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She might have been short of relatable subject matter then, but the long months on the road all over the world gave her the chance to hone other aspects of her craft. I was like, ‘I don’t wanna do that’, but that was all I had experienced for several years – not love, not heartbreak, nothing literally just tour! I don’t want to be up here, and my audience is looking up, you know? I want to be level with the people that I’m making music for.” “I didn’t want to write the second record about tour,” she explains “Because it’s just not relatable to anyone but me and my bandmates and other people on tour! I think it’s like, a thing, y’know? You have success on your first album, then the second one is about tour. But Jordan had other priorities – while her friends back home were finishing high-school and heading off to college, Snail Mail was relentlessly touring, giving her a limited amount of subject matter from which to pull new material. Within no time the word “prodigy” was being chucked around, and the album would make year-end lists in Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and everything in between.Īnd then there was radio silence, asides from recording a version of Pristine in ‘Simlish’ for the videogame The Sims 4, Jordan hasn’t put out any new music since 2018 – quite a thing in an industry that normally expects a regular drip-feed of new singles to populate playlists and keep a young artist in the zeitgeist. Still just 22 years old, Ellicott City, Maryland native Jordan was barely 17 when her EP Habit catapulted her into the indie-rock big time, a deal with Matador quickly followed and her debut album, Lush followed two years later. “It feels crazy to me, to be on an independent label or something if you’re just performing the songs for an indie crowd – what, you’re like a performer, but not a writer, not an artist? I don’t know, it just feels like why even take the job if you don’t want to do half? If you call yourself a singer-songwriter, you might as well be a singer and a songwriter, you know? I take a lot of pride in the songwriting element of it, and that’s why I like to do it.” I think it’s such a genre-defining difference, because it’s the hardest part. I just think that, if you’re gonna qualify it as indie, it should almost be a separate category – people that write their songs and people that don’t. It’s not my place to say what people should and shouldn’t do. “I just take a lot of pride in the fact that I don’t have any help. “With the least shade intended possible,” she continues. Her music might have a weary old soul quality to it, but she’s a bubbly and gregarious interviewee, her hands gesturing animatedly as she gets caught up in her point. “It’s just so strange to me that we’re at a time of ghost writers and shit,” Jordan explains via Zoom from her cosy New York apartment, guitars precariously balanced on stands in the space between the couch and the fridge. READ MORE: “We were known because we didn’t have choruses, now I enjoy that”: The War On Drugs Adam Granduciel embraces pop on I Don’t Live Here Anymore.And if you read that with a sharp intake of breath and a wince, you’re not alone. In the essay that accompanies the release of Snail Mail’s long-awaited second album, Valentine, Jordan’s friend, the artist Katie Crutchfield (aka Waxahatchee) is at pains to point out that every one of the album’s 10 songs was written by her alone, “in an era in which ‘indie’ music has been reduced to gentle, homogenous pop composed mostly by ghost writers”. “It means independent, you know?” Lindsey Jordan has some thoughts on the current state of indie music.