Snail Mail on existential angst, artistic growth, and new album 'Ricochet' • Interview • DIY Magazine

There have been umpteen reasons to feel the clutches of existential dread as of late, be it a passing glance at the news, the climate crisis, or the fact that time feels like it’s moving exponentially faster (we’re closer to 2050 than we are to the release of the first Shrek film). Snail Mail has definitely felt that dread: “I’m terrified of getting old,” she sighs. “I’m terrified of ageing - I’m just terrified of being alive!”

Lindsey Jordan joins our Zoom call from New York, where she’s in the home run of a busy press week promoting third album ‘Ricochet’. “It’s different now than last time I was doing all this,” she says, of her schedule. “It’s more video heavy, in an intense way. The camera is always there. I swear everything used to [just] be print.”

The last time she was “doing all this” was in 2021, for her second album ‘Valentine’. That (literally) heart-on-sleeve account of love and heartbreak came wrapped up in a kitsch, pastel-drenched aesthetic, and reasserted her reputation as an indie rock heavyweight built by the runaway success of 2018 debut, ‘Lush’.

While those records were “outpourings of pain and agony and teenage emotion”, this time around Lindsey opted to lay off “the love stuff” as much as she could (“not entirely - impossible to do entirely”). Instead, ‘Ricochet’ zooms out to take existentialism as its central preoccupation. She cites Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 film Synecdoche, New York as her inspiration of sorts, in that watching it for the first time five years ago activated a pretty debilitating stream of intrusive thoughts about death and dying - understandable; it’s not exactly an optimistic take on the human condition after all. “I’d be out with a friend, and in my head be like, ‘damn, I don’t want to have to mourn you; that’s gonna be so nasty’,” she recalls. “It was quality-of-life destroying.”

The headspace Lindsey was writing from is evident from the outset: “I know you’ll miss me when I’m gone,” she sings on opener ‘Tractor Beam’, where sunny guitars disguise gloomier lyrics. On the grungier ‘Hell’, she’s pleading with the “bouncer in the sky” to let her into an imagined afterlife, while ‘Nowhere’ - which takes inspiration from Laura Gilpin’s 1977 poem The Two-Headed Calf - yearns for escapism. But, despite her confessed terror vis à vis being alive, the record reaches a far more peaceful conclusion. “What if nothing matters?” she frets on ‘My Maker’. By the penultimate title track, she seems to have found an answer: “If nothing matters / We can do whatever we want”.

“I think years of it really severely freaking me out has rounded my brain about it a little bit,” she nods. “By the time I was ready to turn everything into a lyric, I was definitely like, ‘okay, this feels like a waste of my youth, the amount of time that I’ve been worrying about this. When I’m old I’m gonna be really mad at myself about this’.”

“I tried to be really intentional about what kind of writer I wanted to be, what I wanted to say.”

Although ‘Ricochet’ allowed her to process her fears and reach a verdict far less depressing than Kaufman’s, creating the album wasn’t necessarily a cathartic experience. Where ‘Lush’ and ‘Valentine’ were the result of inward-looking self-expression, allowing Lindsey to adopt a “this is me, deal with it” attitude, the sheer scale of her subject matter this time around gave her pause

“I tried to be really intentional about what kind of writer I wanted to be, what I wanted to say,” she says. “I was really worried about talking about something that everybody has an opinion on. I’m not a sage religious expert. I’m not a science expert. I don’t have a particularly unique point of view here.”

That sought-after moment did emerge after writing the album, though, via the filming of a Coldplay-inspired, one-take video for ‘My Maker’ in which she rides in a hot air balloon. “I was doing my research and I was like, ‘it’s kind of crazy nobody’s done this; I gotta jump on this’,” she recalls, admitting that this video idea was what drove her to pick the song to be a single. “Now I know why people don’t do it: it’s really, really, really hard.”

After a week of getting up at four in the morning to learn that the slightest gust of wind had cancelled yet another attempted flight, they finally got the shot, which culminates in Lindsey gazing over a vast expanse of Arizona stretching out below her. “There’s something really whimsical and freeing about it,” she grins. “I thought it would be cool to be close to the heavens, and feel the ‘I’m so small in this big universe’ feeling.”

While her social media mentions consist mostly of those celebrating the ‘Snail Mail renaissance’, a somewhat more surprising community has formed among those with a more specific association: the artist they used to listen to in their car while having a cry on their lunch break. “That’s really funny,” Lindsey grins, recalling a similar comment made in a recent meeting, where someone characterised her music as ‘something [people] liked in college’. “Hopefully those people are feeling better. I totally get it; that’s what it’s for.”

“[‘Ricochet’] feels almost like my first record of knowing what to do.”

Ricochet’ not only finds Lindsey exploring new themes in her songwriting, but, five years on from ‘Valentine’, she’s also learned how she prefers to write: she worked on all the songs for ‘Ricochet’ simultaneously, stitching instrumental sections together before figuring out any lyrics. It marked a departure from her previous method of focusing on them each one by one - something that often spiralled into “intensely staring at something for six months and thinking, ‘I actually can’t even tell if it’s good or not anymore’.”

“It was so devastating, the way I was doing it before. I knew that there had to be a better way,” she says. “I definitely feel like I’m learning how my brain works better as I do this.”

Alongside a more sustainable method of writing, “yet another piece of the puzzle” was leaving her old New York apartment behind. Although she originally moved to the Big Apple to be near her friends, her relentless touring schedule meant that it became more of an exercise in “throwing rent money into the void” for a place she was very rarely in, and, when Covid did land her back there for an extended period, she learned the city was not for her. “I felt watched,” she remembers. “I was like, ‘people can hear me’. I felt really insecure about making noise.”

She’s now based in North Carolina, where the space, quiet and lack of distractions have proved far more favourable for her creative output. “[‘Ricochet’] feels almost like my first record of knowing what to do,” she says, reflecting on how the past few years shaped the project. “Every single step of it is super by my design, and thinking, ‘I’m pretty sure if I just flip it and do it this way it’s gonna be way more enjoyable’.”

It’s a common sentiment; each year bringing new, sometimes groundbreaking wisdom, discounting everything the version of you from twelve months ago had known to be true. It goes some way to alleviating those fears about ageing, as did a “forever ago” conversation Lindsey had with an older friend. “Your thirties are dope because you’ve got a lot closer to learning how you’re supposed to live, and how to take care of your body and self’,” she remembers them telling her. “That genuinely keeps me going. I’m like, ‘okay, my thirties are about to be badass!’”

While this decade has naturally been a process of self-discovery - and becoming less freaked out by the wider workings of the universe - something that’s remained a constant in Lindsey’s career has been her determination not to fall for the sheen of celebrity. She takes aim at the fickleness of the industry and its social scene throughout ‘Ricochet’, but most explicitly on its closing track ‘Reverie’. “Met a guy so far up his own ass / I gotta laugh to keep from crying,” she laments, before later concluding that “All my heroes are nothing more than socialites”.

“One thing my adulthood has taught me, that I didn’t really care about as a teenager, is that I really can’t walk through the world in a way that I’m not proud of,” she says. “Maybe there won’t be a consequence, and you will just live your life and be really rich and famous and successful - it’s really hard to not be jaded when you have opinions about anything, and humanity, and you’re around the monster factory all the time.”

Putting all of her frustrations onto the album wasn’t always easy, and often felt strange (a line on ‘Butterfly’ where she quips that “the suit is just another grifter with a card” was interesting to play to, ahem, the suits) but it’s part and parcel of the album’s thesis. There’s no way of knowing what comes next. Maybe something; maybe nothing. Maybe that’s terrifying. But you need to be able to live with yourself along the way.”

‘Ricochet’ is out now via Matador.

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