Brennan Wedl is a Minnesota-raised, Nashville-based songwriter; Lindsey Jordan is the guitarist and singer-songwriter who fronts Snail Mail. Brennan’s self-titled record (produced by Katie Crutchfield and Brad Cook) came out this summer on ANTI-. Lindsey features on the tracks “Tasmanian Devil” and “Pretty Little Fantasy,” so to celebrate the release, the two took some time off from their tour earlier this month to sit down and catch up about the making of the record, and much more.
— Annie Fell, Editor-in-chief, Talkhouse Music
Brennan Wedl: So, LJ — mind if I call you that?
Lindsey Jordan: Sure. That's a classic nickname for me.
Brennan: We're doing this artist-on-artist smack-down today.
Lindsey: Artist versus artist.
Brennan: They pair us up—
Lindsey: And we fight to the death.
Brennan: Should we talk about some music?
Lindsey: Let's do it.
Brennan: Do you like Rush?
Lindsey: You know what? No. Are you a Rush-head?
Brennan: I love Rush.
Lindsey: That's cool. I wasn't expecting that from you.
Brennan: I saw them play live when I was 16. My dad took me, it was at the Xcel Energy Center in Saint Paul, and Rush had rotisserie chicken ovens on the stage.
Lindsey: Oh, my god. Were they eating from them?
Brennan: No, they had some guy dressed up as a chef coming to get them throughout the set. It didn't smell like it — maybe if we were in a more intimate setting, it would have been more… rotisserie. But that just was seared into my memory.
Lindsey: What do you think that was? Like, what vibe is that?
Brennan: Maybe like a goofy stage designer?
Lindsey: I like things that take me outside of my expectations for what these things can be. Like if you have a crazy amount of money to spend, it's like, “Should we have a guy flipping rotisseries around?” Do you think the rotisseries were real?
Brennan: I want to think they're real. But that would be a lot of money, lot of chicken.
Lindsey: A lot of waste.
Brennan: Maybe they just were eating rotos every night.
Lindsey: I mean, that's what we do. We have rotisserie chicken on our rider. We did that on the last tour and learned about it from, I'm pretty sure, Angel Du$t. It's a hardcore guy thing to be like “Protein…” I was like, “That's an amazing idea.” And ever since we started bringing rotisserie chickens on the road, it honestly is kind of a lifesaver. I'll have a whole day in a food desert type place, just take a big handful of rotisserie chicken before the show, and it evens me out.
Brennan: That is good for the spirit, I think.
Lindsey: I learned from getting vocal surgery and having a vocal coach that was hella serious, physical therapy style — she was above and beyond with the singing secrets, and she was always like, “Protein before you play.” Even if you have nuts on the side of the stage, it’s really good for keeping you strong and centered. And then she was also like, “Not a lot of spices or flavors.” So rotisserie chicken feels perfect to me. It's bland. But I'm not sure if I really fully understand why [you shouldn’t have spices or flavors]. Maybe it's an acid reflux thing, or something that would irritate your stomach… But it does feel like on tour, plain protein is a huge lifesaver. Peanut butter for me — ooh.
Brennan: Uncrustables are a good grab and go… What constitutes a bad show for you?
Lindsey: I'm really harsh on myself. I think there's a level to that that's good. But it's an endless thing for me where I can totally tell you if I'm happy with the show. It's like a night and day thing. Basically for me, if I feel like I don’t have enough sound clues in my monitors — like if I'm having a night where I'm not hearing the drums as clearly as I'd like to in my ears, then I feel like I played an off rhythm type of show. Another thing that constitutes as a bad show to me — and I had this yesterday — I forgot to take my beta blocker and then my voice gets really shaky in the beginning and it sometimes never gets solid. It just shakes the whole time. That, to me, is a bad show. But I think a truly bad show would be if you can't fake it being a good show to people. What about you? What's a bad show to you?
Brennan: Sometimes my hands will shake. I hate that.
Lindsey: Same.
Brennan: I can control the voice. And if the voice isn't where I want it to be, I can kind of do sing-talking.
Lindsey: You're speaking my language right now.
Brennan: If I do a weird banter moment, it's hard to recover sometimes. And then during the songs, I'll be like, Oh, god, I can't believe it!
Lindsey: Totally. But then again, sometimes people just aren't fucking ready for truly awesome banter. Maybe it landed weird. But, I don't know, less than ever crowds are kind of… It feels less like they're feeding into trying to make me feel good about myself. [Laughs.] You know what I mean? Like, people aren't just laughing just because I say something anymore.
Brennan: They make you work for it.
Lindsey: It’s a sign of the times. It's way more like, “Entertain me.” It's not, “Let me see you get up there and do your thing.”
Brennan: There was kind of a peanut gallery from the audience last night in Charlotte, North Carolina. For both Soccer Mommy and Snail Mail, people were like, “You're amazing! Play every song!”
Lindsey: I love that. I need it.
Brennan: I heard some people barking.
Lindsey: Really? I was really happy to hear a few catcalls last night — it's been a while for me, and I actually really needed that. Sometimes I really base my self-worth on how much catcalling I'm getting. I'm like, Wow, I must be looking unhealthy or something… I don't know, I base a good amount of self-worth on if people are barking or not. [Laughs.]
Brennan: [Laughs.] Alright, LJ, let me ask you: Have you seen any ghosts?
Lindsey: Oh, my god. My major ghost situation that I really stand by, like, that's actually pretty weird: in 2019, I was staying in a hotel with this girl that I was hooking up with before I was gonna go to rehab. I didn't know this girl that well, but we shared this experience. Basically we were in this weird hotel, it was under a lot of construction, and we were in bed and it was, like, 1 AM. We both sat up and it sounded like somebody was right at the edge of the bed, dragging chains across the wooden floor. We both were so scared that she was like, “Do you want to look?” And I was like, “I don't wanna look. Do you wanna look?” “No.” I was shaking. And then when I was at rehab, I woke up in the middle of the night and — I have to believe it was in the middle of a lucid dream or something, but I felt like I was completely awake — I sat up and my pillow was on my lap and it got pulled all the way off the bed and all the way across the floor. I screamed really loud and my roommate woke up, and all of that was in real life.
Brennan: Did you see it being dragged?
Lindsey: Yeah! It's really confusing… But what about you? Have you spent some time with ghosts?
Brennan: You know, I have. I have two defining stories. As a kid, I slept with the door open, and when I was on my left side I could look down the dark stairs — little cursed to choose to do that every night — and I woke up one night and I saw this glowing bright figure in the doorway. I was so scared. I put the covers over my head and I was praying the Hail Mary and I was like, “I don't want this!” And then it wasn't there.
Fast forward to college: I was stoned on pot.
Lindsey: Yes.
Brennan: And I don't want that to interfere with the validity of this tale.
Lindsey: No, no. I believe you through any weed story, bro.
Brennan: Thank you, I really appreciate that. So, I was stoned on pot in a basement in Boston. It was a bunch of young folks that lived in this basement apartment, so not the coziest vibes. But I was cozy, playing synths, doing laundry… I look to the door — I was alone in the basement — and there's this electric, staticky, pointy, freaky ass figure in the doorway. I had this moment where I was like, Oh, god, I just saw a ghost. That's def a ghost. Then I look back and it's not there. I went up to the person that lived in that room, shaking like a leaf, and he was like, “Did you see the thing in my doorway?”
Lindsey: Fuck! Wait, that's actually kind of incredible that you got to see it. That's a privilege.
Brennan: Yeah, a few people saw it. The consensus was it was feeding off of everybody's depression.
Lindsey: Awesome. That actually sounds like it would really help
Brennan: Totally… not!
Lindsey: Yeah, that's actually really scary.
Brennan: It was a spooktacular Boston night.
Lindsey: When did you take your album cover? It's really cool.
Brennan: Thank you, dude. It was taken in January. My friend Blaire Beemer and I were just wanting to do photos kind of for the hell of it, just to mess around, do fashion. They had this leaf blower and they were blowing it at me, and they would also come by and lift up my scarf.
Lindsey: Yeah, it's got some motion in it.
Brennan: There's some locomotion in it. It was fun. [The photo on the cover] was kind of a blooper moment — I was doing the scream in real life, like shrieking and then laughing after, like, “Ah, that's stupid, silly!”
Lindsey: That's when the magic happens.
Brennan: That's right. We can't censor the shriek. Tell me about your album cover.
Lindsey: I was originally gonna have Etta [Friedman] paint a two-headed sheep or lamb.
Brennan: I love that you had that motif, by the way, throughout. And then you did that video where you were making the two-headed [lamb] — that was awesome.
Lindsey: Thank you. I've gotten a lot better at sewing since then. But that was the idea, and then my friend Elsie [Richter], as a gift for my birthday, [gave me] this two-headed lamb figure. We were trying to make that the cover, take a cool photo of it and scan it and process it in the [same] way that we ended up actually doing the one that we chose, with a jelly pad. We print the photo out onto the jelly pad and then scrape at it so it has that grunge crunch to it. But all of the stills of the sheep came out kind of vague, and we were trying so many different ways and none of it was giving album cover to me. So we ended up using Etta’s — it was just a test that she had done to try to figure out the jelly pad process, but we kept going back to it and being like, “This looks so iconic. This looks like an album cover.” And I was already using a bunch of spiral motif type stuff, so it ended up just working. All of my records have been my face right on the front, and I was like, “I want to try something else and I'll just put my face on the back.”
But it's cool — Etta knows a lot of artists and spends a lot of time in the visual art world, and it's super inspiring for me to be around. Etta almost creative directed the visuals. Having someone that close that has that much of an eye for it, and she’s studied layout shit… She's just a boss, and probably the only reason I was willing to be like, “Let's try a visual that isn't matching the theme of all the other album covers.”
Brennan: I love that. Visuals are so vital. It takes it there.
Lindsey: I don't know how you feel about the music video process, but I find that whole visual thing fun and I really like what it does for my creative brain. But I find it obnoxiously hard and intimidating to try to match this thing that you've put your heart and soul into. There's nothing about me that's an expert in visuals.
Brennan: That's a superpower — that's the special sauce.
Lindsey: It's so cool to be able to be like, “I can put these two things together and it elevates the first thing.” But I think you can really easily mess it all up. Or, not mess it all up, but the presentation matters and some people just don't have a visual eye. It's always less fun than I remember it when I get started on music videos. It just is an uncomfortable amount of pressure to me to be like, “Yeah, let's put together this music video for $5,000 or less,” and then it's really got to match this album that I've been writing for five years.
Brennan: You did really good. One of my favorite things about Ricochet is that it is all so true to you. Like the hot air balloon video — I have never seen anything like that.
Lindsey: That was the first music video in a hot air balloon!
Brennan: What?!
Lindsey: Nobody gives a fuck, but that was the first music video in an air balloon.
Brennan: Guinness World Records should hear about this video.
Lindsey: They should. We had no budget for this video, and I made all the music videos with my friend Elsie, who has an incredible eye for visual stuff, but she hadn't done much video stuff. But she's one of my best friends who knows me really well, and she was talking to me about what she liked and disliked about some of the Snail Mail music videos over time. I was impressed by the level of boldness to say to me what she dislikes. And then as she was telling me the things that she would want to see in a Snail Mail music video, I was like, This girl really sees me and knows me. She basically was just being like, “I don't want to see a big snake like on ‘Ben Franklin’ and I don't really want to see a big theatrical thing on like ‘Valentine,’ because your essence is really what this all is. I would love to just see you doing your thing for five minutes straight in front of a video camera.” Which is not exactly what we did, but the hot air balloon is one shot.
Same with Etta doing the album cover — everybody who worked on it is somebody that really intimately knows me. And Aron [Kobayashi Ritch], the producer, is one of my best friends, and Ray [Brown] and Alex [Russell] playing on it too… It was the only time I've tried to be like, “It would be really cool if everybody involved super intimately knows me.”
Brennan: That's priceless. You can be mask off.
Lindsey: Yeah. And I feel like we see our friends in a way that's elevated, if we love and care about them. It's something I've never thought about, but having somebody who already really understands you and loves and cares about you trying to help you portray yourself is a really cool way to see yourself.
Brennan: That's magic. When artists see each other collaborate, team up, really form deep bonds, you can make something that you could never make just getting paired up randomly. Sometimes, maybe, but the feeling's just different.
Lindsey: Dude, let's talk about working with Katie [Crutchfield] and Brad [Cook]. That's friendies!
Brennan: They're so awesome. And then you came through!
Lindsey: Yeah! I was gonna say, one thing I really like about working with [Brad] is he's really good at making the environment comfortable and then capturing the actual essence of the hang in the music.
Brennan: Absolutely. We did full band in the garage, shoes off. We didn't do too many takes and I really loved that. I loved that that was the mode in which Katie and Brad work.
Lindsey: Yeah, it totally is. I was a little terrified of that being the way that I was playing the guitar, though, because I was like, “Oh, my god, wait, give me a few more tries…” I mean, I had a lot of fun with what we did. But at least as a guitar player, for me, I usually would think I would need a lot, a lot, a lot of takes to come up with something. And I do feel like the essence of that hang was captured in a way where I was like, OK, cool! I didn't think I had enough chances to make anything that was gonna make it onto the thing, so that was cool. I was happy that I could be part of it, because I love your music so much.
Brennan: I love your music, dude. We've been kind of ice skating around each other for a few years, and I'm just so happy that we can hang on this tour.
Do you have any closing remarks, thoughts, or wishes?
Lindsey: How do you feel right now with the state of the music industry?
Brennan: [Laughs.]
Lindsey: Evil question to ask at the end.
Brennan: I have hope.
Lindsey: Hm. Tell me about that.
Brennan: I think we're speeding down the highway at about 90 miles per hour in social-media-Neuralink-fucking-meltdown-brain-humanity mode, and there's a sharp left turn coming up.
Lindsey: I hope so.
Brennan: I really think that artists and listeners, for the most part, will hopefully try to foster that more themselves, versus relying on big business and algorithms. That sounds like a small scale start.
Lindsey: I think things do have to swing back. And I think almost everything right now that's making it up to the top of the algorithm is written for the algorithm, and there's no way that can age gracefully. The thing, though, that I've noticed, especially this year for some reason, that really ails me — it makes me so mad — there's so many things that are up at the top of the charts where it's big because everyone's shitting on it online. Like, the whole discourse around this artist is that you guys all hate them and it's bad and it's being pushed in our face, and I'm like, “How are we keeping it at number one?” It feels to me like more than ever, people are just happy to take the slop that's in front of them. Even though they know it's slop, they're like, “OK, well, maybe this is stupid and bad and shouldn't be here, but I'm still gonna buy the tickets.”
Brennan: Do you think it's out of curiosity?
Lindsey: No. I think that there's just too much out there and it's really hard for people to find anything anymore. I even feel that way. I have such a horrible idea of what even is getting released nowadays because my fucking feed is so full of, like, Sombr. I'm like, “Why do I know so much about this?” I think people just have a hard time finding things and aren't really thinking for themselves. Even I think people who think for themselves aren't realizing how much they're getting influenced. But I really am hoping for change, because it's a completely different world on this album release for us, and I have no idea how to navigate it anymore. The two records before, it was all pretty consistent, “This is what the music industry is like.” I feel like the changes that are upon us right now have happened so fast that I am scared that things are gonna get even crazier.
Brennan: They probably will.
Lindsey: Yeah, right? They have to. But I guess there's no use living in fear.
Brennan: That's true. We just need to keep pushing ourselves to expand in our minds and hearts.
Lindsey: I agree with that. And grow. That's important. I think it's a time where you could have a fan base and a style and you can still do well by putting out the same thing over and over again. Which, in other eras, you would do much better for yourself by trying to change your music and grow. Right now, it feels like the most successful thing that a lot of people are doing is duplicating what they did before. At least to my knowledge, I've never existed in a time where that was celebrated so much. It's like playing it safe is actually good right now. I feel like we gotta just keep on not playing it safe, and growing and not relying on things that people already like.
Brennan: I agree. Sometimes when I'm songwriting, I'll find myself being like, Is this chorus hooky enough? Is this singable? But there is a fine line between wanting to serve a larger trend versus wanting to be nerdy about songwriting.
Lindsey: Yeah. Or even serve the people who already liked it and just want more of the same. But even if that went amazing for you, there's no way that with time that could make you into a Radiohead type artist. They're legendary and awesome because every era has merit and it's all different. You can tell they give a fuck and they're really trying to grow on their own time. But you can totally make money just making [the same thing]. If we made Lush a a hundred times, I'm sure it would work for five years, you know?
Brennan: I wonder if people's attention span would allow for that.
Lindsey: Oh, I don't know. I just feel like a lot of things that are breaking through right now, the less different the second album is from the first one is doing better with people. I don't have the attention span to listen to the same album over and over again, but it's almost like people think it takes less attention to listen to the same thing over and over again.
Brennan: It can be lodged into your spinal cord pretty easily.
Lindsey: [Laughs.] Yeah. But as long as you keep giving a fuck about songwriting and growing, that's all that matters.
Brennan: Amen.
Lindsey: Well, good talk dude.
Brennan: Good talk.
