The Prying Eyes Of Snail Mail's Valentine

By Max Freedman


It’s easy to forget that Lindsey Jordan, the frontperson of esteemed Baltimore indie-rock musical group Snail Mail, was literally a teenager while in her breakout moment – up until she reminds you in the most subtly brutal way. “I was really overwhelmed by a lot of decisions that I had to make,” she tells MTV News about the months surrounding the release of her career-making debut album, 2018’s Lush, “and I was leaving high school.” The contrast is striking: Being a musician who tours, does press, maintains a steady social media presence, and hires an enormous team requires more than a few big choices that non-musicians may not understand. Jordan had to create those choices right as she legally became an adult. Several of the songs on her Lush follow-up, Valentine, boast flashes of this tension between a younger, more innocent Jordan and one suddenly thrust into the spotlight.


If Jordan, right now 22, worked through teenage romances nearly in real time on Lush, then on Valentine, she mourns relationships well in the past, with something eerie newly in the mix. These post-breakup reflections come with glimpses into how her public exposure likewise affected her romantic partners. It’s a perspective rarely seen in pop music, and Jordan says that “it just comes out once I'm talking about [these] relationship[s].” In her memories of former loves, the eroded privacy barrier that she dealt with creeps in without permission.


This damaged privacy barrier, Jordan surmises, is inevitable any time music like hers reaches a wide audience. Lush did, landing on several critics’ 2018 year-end lists and earning her festival slots at Firefly and Primavera Sound, not to say tour dates alongside Alvvays, Interpol, and Yo La Tengo. “Making emotionally susceptible music makes people feel connected [to you] in a way that’s really intense,” she says. She also felt that the uniquely 21st-century “direct line of communication” that the world wide web sets up between musicians and fans exacerbated this intensity. Social media felt like a “weird bubble where you don't have to be a usual person, because there really are Instagram people that will love you no matter what. … Being in a feedback loop isn't good for your mental health.”


This statement is as close as she comes to a broadly applicable hot take that would make headlines; only a couple of years into her twenties, Jordan is already realizing that her actual lived perspectives might be more valuable to share. That’s why she pivots back to the initial person to wrap up a thought about social media: “I didn't need any more validation, and I didn't need to be able to see any of the mean stuff.”


Valentine is likewise rather autobiographical, and while in it, fragments of the constant commentary and watchful eyes of fans pop up as she revisits past relationships. The album evokes how, any time you're going through an extended period of truly awful emotions, you could think you’re solely accountable for your ailing, yet once it’s all in the past, you could visualize the external roots of your trauma with glaring clarity. It all comes with mid-tempo music that’s among Jordan’s moodiest and — dare it be mentioned — most lush to date, with string sections and Jordan more frequently singing in raspier tones. In growing out of her teenage years, she’s sandpapered her voice’s roughest edges and left in back of a more mature, nuanced register and range.


On Valentine’s title track, she asks a partner in a I-just-woke-up voice, “Those parasitic cameras, don’t they stop to stare at you?” Around them, synths gleam and drums murmur in a Twin-Peaks-meets-chillwave manner that conjures intermingled bliss, anxiety, and trauma. For the rest of the song, though, she focuses on her signature unrequited love. On “Forever (Sailing),” she sings, “Don’t let ’em visualize, we don’t owe it to nobody,” on a song otherwise about losing an old flame to someone else. She rarely leaves her gravelly low register,  cycling through her woes over a dirge of guitars and mellotron-like synths. As she reminisces on this relationship, that ever-pervasive crumbled privacy barrier comes scything in, disrupting meaningful moments for both partners.


“The dynamic,” Jordan says, is “one where neither person is set up for privacy.” The way it juts into her lyrics almost without permission, on an album she describes as primarily about “love and loss and stuff like that,” reflects how inescapable her public exposure felt. Its semi-accidental presence on Valentine might also stem from how few paths she had to vent about it. She did have Waxahatchee’s Katie Crutchfield (“my closest friend, probably”) actively “working through a lot of this stuff with me.” (Crutchfield provides backing vocals on the synthy, bassy highlight “Ben Franklin,” the only Valentine track on which Jordan mentions her 45-day stint in a treatment facility.) Although simultaneously, her high school companions were going through “so much that...I haven't, just in a real-life context.” @They could have been enjoying the nearly responsibility-free time between high school and college, while Jordan was “doing this job that's unique because you're getting good at one skill set, and that skill set is separate from everything in the real world.” The growing gap between herself and her peers made her ascendance and acclaim feel deeply isolating.


That loneliness pervades Valentine. Even the softest, slowest songs on Lush felt like they were being played to an audience, nevertheless on Valentine’s “c. Et. Al.” And “Mia,” you could envision Jordan convening with only several other people in a little, enclosed space. The strings on the latter are especially stirring, and they’re among Jordan’s most exhilarating new ideas. She brought them to the table with full support from Valentine co-producer Brad Cook, a Bon Iver and Waxahatchee affiliate who co-produced another pivotal 2021 indie-rock release, Indigo de Souza’s Any Shape You Take. Cook, Jordan says, was “really cool about letting me take the reins as a co-producer and left a lot of things to me to decide.” Every new musical instrument they added with each other was completely intended to “emphasize what’s already there. … Having a string crescendo [or] a certain tone on a synth bring[s] residence the message.” So, also, does the amazing breadth of her voice’s “gentle moments, not-gentle moments, and intimate moments.”


These choices pay off tremendously on “Glory,” where cello swells in the verses reinforce the guitars’ melancholy. They vanish in the chorus, however the solemn tone they’ve set assists the Jordan’s low-register hums of “You owe me / You own me” come off plainly defeated rather than irritated, and the way she makes the simple words “owe” and “own” sound nearly indistinct paint a clear picture of her head-swirling emotional state. On the chorus of “Headlock,” pianos — mostly unheard of on previous Snail Mail tracks — imbue the chorus with a twinkling, resigned nostalgia that makes the honest lines “Man enough to be able to see this through / Man, I’m nothing without you” feel infinitely more devastating.


“Is it one more thing I won’t get to?” Jordan asks toward the track’s end. Though she’s ostensibly talking about the romance defining the song, it’s tempting to read a gutting double-meaning. As a breakout musician dealing with all of the attendant exposure, more and more several ordinary experiences felt out of reach, if not deeply meaningful, to her as she went through circumstances entirely foreign to the people in her life. That’s the duality of Valentine, though that fading privacy barrier is still not the main point. If it were, she presumably wouldn’t be releasing another album and diving back inside the same public exposure underlying these songs. If anything, Valentine has helped her come to terms with it all. “It abandoned me feeling pretty exposed and confused,” she says, “but ultimately, I think it could've been a lot worse.”