “It’s nice seeing people singing the words … so people aren’t just blankly staring with their arms crossed being like ‘I don’t know if I like this or not.’ It just takes a lot of work out of the equation.” After spending the first years of Snail Mail as a self-described “perpetual opener,” Jordan’s hardened attitude toward lackluster concertgoers is to be expected, especially as a Slytherin who’s concerned with self-preservation.
This even extends to Jordan’s ability to play these personal and dramatic songs every night: “I think that those songs [on ‘Lush’] are up close and personal, [but] seeing people singing alone is weird and cool because it was just like when I was writing it. I’ve realized that there’s enough space between me and the subjects of the songs that people are able to bring their own context [to the tracks]. It’s a good way to give yourself closure — at least for me — to just write a song about [a moment in your life] and then close it off … and then play it every night. I don’t know, it feels like a good coping technique!” Classic Slytherin.
Jordan’s been working on her ability to take care of herself and preserve her creativity for a long time and she’s found the most success in being critical of her own work. She never wants to, as she puts it, “ride the hype wave onto the hype beach.” “I think that making sure that you’re putting your work through an editing process of some sort — and being critical rather than just trying to pump things out [is smart],” says Jordan. The singer-songwriter worked with producer Jake Aron to strip out some of the fuzz from past Snail Mail releases to get to the heart of what separates Jordan from her peers — her lyricism. “It took a long time to figure out what [a completed song] meant to me. In the studio Jake and I worked really hard together to make sure that all of the songs were exactly what they needed to be—with nothing less and nothing more.” Even though that process was full of trial and error for the pair, Jordan’s confident in her ability to gut-check her work even more now. “Getting to the point where I felt like I could [say] ‘This is my work, this represents me and it’s done’ was very challenging,” says Jordan with a heavy sigh. “But I feel super prepared to be in the studio again, just because now I feel like I’m way more in touch with myself and what it is that I want … That’s just something I think people need to discover on their own.”
Although Jordan’s penchant for hard work is technically a nerdy Hufflepuff trait, her cleverness is all Slytherin. She’s thrilled when a song’s true meaning can get past the critics and fans. “I’m just not that down to slice [my songs] open and start talking about them because I think that some of the best novels and poems and songs are exciting because they’re ambiguous,” she says, connecting her art to her favorite — and very dramatic — literary predecessors. Don’t worry though, Jordan insists that she’s not that full of drama herself: “I think it’s important to get it out in the open that I was not a theater kid! I was on the outskirts of all of that.” As she sits in a defunct beauty parlor dryer chair, Jordan’s dramatic past comes back to haunt her.” I played a guitar in one of the plays, I was an extra in one of them in high school … Also I went to theater camp when I was like 7.”
As the evidence against her being “a drama kid” starts to stack up against her, Jordan pivots to why she loves drama — in her work exclusively. “As a writer, those things [that I write about] feel like the end of the world and I like capturing at that very moment in time what it is about those things that feels like it’s the end of the world.” She takes a moment and pushes her hair back behind her ear before continuing. “Describing being broken up with as, like, this huge, vast gigantic thing … it just feels a lot more real to me than shrugging it off and pretending I don’t care about it.”
Right before the mood gets too serious, Jordan pulls it back to what’s most important. “Let’s just shout out Harry Potter for a second,” she exclaims. “First of all, as far as the movies go, great cast, incredible. Harry Potter World? Been twice. Went for my 16th birthday and then I took myself there — by myself — on the last tour.” And even after all of her commitment as a model Slytherin, apparently this second trip was a bit touch and go at the beginning: “I had my [credit] card out and I was like ‘This is stupid,’ so I called my mom and I was like ‘Should I do both [Harry Potter parks]?’ and she was like ‘Yeah, go for it. Regret it later.’” A giant smile comes across Jordan’s face as she describes that magical day. “It was one of those treat yourself days. I work hard.” After touring the world and pouring her heart out in her hit album, no one can argue with that.
Snail Mail at The Bootleg
© RACHAEL WRIGHT
The Three Best Pieces of Advice that Snail Mail’s Lindsey Jordan Ever Got (and Actually Took)
Write something every day.
“Liz Phair — during that sit-down-let’s-talk-to-each-other thing over oatmeal — was saying that in order to make writing a record less daunting, it’s important to write something every day, whether it be big or small, good or bad. And I feel like I get a lot of advice from people, but that actually … like that day we went to Guitar Center and bought one of those little Vox headphone jack amplifiers and I was, like, in the car writing and I wrote a song because of that piece of advice! And I do that every day, I try to sit down with a guitar in the van and write. Writing a record is really hard on the mind and heart so writing something everyday, just so it doesn’t feel like a big deal, is a really big thing.”
Never date someone that you think is cooler than you.
“I think about this all the time, never date someone that you think is cooler than you. Because there will be a power imbalance there and you’ll always be looking up at them like, ‘Oh that person is out of my league.’ I mean, as fucked up as that sounds, it’s basically that [you should] like someone who you don’t have any reason to believe is cooler than you, like someone who you feel like you’re on equal turf with. I don’t know if that’s like backwards, but it’s been formative [for me] because if you always feel like that person is just way above you in life, or that they could have this cool complex and you’re like that person walks around like they’re cooler than everybody. That, to me, felt like really great advice. I mean, it’s something that should go without saying that you would want to date people that don’t make you feel small, but it’s something that maybe you wouldn’t necessarily do unless someone was like, ‘Hey, you should not date people who make you feel insignificant.”
Sometimes my weight fluctuates — deal with it.
“Rihanna said this — it’s not advice that I got from RiRi, but there was a tweet where she was talking about how on tour your weight fluctuates. This is really personal, but that’s something that I remember, that Rihanna tweet, and it just being like ‘Sometimes your weight just fluctuates, so, like, everybody else can just deal.’ I know that doesn’t sound like a big thing, but on tour you sit in the van all the time, you don’t get to exercise, you don’t get to have your normal schedule and sometimes don’t fit in the way they did and sometimes you look a little different in photo shoots and stuff, but it’s … easier said than done. But that Rihanna tweet … I think about it a lot. It’s just a sick piece of advice for the world. It’s like, you don’t have to look a certain way for someone, as cheesy as that sounds. It’s just like taking care of yourself on the road is really hard and that’s advice you get from everyone. It’s just like no matter what you’re doing, as long as you’re looking out for yourself and your body, it’s just that that’s the vibe on tour. I didn’t think I’d go that deep in this question, but here we are!”
BAILEY PENNICK 