“I would rather do anything than sit there and watch somebody fiddle with pedals” Snail Mail on why she’s embraced the guitar on her terms on new record, Ricochet
You have your whole life to write your first record. But time goes by awfully fast when you have to follow it up, a pressure-cooker reality that Lindsey Jordan made work for her while assembling Snail Mail’s superb second LP Valentine. Released in 2021, its blend of barbed anti-romance and winsome indie-rock felt like someone getting something out that needed to come out.
READ MORE: “Nothing pisses me off more than someone throwing a label on me: I’m 19!” Grace Bowers is determined to forge her own path
It’s now been five years since it got its hooks in, though, and the intervening period increasingly feels like both a reset and a long exhale. “I love that record, I’m so proud of it,” Jordan says during a Zoom call from her home in Greensboro, North Carolina. “But I knew that, even if I was going through brutal heartbreak, I didn’t want to write about it anymore.”
Instead, Jordan compares the songs on Ricochet, her long-awaited third album, to her earliest bedroom-sculpted releases, believing the patient catch-and-release of the writing process has given them a similar sense of honesty and emotional clarity, no matter how thorny the philosophical subject matter.
“I spent probably four years trying to optimise my process,” she continues. “I worked super slowly, really trying to figure out what it was going to be. I was trying to write every day on tour, and I ended up putting together maybe nine of the 11 songs, including writing the vocal melodies before there was a single lyric.”
Image: Daria Kobayashi Ritch
Palette Cleansing
The record’s guitar sounds also formed part of that formulation, with Jordan and producer Aron Kobayashi Ritch, who also plays bass in Brooklyn indie-rock band Momma, building a collaborative playlist that pulled at disparate threads of 90s rock, from Ivy’s cultured power-pop to the brawny vulnerability of Third Eye Blind and Oasis, and pillowy early ‘00s pop in the form of Frou Frou and Dido. “Some of it was directly referenced: Agony Freak was so inspired by Pinback,” Jordan says. “We had our palette before we had anything else.”
“The way that Aron demos with people, and the way that Momma demos, which is really interesting because they’re collaborative [writers], is to really develop stuff before they even step foot into the studio,” she adds. “I’ve never been in a studio and not had a few weeks of adding flourishes or something. The way that they prepare for stuff is that they’re setting the tone and there’s not a second in the studio for writing, which actually I would recommend to pretty much everybody at this point. The references we decided on together were spot on. I feel like we combined tastes and made it happen in a way that was more intentional than I’ve ever done on a record with a producer before.”
But, when confronted with this rich, texturally detailed backdrop of sunny melancholy, Jordan pushed back lyrically by pondering the stuff that never gets any easier: cosmic insignificance, time’s hard-nosed disregard for how we feel. The result is an intriguing push-pull relationship between arrangements that feel entirely sure of themselves and words that are anything but. “I feel like a person who is very aware of that tension,” Jordan observes. “It’s something I love messing with.”
“One day we won’t be around,” she sings during Light on Our Feet, the sentiment swooping on a beautiful hook, strings darting between its drawn-out vowels. Towards the end of My Maker, the line, “Above us it’s just sky,” tumbles into a belted refrain, its lilting acoustics decorated with intricate solos. “The melodies were as confident as they could possibly be,” Jordan says. “I love, love, love the lyrics but I have revisions in my head for all of them.”
Uncertainty Principle
That admission also points to one of Ricochet’s greatest strengths — its ability to embrace uncertainty and constant re-evaluation. In posing a long list of questions, with comparatively few answers, Jordan suggests that if you need to change your mind, or admit that, maybe, you just don’t know, then that’s cool.
From the opening riffs of Tractor Beam on down, the record feels like one of those long summers when some things come into focus while others get muddied up. “On …Maker I wanted to say “Above us it’s just sky,” but it was like, ‘Who am I as the speaker here?’ I don’t feel like I have a particularly unique view of what’s going on, or of the human experience,” she says. “It’s definitely not coming from a sage.”
While some sessions took place at the Nightfly and Studio G in Brooklyn, Ricochet was chiefly tracked at North Carolina’s Fidelitorium Recordings, a space owned by Mitch Easter, whose production resume includes R.E.M.’s first two LPs, Pavement’s Brighten the Corners and his own work fronting the slept-on power-pop band Let’s Active.
“He’s so fucking nice and cool,” Jordan says, noting that she was able to drive up to the studio each day, dropping her dog at daycare en route. “He came to see us in Nashville not that long ago with Dinosaur Jr, and I punished him really hard after.”
At Fidelitorium, Kobayashi Ritch and engineer Hayden Ticehurst often had things humming along by the time Jordan arrived each day, underlining the shared understanding of what they were aiming for. The simpatico relationship even extended to how they’d chase loose threads.
“I would rather do anything than sit there and watch somebody fiddle with pedals — I hate that part of the process so much,” Jordan notes. So, instead, she played and played and played while Kobayashi Ritch popped his earplugs in and went to work in the live room. “She was a great sport for that,” the producer says. “The thing I like most is when an artist is okay being like, ‘Dude, if you want to take your time, I’ll just play.’”
Image: Daria Kobayashi Ritch
Bat The Cycle
Using a Radial switcher, Kobayashi Ritch would cycle through rigs, often running multiple amps in concert to build something texturally extravagant without much reliance on fixing things in post. On the song Hell, there were four of them in airy harmony, with a load of room mics up to create a sense of space.
Plucked from Easter’s collection and thrust into heavy rotation were a 70s tweed Princeton, a Twin Reverb and a Guild Thunder, which would often only have its reverb channel mic’d. “The Princeton, you put that thing on 10 and it sounds so good,” Kobayashi Ritch recalls. “He also had a Bad Cat and a Vox [doing] the AC30 thing, and then an Orange combo — something ‘70s, huge and heavy.”
The guitars on the record skew character actor rather than matinee idol, with personality and availability at the forefront of the conversation. Jordan’s Noventa Jazzmaster and Rickenbacker 360 were in the mix, along with a Martin acoustic with a really high action belonging to bassist Alex Bass. Kobayashi Ritch, meanwhile, threw his HSH Strat, a ‘90s Jazzmaster with Curtis Novak pickups and a double cutaway ‘68 Gibson Melody Maker into the fray, with their contributions orbiting Jordan’s prized ‘71 Gibson SG, which did a lot of work in the studio, a setting that it’ll be exclusively inhabiting from now on.
“I’m not bringing the SG on tour,” she says. “It’s not worth it to me. It was expensive and setting it up was a whole song and dance, like nothing I’ve ever been through with a guitar before. I love it so much. It’s also the only vintage guitar I’ve ever had. I don’t want anything to happen to it.”
Despite being a rich, adventurous record packed with strings, horns and tiered harmonies, Ricochet never loses sight of Jordan’s personality as a guitarist, from the swooning Goo Goo Dolls-esque melody of Cruise to the subtly knotty arpeggios of Dead End. Part of that can be traced back to the fact everything is in its right place.
Jordan observes that the tracking process was essentially free of distractions or extraneous info, allowing all attention to be focused on bringing the sound in her head to life. “In finding out what works for me, I feel like [I realised] I would like to work with my friend who is the same age in a studio that is intimate and chill and kind of bare bones,” she says. “My girlfriend did the art, me and my best friend did all the music videos together. It’s not DIY because we have label backing and stuff, but it feels like now I have the experience and the opportunities to do whatever I want.”
Snail Mail’s Ricochet is out on March 27 through Matador.
The post “I would rather do anything than sit there and watch somebody fiddle with pedals” Snail Mail on why she’s embraced the guitar on her terms on new record, Ricochet appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
Source: www.guitar-bass.net
