{"id":497461,"date":"2026-03-01T12:18:10","date_gmt":"2026-03-01T12:18:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/497461\/"},"modified":"2026-03-01T12:18:10","modified_gmt":"2026-03-01T12:18:10","slug":"snail-mails-lindsey-jordan-i-think-im-at-a-really-good-age-to-be-a-rock-star","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/497461\/","title":{"rendered":"Snail Mail\u2019s Lindsey Jordan: \u2018I think I\u2019m at a really good age to be a rock star\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Five years ago, Lindsey Jordan\u2019s OCD entered a \u201ctailspin\u201d \u2013 prompted, the musician better known as Snail Mail<\/a> says, by the 2008 film Synecdoche, New York. Written and directed by Charlie Kaufman<\/a>, the surreal, death-obsessed movie sees Philip Seymour Hoffman<\/a> play a dramatist whose sense of reality begins to fold in on itself. \u201cI accidentally developed a pretty severe OCD thing about dying from that movie,\u201d Jordan says, plainly. \u201cThe all-seeing narrator in it just drops all these awful life spoilers that I\u2019ve been spending so much time in my life consciously not trying to think about. Then it became just a part of everything that I do. And it just started becoming this awful thing that I couldn\u2019t get rid of, where anytime I\u2019d be having a rewarding time or doing something I care about, it would ruin me being present.\u201d<\/p>\n

This destabilising period resonates throughout Jordan\u2019s muscular and atmospheric new album, Ricochet, the third Snail Mail LP after her 2018 breakthrough Lush and 2021\u2019s Valentine. It\u2019s almost certainly her best work to date: a melancholy, probing, 11-song record about mortality and existential dread that falls, she says, just shy of a concept album. \u201cI don\u2019t know if those exist, really, truly, anymore \u2013 but it is capturing everything about who I think I am right now. I don\u2019t want to do it a disservice by calling it another \u2018diary record\u2019. I called Lush a diary record, but that gets sort of pigeonhole-y, because I\u2019m like, \u2018a girl with a diary\u2019. Know what I mean?\u201d<\/p>\n

When she first broke through, the better part of a decade ago, Jordan was viewed as part of a burgeoning new sub-genre: angsty indie music led by young (often queer) women such as Phoebe Bridgers, Soccer Mommy, Lucy Dacus, or Mitski. Cue the influx of features with headlines like \u201cRock\u2019s Not Dead, It\u2019s Ruled by Women\u201d (New York Times), \u201cThe Joy of Sad Girl Music\u201d (Harper\u2019s Bazaar), or \u201cThe Wry Young Women Writing Sad, Buoyant, Beautiful Songs\u201d (The New Yorker). Yet Jordan never felt like part of a movement, and looking back now, \u201cthere\u2019s kind of a weird energy\u201d, she believes. \u201cI think all the women that were getting grouped together didn\u2019t feel that way.\u201d<\/p>\n

As we speak, she sits on a sofa in her house in North Carolina, leaning forward animatedly into her camera. She\u2019s wearing a T-shirt that reads \u201cBandwagonesque\u201d, an album by the Scottish alt-rock band Teenage Fanclub. \u201cIt is really cool that so many bands with women were getting pushed at that time,\u201d she continues. \u201cBut it gave people this false idea that everything\u2019s totally fine. And now I actually think we\u2019re on the other side. We\u2019re gonna see even less women in music soon, to be honest. I think we\u2019re back to like, men rock.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jordan is doing her part, at least. Where much of her early songwriting plundered the conventional material of youth \u2013 love and heartbreak, albeit filtered through the specific lens of a world-weary Gen-Z lesbian \u2013 Ricochet has a different purview. Take \u201cMy Maker\u201d, the album\u2019s superb second single, a propulsive, The Sundays-indebted dream-pop number that imagines waiting at an airport bar on the way to the afterlife (\u201cBouncer in the sky \/ Let me in, I\u2019m scared to die\u201d). <\/p>\n

Other songs tease at her own tricky relationship with success, while the lilting, richly orchestrated \u201cLight on Our Feet\u201d \u2013 a crescendoing anthem of a song with a hint of Bridgers to its melody \u2013 and \u201cReverie\u201d are the only real love songs on the record. \u201cI was trying to step out of having that just be my shtick,\u201d Jordan says. \u201cThere\u2019s parts [of the album] where I\u2019m mourning how out of control I felt as a teenager in the music industry, with like bad people everywhere. The vulnerability of something that can\u2019t defend itself.\u201d She seems to fray a little as she utters this last thought.<\/p>\n

\"Snail<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

Snail Mail\u2019s Lindsey Jordan: \u2018I\u2019ve made a lot of mistakes already\u2019 (Daria Kobayashi Ritch)<\/p>\n

Born in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland, Jordan took to music early, learning classical guitar from age five. (Her musicianship has always been a great strength, and remains especially so on Ricochet.) Her mother owns a lingerie store called Bra-la-la; her father works for a company that makes educational textbooks. If her childhood provided some of the germs of her future artistry, then it also foreshadowed some of the challenges she\u2019d face: she was a child with OCD tendencies, and a complicated relationship with religion. <\/p>\n

Her vulnerabilities became a lamentable subject of online discussion after she alluded, briefly, on a song from Valentine, to a 45-day stint in rehab she completed in Arizona, in November 2020. (She previously told Pitchfork that she was \u201cdealing with a unique set of circumstances and challenges rooted in being so young when I started\u201d.) In the years since, however, that admission fuelled a wave of conjecture, something Jordan refers to as the \u201csubstance conversation\u201d. \u201cI never go looking for things,\u201d she says. \u201cI never look at Reddit. But people tell me [when I\u2019m mentioned], which sucks.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of me really wishes I never put that lyric in, because it caused so much trouble for me, honestly<\/p>\n

Lindsey Jordan<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s crazy,\u201d she continues, \u201cbecause I don\u2019t ever want to drop too much information about what happened there. But I wasn\u2019t [in rehab] for drugs or alcohol. I was there because some gnarly s*** happened in my life, and I was needing some intervention. And so after that, the substance conversation around me started. And it really pissed me off. Like, I didn\u2019t include that lyric so y\u2019all could study me.\u201d<\/p>\n

She grows visibly vexed. \u201cI just don\u2019t want people formulating a false idea about me,\u201d she continues.\u2029\u201cIt feels unfair, and it makes me not want to say much about any choice I\u2019m making in my personal life. I sometimes think people shape what they think they\u2019re going to get out of the show based on the fact that they think I went to rehab for some mysterious drug or alcohol.\u201d She exhales. \u201cPart of me really wishes I never put that lyric in, because it caused so much trouble for me, honestly.\u201d<\/p>\n

Not unrelatedly, Jordan now largely avoids social media (bar TikTok), but is currently back on Instagram for Ricochet\u2019s album rollout. \u201cI\u2019m hating my life on there a bit,\u201d she says. \u201cYou\u2019re getting so much of people\u2019s marketing; it makes me feel like I can\u2019t think straight. Part of me thinks I\u2019m stepping into a completely different industry, like I\u2019ve become a football player \u2013 I have no idea what\u2019s going on. It\u2019s all algorithms, and people paying to flood Instagram. Everything is a weird trick. Sometimes I just wish all the data centres would just get burned down.\u201d<\/p>\n

There is something infectiously likeable about her, a real, unaffected earnestness. She speaks at pace, and with a firecracker enthusiasm that gives over at times to a sort of startling, unconcealed fragility. Perhaps this is to do with age \u2013 she is still, objectively, young, even with a decade of professional music behind her. \u201cLast time we played Coachella, there were all these bands the same age as me there, and I felt like a weird old sage,\u201d she jokes. \u201cBut it\u2019s sick, because now I think I\u2019m at a really good age to be a rock star, and I\u2019ve made a lot of mistakes already.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Jordan<\/p>\n

open image in gallery<\/p>\n

Jordan performing at Coachella in April 2023 (Getty)<\/p>\n

We chat for a bit about slightly less fraught topics. Jordan talks about her small role in Jane Schoenbrun\u2019s cult 2024 movie I Saw the TV Glow, about a pair of queer kids who become fixated on a teen fantasy series \u2013 Jordan played the show-within-a-film\u2019s Buffy Summers-esque lead. Today, I Saw the TV Glow is beloved, particularly within the trans community. \u201cIt\u2019s probably my favourite thing to talk about actually\u2026 I\u2019m constantly meeting new people like, \u2018You ever hear of a little something called A24?\u2019\u201d she grins. Jordan talks about wanting to act more, to score a film, and about films in general. She is, she says, a \u201chuge movie buff\u201d.<\/p>\n

I am heartened by how happy Jordan seems overall. Having spent a couple of weeks immersed in the splendid isolation of Ricochet, I wasn\u2019t really sure what to expect. But while Jordan\u2019s record might have been born of a miserable experience \u2013 that Kaufman-induced, obsessive morbidity \u2013 there is, she says, \u201cno danger anymore of re-entering that whirlwind\u201d. She even rewatched Synecdoche recently, and found it, if anything, a comfort. <\/p>\n

\u201cI had purposely avoided thinking about any of that stuff, for so long. And now, I\u2019ve had no choice but to really sit in it, and think through it,\u201d she says. \u201cIf I know I\u2019m terrified of mortality, and terrified of wasting my life, the worst thing I could possibly do would be sabotage it all. And yeah, I don\u2019t think I\u2019m in danger of ever ending up in the same place \u2013 but I do think it completely changed who I am as a person.\u201d <\/p>\n

She smiles. \u201cWhich is crazy.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Ricochet\u2019 is out 27 March on Matador Records. Snail Mail is performing at London\u2019s Electric Ballroom on 25 June<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497462,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[88,216],"class_list":["post-497461","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497461","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497461"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497461\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497462"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497461"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497461"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497461"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}