In a Phoenix Airbnb last year, Lindsey Jordan waited for the skies to clear well enough for a hot air balloon ride. High winds, fog, and low visibility had already halted her mission five times. Not many people use airboats for content, let alone one-shot music videos à la Coldplay’s “Yellow.” Nick Cannon got in one for an America’s Got Talent segment. There was an opera concert over Turkey, a Diplo set at Burning Man, and a world record-setting drum performance. Hot air balloon culture had never infiltrated the indie-rock world until Jordan needed a music video for “My Maker.” It’s a song about the heavens and the hugeness of fate, after all. She needed to get as close to the sky as possible.
For manifestation purposes, Jordan purchased a hot air balloon notebook and filled it with video ideas, tour details, and press cycle need-to-knows. She had her idea for the “My Maker” video before “My Maker” was even picked to be a single. The label had suggested doing the hot air balloon video for “Tractor Beam,” and “Agony Freak” was also up for consideration, but Jordan wouldn’t budge on “My Maker.” The ride would have to take place at sunrise or sunset and, by day six, Jordan still hadn’t left the ground and her spirits had nearly gone full subterranean. But on her final day in town, the skies cleared up enough to shoot.
Three takes and one Rainbow Ryders aeronaut cameo later and Jordan had her “Moody’s Point” moment. “I wasn’t scared while I was up there, but I was pretty surprised that that is something we still do as a society,” she laughs. “There were guys on the ground jumping up, trying to weigh the basket down while we were landing. We were bracing sideways and shit. We signed a lot of forms and I said, ‘How is this, like, a business?’” The video came out beautifully, just as Jordan hoped it would. She’s relieved about it now, considering she spent all of her music video budget on the “My Maker” footage and had to film the “Dead End” and “Tractor Beam” accompaniments on a shoestring.
In 2021, as Jordan navigated conversations around her stint in rehab during press opps and prepared to tour the critically-acclaimed Valentine, she was sidelined by an injury: vocal cord polyps triggered by severe vocal trauma. She knew something was wrong before the diagnosis, because her friends would say, “You should get this checked out, it sounds really unhealthy… whatever you got going on,” to her. Jordan says the period between Lush and Valentine worsened her condition. She was at the whim of her voice, losing it more often and more dramatically, calling them “bad vocal days.” “I had no idea what was happening,” she admits, “because the technique just wasn’t there.” She’d practice by herself and sound fucking amazing. Four shows later, her voice would be shot. Maybe it was lack of sleep, or lack of water. She remembers Coachella 2018 being especially bad. Jordan’s vocal coach at Mount Sinai listened to her Habit EP from 2016 and could hear the polyps, because injured voices have diplophonia, also known as “double pitch.”
The healthiest way to get rid of vocal polyps is to undergo vocal therapy, not just cut them out, because too much vocal cord scarring is irreversible. But Jordan got the surgery and was on vocal rest for a month, undergoing intense physical therapy just to sing again. Now she has to get a camera down her throat once a year. “When we were in Japan last year, I got it done because I needed to, and they use bigger cameras there,” she remembers. “I haven’t gotten it done since, because it was dramatic.” The trade-off, she says, is that she “got a whole new vocal voice.” It felt like vocal feminization surgery, because she can hit falsetto notes now. But the surgery and recovery has made Jordan wary of vocal fries and itchy dialects, and alarm bells go off in her head every time she meets a new person with a raspy voice. “I don’t even know if anyone is supposed to naturally have that,” she confirms. “I feel like it’s all injury stuff, but maybe not.” But Jordan’s confidence is through the roof, even if that means going on vocal rest during tour. “I still have to be really careful, but this brand new range makes playing shows fun again, because I know what’s gonna come out.”
CONFIDENCE IS KING ON RICOCHET, Jordan’s third Snail Mail album. “Light On Our Feet” is ambitious, touched by hefty violins just as “Mia” was five years ago. “Hell” is quintessential Snail Mail: scorched-earth alt-rock cranked to an 11. There’s an obvious interplay between taking risks and ratcheting up the tried-and-true formula. Jordan flipped her writing process around this time. “I usually work on one song at a time for six months or more,” she reveals. “And then there’s a 70% chance it won’t get used.” She used to do guitar and vocals at the same time, fine-tuning everything until she had to decide if the track was record-worthy or not. No other process felt as gratifying, but no other process felt as discouraging, either.
Making Ricochet, she says, meant not torturing herself over demos anymore. Jordan wrote every day on the Valentine tour, “making amazing leaps and bounds on melodies and chord progressions” for three out of the last five years, chasing after catchiness and often refining eight instrumentals at the same time. When she got off the road she moved out of New York, settling into a new home in North Carolina where she could do the vocal melodies “fill-in-the-blank-syllable”-style. Jordan had never developed a record like that before, knowing every guitar solo without knowing the identity of the project itself. And it took her a year to finish the lyrics. She even missed seeing her family on Christmas because she locked herself away to Frankenstein Ricochet together, building a world at her own pace, attacking melodies like a scientist, and trying really hard to not write about love too much. “It’s in there still. I can’t really help it.” The closing track “Reverie” confirms this.
Ricochet is like an early-2000s CD mix packed with songs that feature glimpses of Smashing Pumpkins, Bush, Michelle Branch, Goo Goo Dolls, Sunny Day Real Estate, and Coldplay. Jordan isn’t abandoning her SiriusXM Lithium-style roots, but refining them. Since Lush, critics and listeners have touted her as one of the greatest living guitar players, including us here at Paste. ‘90s alt-rock phantoms like “Pristine” and “Heat Wave” alone solidified it, but “Madonna” and “Ben Franklin” gave Jordan’s form an edge of pop. On Ricochet, “Cruise” and “Butterfly” innovate and improve on her noisy, layered methods, utilizing alternative tunings and better-rounded tones. Taking a cue from 2018’s “Let’s Find an Out,” almost every lead on LP3 is played with fingers, not a pick, a style that Jordan is more comfortable in because she learned classical guitar first. But it’s Elliott Smith’s “Angeles” that’s proved most parallel to her dynamism. “There’s a bunch of stuff in that picking pattern with the fingers that’s alternating, it’s not consistent the whole time,” she says. “He’s adding in new strings in each part.” There’s a part in the “Butterfly” instrumental that sounds like Jordan is tapping, but it’s just an illusion. She’s actually muting while fingerpicking.
When Jordan started making music, she was convinced that people are only capable of writing a predetermined number of good songs, which is why bands start to suck after two albums. “I am always trying to solve that problem in my head,” she says. “What happens? Do you get too much money? Do you get too comfortable? What the fuck happens that people just can’t continuously make good music?” She’s scared of running out of ideas, worrying that there’s only so many intervals or melodies or note pairings that she’ll like enough to actually put out. And the emotional and physical toll of being a touring, working musician in her mid-twenties isn’t lost on Jordan, but that feeling is dissipating now as she readies her third album at age 26: “It feels good to know that I’m still this young and I’ve figured out how I like to work.” Ricochet got made with one microphone, every guitar Jordan owns, co-producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch’s spark, and some light reinvention. The adage, Jordan says, was “don’t judge your past self.” She doesn’t listen to old Snail Mail records, thinking about them only in their live formats. “But I’m at a point where I can’t imagine fully cringing at teenage me. It’s cool to make a body of work.”
MID-VALENTINE TOUR, JORDAN took a supporting role as Tara in Jane Schoenbrun’s I Saw the TV Glow in 2024. She was a fan of Schoenbrun’s debut feature, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair, and found herself bonding with the director over Gregg Araki, whose 1997 flick Nowhere became a huge influence on “My Maker” and the fittingly-titled “Nowhere.” It wasn’t just that Araki convinced Slowdive to write a song for his film, but that his environments became vessels for such momentous soundtracks. Araki, Jordan says, is great at “connecting dots,” and you feel the unity between sound and substance in his art. Her approach to the Ricochet lyrics rings similarly. “The songs already had a mood in them, because I gave them a mood as I was writing them. And I was like, ‘I know that it can’t be nihilist. I want to sing about the afterlife but I have to make this sound a little bit hopeful.’” Laura Gilpin’s “The Two-headed Calf,” a nine-line poem lamenting death and the value of life, also bled into Jordan’s psyche while writing “Nowhere,” in her lines “Damn, the sky’s so clear tonight, like a hot bath waiting on the other side, just begging me to slip beneath.”
Jordan has also cited David Berman’s Actual Air and Frank O’Hara’s Lunch Poems as an influence on her writing. Just as O’Hara wrote thoughtfully and specifically about the people in his life, there is a lot of care between Jordan and the people who populate around her in her songs. “Nowhere” is a great example of that, just as “Ben Franklin” was five years ago. “How do you approach being kind while also being fair in your lyrics?” I ask her. It’s hard, she responds, because a lot of Ricochet, especially “Dead End,” is her talking to herself as a child. “But that doesn’t mean that it didn’t cause some conflict, where someone was like, ‘Is that me?’” Jordan doesn’t see herself as very brave, nor very comfortable writing about other people or appearing unseemly in her art. “I can’t write anything sexual because I think about my parents reading it. Like, that can’t happen. I don’t ever say anything about my family. There’s just certain things I can’t cross the line about yet.” But she’s balanced it before. Valentine was a message she wanted someone to hear. People’s perceptions aren’t as heavy on the mind this time around.
But Jordan recognizes the prejudice against women in music. She knows that, if she writes anything about herself, she’s going to take shit for it. “You can be a male singer-songwriter writing about being pathetic and it’s different,” she elaborates. “Every Snail Mail song gets the full treatment. It makes it hard, because there’s so many songwriters who don’t really get asked to fully explain themselves. I don’t mind, because I have an explanation ready, but, sometimes, I just want to say something that I don’t want to say out loud.” She credits the band Momma, whose bassist is Aron Kobayashi Ritch and whose singer and guitarist Etta Friedman is Jordan’s partner, for writing “really daring shit.” “And there’s people in their lives seeing that,” she continues. “I look at them as really brave writers. I think I can be brave in some ways, but I really worry about affecting other people.” Jordan has thousands of stories to tell, many of them insane. She wants to write an autobiography but has one crucial pre-requisite for it: “Some people need to pass away first.”
Ricochet features a lot of anti-music industry sentiments, in an effort made by Jordan to be transparent about the inner-workings of the business (“The suit is just another grifter with a card,” she declares on “Butterfly”). “The longer I’ve been doing this, I’m like, you really have to fucking lay yourself out on the line to try to help other people,” she admits. “It really is not always the best choice for you.” Much like how Hayley Williams, who similarly got a record deal as a teenager then became a mentor to younger artists stuck in bad label contracts, Jordan is keen on pulling back the curtain—not on her life, but on her living.
Even if Jordan isn’t filling Snail Mail records with sex or family trauma, she’s still a courageous writer. Her stay in rehab wasn’t a defining part of Valentine, but she mentioned it in “Ben Franklin” (“Post rehab, I’ve been feeling so small / I miss your attention, I wish I could call”). She went because she had “something insanely awful happen in my life, and I was needing intervention.” When “Ben Franklin” dropped in October 2021, everybody tried to figure out which hard drug she was on, which was, by my memory, a gnarly and unkind thing to witness even as a startup music critic. Rehab itself, she says, was almost as traumatizing as the response to the song. “I felt I’d be remiss to not mention it. But then again, I hate being in a line of fire for people. They don’t like something about the show, like, ‘Well isn’t she on drugs?’ It’s like, no. But, also, none of your fucking business.” Jordan doesn’t even bring a cup on stage anymore, even though some of her favorite artists are guys who get really fucked up on stage—the male-versus-female songwriter divide strikes once more. “I don’t even want to talk about where my insecurities lie with vulnerable stuff, because it seems like a lot of it just becomes fodder for people to be like, ‘Oh, that’s what’s wrong with her?’”
Ricochet is about being “situationally jaded,” as Jordan frames it. Even if nihilism is somebody’s natural state, she believes they should work their way out of it. That’s why she’s singing about how there’s no God but we all need to be good people on Ricochet: “Either you carry yourself in the world in a way that you’re proud of, or you don’t.” She spends a lot of time alone, willingly. That’s why she bought a house in “Shitfuck, Nowhere” (smalltown North Carolina to the layman) and got into pottery, cooking, tie-dyeing, and jewelry-making. On our Zoom call, while her dog barks briefly off-screen, she fidgets with some kind of craft in-between answers. After treatment and surgery, Jordan spent a lot of time figuring out who she is, who she wants to be, and what her morals are, asking herself over and over: How do I want to live this little life I have? “That all makes me sound way more righteous than I ever want to be,” she laughs, nodding her head. “But being a good person is the only thing we have.” Jordan, comfortable in her own smallness, frames it well on Ricochet: “Above us, it’s just sky.” There’s work to do down here, too.
Matt Mitchell is the editor of Paste. They live in Los Angeles.
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