For any artist, few hurdles prove as daunting as the notorious sophomore album: the thing after the thing that made you big. There exist two opposing, yet equally weighted, demands: the pressure to recreate your initial success, to remain static in your once-defined lane, versus the pressure to try something new. It is a thin line to walk, a road peppered with anticipation, the knowledge that whichever path taken will, inevitably, disappoint somebody.
But there are successes, triumphs that can leap over the hurdle of expectation. There’s The Bends, Discovery, Late Registration. And then, there is Valentine.
Lindsey Jordan was still a teenager in Maryland when record labels began circling her. Following the release of her debut EP Habit, Jordan signed to Matador Records, performed her debut Tiny Desk Concert, and embarked on her first US-European tour. Then, she graduated high school.
Jordan’s debut studio album, Lush, came in the wake of a life transformed by fame. Snail Mail was swept in with the tide of a pointedly young, female renewal of indie rock: just before her, there was Lorde, and with her, there was Clairo and Girl in Red. There existed a new kind of parasocialization permeating the personal lives of these artists: they were young women, often expressing a queer identity, crafting visceral, lavish works laced with the innumerable pain of intimacy, the paralyzing thrill of growing up in love. Snail Mail was no exception: she wrote as if that pain was unavoidable, like it seeped into every part of her and had to be exorcized from within her. One of Jordan’s breakout singles from Lush, “Pristine”, is a roaring anthem of unrequited love, a defeatist ballad for the masses. It reads like a confession born of complete desperation, a soul laid bare in song: “And I know myself and I’ll never love anyone else / I won’t love anyone else / I’ll never love anyone else”.
For Jordan, there was tour, more tour, a pandemic spent in her parents’ home in Baltimore, and a forty-five day stint in rehab. Mounting pressures as a public figure had breached the artist’s personal life: “Everything was a breakdown, like a hurricane ripping the foundation off a house”, she said in an interview with Quinn Moreland for Pitchfork, “it was not sustainable…I was like a baby in an adult job.”
Valentine, as a whole, is pumped full of a fresh poignancy, the kind of reverence that is only found when crawling up from rock bottom. If I may briefly speak from experience, they don’t call it a searching, fearless moral inventory of yourself for nothing: there is no deeper breaking of the flesh than learning to live without the thing you believed you needed to survive. Everything is stripped away; there is only you. There is no choice but to learn who you are, who you really are, without the artifice of a chemical reaction erupting within you. You have tried so hard, for so long, to control everything; suddenly, you are forced to release all control. Temperance is the most invasive condition of all; it snakes its way through you, shedding everything and sacrificing nothing.
Jordan’s writing was always armed with awareness, a total, unabated expression of self — in Valentine, she just sees herself differently. In the confessional nature of her previous work, Jordan faces her emotions with a pensile chagrin, each line penned and performed with an air of apology for herself. Valentine is not the same, cannot be the same: Jordan is still confessing, but she’s not sorry.
Enter the sizzling, punishing pulse of “Ben Franklin”, the album’s second single, a manifesto for the scorned. “Moved on, but nothing feels true / sometimes I hate her just for not being you”, Jordan admits. The song is a biting acknowledgement of a grief rooted in contradiction: she longs not for her infatuate, but for her “attention”. Similarly, the winding, hallucinatory “Forever (Sailing)” grapples with obsession in love, a despondent reflection of what could have been: “So much destruction / look at what we did / that was so real / and you don’t just forget”, she opines like she’s trying to convince herself. Jordan is living in the past, just for a moment, and making peace with it.
The swinging, strummed “Madonna” details her lover atop a pedestal with Jordan reverent at her feet: “I consecrate my life to kneeling at your altar / my second sin of seven being wanting more”. It’s a devotional hymn of epic proportions, a complete submission of self to another: “Bow to your divinity / gonna wipe the dirt off me”. Through all of Jordan’s piety, though, there exists the resentment born of mortal worship, a detailing of divine disappointment: “I’ve come to hate my body / ‘cause now it’s not yours, it’s not mine”.
But in the wake of Jordan’s worship, the album’s culmination is entirely human. “Mia”, delicate and orchestral, foregoes temptation for truth: “Isn’t it strange, the way it’s just over?”. The song’s palette is soft and soaring, armed with the gliding acoustics of a squadron of string instruments. Everything is ripe and real, Jordan’s final goodbye to her love: “Lost love, so strange / and heaven’s not real, babe”. Jordan wishes and wants, kicks her feet in place, but she knows the truth: there is only earth beneath her and sky above her. In “Mia”, Jordan abandons the promise of salvation through death; she promises to find salvation in life, instead.
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I listened to this album several times, but Valentine was the only track I kept coming back to.