She added, “I wish we were.” (To be fair, she said, she isn’t writing punk songs-though she may do so “one day.”) As for the more immediate future, the album’s release will bring along a two-month-long tour with bands like Belle and Sebastian, that will end with Jordan finally moving out of her parents’ house-and presumably staying as far away as she can from “nasty-a–, roach-infested New York,” which, being claustrophobic, she didn’t take too kindly to while finalizing the record. “We definitely aren’t a punk band,” Jordan sighed.
She also has no illusions about how doing so will pretty much automatically disqualify Snail Mail from the DIY punk scene that its members grew up in, even though each of them still personally upholds its political, accepting values. “Sorry”-albeit a sarcastic one-was also Jordan’s response when Pitchfork published a video of the band earlier this year, prompting many to angrily ask, “Why is she so young?” Still, Jordan would take astonished “She’s 12, and she’s a girl!” over “Teenage boys being like, You’re hot” any day-the type of reactions she knows will stick around even as the band grows more established and into the spotlight. “I was like, Uh, ‘cause I’m gay, and she was like, Oh, sorry,” Jordan recalled with a laugh.) On Christmas one year, her mom asked her why she wouldn’t marry her bandmate, Alex. (For the record, everyone has always been “chill” about her sexuality, and the only people she felt she officially had to come out to were her parents. “I didn’t really intend to make it a message or anything, but it’s nice to be able to write about someone and say ‘her’ or ‘she’ and not be worried about what my friends or family would think,” she continued. “I just want to make sure everything is as real and genuine for me as possible,” she said, pointing out that Lush is “definitely more gay” than Habit, which she wrote before she was out. It hasn’t escaped Jordan that she could have been more prolific in order to capitalize on the hype she simply hasn’t wanted to.
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Habit was originally “100 percent just not intended for anyone to hear,” and so much like “just writing in a diary” that Jordan found herself thinking, “Wow, if this ever got out, I’d be f-ed.” Essentially, she did it for herself, which is why she considers the EP to be “a personal milestone in pretty much every aspect”-fittingly enough for a prequel to Lush, which she considers to be “another real marker of maturity.” That’s true not just in terms of its focus on guitar work, but also through processing all of the pressure and “really weird situations” that writing Habit has led her to, including figuring out how to “separate all the weird hype and press from the person I am when I’m just alone in my room, writing, reflecting, by myself, with a guitar.” Lush is also quite personal, but in a different way. They’d created such a profitable stir that the band had to hire “a whole bunch of people” because Jordan simply couldn’t keep up with her email anymore.įinally, a couple of months later, in May 2017, after missing “a crazy, f-ed-up amount of school days, like 50 or something in just my senior year,” Jordan somehow graduated-an accomplishment that pales in comparison to the rest of that year, which saw Snail Mail release their first-ever music video gain the approval of Pitchfork, which declared Jordan “the wisest teenage indie rocker we know” tour with acts as big as Girlpool, Waxahatchee, and Beach Fossils book a Tiny Desk concert with NPR lead The New York Times’ package “proving” that women are making the best rock music today and, finally, sign with Matador Records, which “went into the abyss and back” with Jordan to make sure Snail Mail’s upcoming album would be “completely perfect.”
Sure, Jordan got thrown out of her own show for drinking, which has become something of a tradition for the band-”they always let us back in to play, but then they make us get out before or after,” she said with a laugh-but it was also most definitely a business endeavor. Predictably enough, by Jordan’s junior year, things were starting to get out of hand: She was spending more and more time in the principal’s office pleading for a few weeks off in order to, say, make Snail Mail’s debut at South by Southwest.