And then I need a few months to come back to it. I need to spend a few months on it, religiously, all night, no sleep. And then I decided that I wanted to put more time and work and revision in it. Right after we finished Habit, I had written “Pristine.” It was maybe gonna be a Habit B-side. What was going on in your life when you were writing it? Lush is heavy, a little sad, and really romantic.
It’s this pseudo satire comedy about all of these old people who are living in a retirement home together and waiting to die. Now I’m reading this book called Ending Up. It’s really good - it made me cry, like, every page. I just finished The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, which is this classic lesbian novel from 1928. You don’t have to be a big personality for everyone all the time. Turn myself off in the car and at the hotel. I feel one hundred percent different than the last time I was at SXSW. So I just kind of keep my head down and care a lot about the songs. It’s real easy to get wrapped up in it and go down evil paths.
It’s so disheartening to be surrounded by things that have nothing to do with your art. There’s sketchballs everywhere in the music industry world. Last time we spoke you told me about how the sudden attention from the industry was disorienting, how you put a lot of pressure on yourself and weren’t sure who to trust. It got to a point where I was like, I would feel like a shitty rock fan if I didn’t. I love Iceage and Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn. It feels like everyone who owns that label, or works on it, are just super interested in things that will last. I don’t feel like there are any bands on there that are trendy or riding out a hype cycle.
They are just such rock revivalists, and they have a really cool sense of what is genuinely good right now. As much as teenhood can feel like an emotional prison, and heartbreak like the end of the world, Jordan seems to be finding a way to muscle through it all.I just had so much respect for them. She seems to sense it, too: Her vocals are strong and determined, her guitar riffs anthemic. Of course, expressing oneself so candidly without fear of ridicule can be daunting, especially for young women, so even as Jordan is caught up in the bruisings of first love, her assertiveness is a triumph in itself. “I know myself and I’ll never love anyone else,” she sings frankly. She knows there’s more out there for her, but is still snared in unrequited love. Lyrically, Jordan’s quite the pragmatist-she doesn’t water down her emotions, nor does she overblow them. “It just feels like the same party every weekend, doesn’t it?” she muses on “Pristine,” the lead single from her forthcoming debut album, Lush. The visuals were an unexpected complement to Jordan’s music-as Snail Mail, she writes songs that combat the acute smallness of suburban youth, filling in empty space with punk-inflected guitar and imagining vantages from which everything feels bigger and more beautiful. Earlier this year, Lindsey Jordan performed songs from her 2016 EP, Habit, at a venue in Philadelphia behind her, a projected video cycled through images of mountain vistas and underwater caves.