Living on the road for much of 2022, Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail yearns for a taste of home.
Home for Jordan is in Ellicott City, Maryland, a suburb of Baltimore where she grew up, first picked up guitar at the age of five and started the indie rock band in 2015. Fast forward seven years later, where, after headlining United States and international tours in support of her 2021 record “Valentine” and joining fellow hometown acts Turnstile and JPEGMAFIA on the former’s “Love Connection” tour, Jordan looks ahead to a grand Baltimore homecoming in February with “Snail Mail’s Valentine Fest.” The five-night run of shows at the city’s Ottobar venue — her first hometown performances in more than four years — will coincide with the upcoming Valentine’s Day holiday. Tickets for the five-night festival will go on sale on Friday, November 11.
“I punched a hole in the wall in the green room one time but it’s all patched up now,” Jordan shares with a laugh. “It feels like no matter where you’re at in your career, you play the Ottobar, it’s really homey and I love that place.”
“Valentine Fest” was initially set to take place earlier this year in the same time frame, but Jordan needed more time to recover from her late 2021 vocal cord surgery which delayed her touring schedule. The five-night festival is now slated to take place on February 10-14, 2023 in Baltimore with Snail Mail performing a varied set list each night, supplemented by a lineup of special guests that the singer curated herself but chose to remain secretive about.
The accompanying poster for the festival, drawn by artist Corrinne James, includes visual Easter eggs for its guests, leaving fans to do some hypothesizing of their own to figure out who will be joining her. But, if pointers for a couple guests are needed, think of bands named after suburban mothers, or a veteran indie stalwart — who Jordan previously opened for — with a previous album title that likens them to an aged dog.
“We have some fucking insane bands on there, one of them I’m pretty sure is getting back together just for this,” Jordan teased. “The idea was to have a new band that we are friends with and admire as the first opener, a legend as the second and then Snail Mail. So the lineup would be the future, the past and the present.”
Bringing “Valentine Fest” home to Baltimore, and more particularly, the Ottobar, is a resonant full-circle moment for Jordan, who played her first show as Snail Mail at the venue in 2015 as part of a local two-day festival called U+NFest. She recalled playing a handful of house shows as a solo artist throughout the Baltimore DIY scene that year performing songs from her eventual 2016 “Habit” EP before a friend, vocalist Angie Swiecicki of Post Pink, invited her to play the local festival. Jordan then enlisted best friends Alex Bass and Ray Brown to be her bassist and drummer, respectively, and Snail Mail was born at the Ottobar — with the core trio having played countless venues of increasing sizes since.
“They’re my best friends and we all really understand each other,” Jordan said. “The dynamic is really like, I write the songs, but I like to bring the songs to them to jam. I trust their sensibility and I feel like we are a team in a lot of ways — we’ve been touring together for so long now.”
Outside of the upcoming festival, Jordan hopes to release more demo versions of songs from “Valentine” following its recent one-year anniversary through her label, Matador Records, after they shared her original demo version of its title track on streaming in February to commemorate Valentine’s Day. Jordan is in the early stages of writing songs for her third studio effort, though she wants to take her time recovering from the rigors of touring before focusing on it.
In other creative realms, Jordan has recently taken up acting with her first film role in A24’s upcoming horror flick “I Saw the TV Glow.” A longtime fan of the genre, citing favorites like director David Cronenberg’s 1983 film “Videodrome,” Jordan found it fitting that she will make her debut in one. She hopes to take on more roles in the future, having recently auditioned to play pop singer Madonna in the upcoming Universal biopic — whose lead role was offered to “Ozark” actress Julia Garner.
“I felt so blissful the whole time [shooting ‘I Saw the TV Glow’] because I get so excited about movies and I was letting myself be excited on set,” Jordan said. “I just made so many friends and I learned so much — I was asking everybody questions. We’ll see if I flop, that could be a total factor, but the plan is to at least try to do more [acting] because I loved it, it was so fun.”
Back on the music side, the band’s last hometown performance took place more than four years ago following the release of Jordan’s debut studio album “Lush.” Returning to the intimate 350-person capacity space of the Ottobar with special guests for five nights — which she hopes to establish as an annual event — is a labor of love to the city whose warm and accommodating DIY scene taught Jordan during her teenage years everything she needed to know about being a musician. Her hometown inspirations such as cult filmmaker John Waters and dream pop duo Beach House, along with Baltimore’s bustling DIY scene, have all played into the ethos of what Snail Mail is today.
“I’ve seen some bands from Baltimore that make me go, ‘This is so innovative and crazy and it’s unlike anything I’ve ever seen,’ and it all just exists in this bubble,” Jordan said of her hometown’s artistic culture. “It’s very much art first and nothing else, and I definitely feel that way about my own music.”
