MAIL ORDER
“It means independent, you know?” Lindsey Jordan has some thoughts on the current state of indie music. In the essay that accompanies 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, homogeneous pop composed mostly by ghost writers”. And if you read that with a sharp intake of breath and a wince, you’re not alone.
“It’s just so strange to me that we’re at a time of ghost writers and shit,” says Jordan via Zoom from her cosy New York apartment, guitars balanced on stands in the space between the couch and the fridge. Her music might have a weary old-soul quality to it but Jordan is a bubbly and gregarious interviewee, her hands gesturing animatedly throughout.
“With the least shade intended possible,” she continues, “I just take a lot of pride in the fact that I don’t have any help. I feel like it’s part of the genre. It’s not my place to say what people should and shouldn’t do. 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. I think it’s such a genre-defining difference, because it’s the hardest part.
“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?
