Wine and Cheese: Snail Mail and Liz Phair

Lindsey Jordan and Liz Phair’s jangling guitars bridge two generations of indie rock.

It’s your dream collab. The artists you add back-to-back to the queue. The pairing you can’t get enough of. You know they sound good together, but why? Welcome to Wine and Cheese, a series investigating the why and telling you all about it.

Written by Carys Anderson

It’s easy to roll your eyes at a comparison of any two women who play guitar. But the pairing of Lindsey Jordan, the 20-year-old singer-songwriter known as Snail Mail, and Liz Phair, who gained national recognition in 1993 with a similar style of home-written songs, is, for once, a reasonable association. Jordan played in a Liz Phair cover band in high school, and her critically acclaimed debut, 2018’s Lush, boasts the same jangly guitar as Phair’s groundbreaking debut Exile in Guyville. They even signed to the same record label, Matador. Strong brand.

That guitar-heavy sound is what may first draw fans of one artist to the other. From the shimmering tones of Phair’s “Explain It To Me” to Snail Mail’s dreamy “Golden Dream,” or the chaos Phair unleashes in the chorus of “6’1” and the quiet virtuosity of Jordan’s flourishes in “Heat Wave,” these two are songwriters who continue to find new ways to approach rock’s defining instrument.

Phair and Jordan’s debuts pair their inimitable strumming with lyrics that squash the conventions of their respective eras. Women’s sexuality seems like Empowerment 101 thanks to modern pop music, but Phair’s brazen embrace of her sexual desires was shocking in 1993. Lines like “I want to be your blow job queen” in “Flower” arguably gained more notoriety than the concept of understanding women as multifaceted individuals, but the vulnerability of songs like “F--- and Run” resonated then and continue to resonate now:

Whatever happened to a boyfriend
The kind of guy who tries to win you over
And whatever happened to a boyfriend
The kind of guy who makes love ‘cause he’s in it?

Phair is narrating her frustrations after a one night stand. It’s a perfect pop song, with one of those chord progressions that sounds simple, yet no one else could’ve come up with it. But perfect pop songs at the time expressed romantic fulfillment, not longing:

I want a boyfriend
I want all that stupid old s---
Like letters and sodas

Phair sighs, not crooning, but in a low register; under her breath, because she knows it’s stupid. This deadpan delivery became one of Phair’s signature traits, and one that she sees in Jordan.

“We get in our drone zone,” Phair told Jordan in a 2018 joint interview with Pitchfork. Jordan’s debut album hadn’t even come out yet, and here she was, discussing divahood and being a “woman rocker” with one of her self-proclaimed influences. The swaggering “Mesmerizing” from Exile in Guyville, and the assured “Full Control” from Lush, might explain why Phair agreed to sit down with the newcomer: both fit into that shared zone and shut the door on relationships with coolness and ease.

Phair’s sexuality and self-deprecating vulnerability staked new territory for women in indie. Exile in Guyville, the album and the name, were crafted as a response to The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street; Phair felt so invisible among the men in her Chicago music scene that she sought to show them her capabilities as a musician, not a musician’s girlfriend.

A quarter-century later, Lush takes cues from that style. “Don’t you like me for me?” Jordan asks in “Pristine,” a song about “allowing yourself to be hopelessly in love and still being able to make fun of it,” as she told Vice. Beyond the apprehension that comes with revealing your emotions to the general public, there also exists the association of heartbroken songs with whininess, or, God forbid, pop music. Despite these prejudices, Jordan reclaims her emotions and imbues them with strength. “I’m not into sometimes,” she tells a half-interested lover in “Heat Wave,” before assuring them in “Golden Dream”: “I’m not yours.”

The gorgeous breakup ballad “Speaking Terms” distills everything great about Lush into one midtempo song: a quiet riff twirls under Jordan’s drawn-out, emotional vocals, until the music swells to her shrugged conclusion: “Leave things on speaking terms / And I’ll see you around.” The guitars swoop in, the song takes off, and Jordan’s lifted up and away from the relationship.

“Intimacy — real, honest intimacy — is one of the most radical things you can do right now,” Phair said of her honorable successor’s style in the Pitchfork interview.

So if Snail Mail’s newfound fame has you itching for new guitar music, try some old guitar music. Spin Guyville and Lush back-to-back and travel 30,000 feet above Chicago in “Stratford-on-Guy,” then dive underwater in “Deep Sea.” It’s these atmospheric tracks that bridge sea and sky, and two generations of indie.

Phair’s already passed the torch. “Rock’n’roll’s not dead,” she told Jordan in that Pitchfork interview. “It’s evolving. And you are the manifestation of the fact that it’s switched over to women, and now guitar rock gods are all female.”

Wine and CheeseAfterglow ATXOctober 4, 2019