A few weeks ago, Cardi B was licensed to perform a wedding for a lesbian couple for her show Cardi B Tries… but it looks like that license might be coming in handy again sooner than anyone expected. When actor Kal Penn noticed the “WAP” rapper on his flight, he joked on Twitter that he had a dream she officiated his wedding. However, Cardi somehow saw the tweet and seemed into the idea, wondering why the Harold & Kumar actor didn’t say hi — and suggesting that she was open to actually performing the ceremony.
First, why didn’t you say hi! Second, I’m licensed to do that sooo……..let me know. https://t.co/NTGvVdacFY
When Penn responded explaining that Cardi’s “do not disturb” light was on and enthused about the idea, Cardi had just one response: “I’m down I’ll get my suit.”
Kal Penn announced his impending nuptials to his longtime partner earlier this week in addition to officially coming out as gay. In his upcoming book You Can’t Be Serious, he details how the couple unexpectedly became close after his NASCAR fan partner Josh got him hooked on the sport as well.
Meanwhile, Cardi’s interactions with fellow celebrities continue to amuse and delight fans on the internet. Prior to her interaction with Kal Penn, Cardi and Penn Badgley of Netflix’s You had a cute back-and-forth resulting in the two stars swapping their profile pics to photos of each other.
Following the tragic shooting of cinematographer Halyna Hutchins on the set of Rust, The Rock has pledged to never use a real gun on any of his productions, no matter the cost. While working the red carpet at the premiere of his latest Netflix movie, Red Notice, The Rock revealed how he was “heartbroken” by the incident, which left Hutchins dead after Alec Baldwin unknowingly fired a gun that had a live round in it during rehearsal.
How the live round made its way into Baldwin’s gun is the focus of an ongoing investigation, but it was enough for The Rock to get his Seven Bucks Production team on the phone and lay down a new ground rule on guns going forward. Via Variety:
“I can’t speak for anyone else, but I can tell you, without an absence of clarity here, that any movie that we have moving forward with Seven Bucks Productions — any movie, any television show, or anything we do or produce — we won’t use real guns at all,” Johnson said to Variety.
“We’re going to switch over to rubber guns, and we’re going to take care of it in post,” he said. “We’re not going to worry about the dollars; we won’t worry about what it costs.”
As the interview wrapped up, The Rock reiterated his stances that no real guns will be used on Seven Bucks productions. “That’s it,” he said. Considering the wrestler turned actor is easily one of the biggest action movie stars in the world, his no-real-guns stance is guaranteed to impact the rest of the industry. It’s a bold example to set and follows Eric Kripke’s recent vow to use “no more guns with blanks” on his sets.
Each week our staff of film and TV experts surveys the entertainment landscape to select the ten best new/newish shows available for you to stream at home. We put a lot of thought into our selections, and our debates on what to include and what not to include can sometimes get a little heated and feelings may get hurt, but so be it, this is an important service for you, our readers. With that said, here are our selections for this week.
Bill Lawrence hops into the sea of reboots to executive produce the return of this 1980s sitcom. Robin Givens is back as the grown-up Darlene, and the show focuses heavily upon a group of overachieving teenagers that must adapt to an unusual teacher, who wants her students to experience life and… maybe ignore their grades? Sounds like a plan. Watch it on HBO Max.
Margaret Qualley (Once Upon A Time In Hollywood) stars in this heartbreaking adaptation of Stephanie Land’s New York Times best-selling memoir, Maid: Hard Work, Low Pay, and a Mother’s Will to Survive. This will, clearly, be a difficult watch, but Qualley’s raw portrayal (of a woman who flees an abusive relationship to go through exceedingly difficult times to break the cycle for her daughter) yields a burgeoning star. Watch it on Netflix. Watch it on Netflix.
To quote Jack Nicholson’s Joker from Batman ’89, “this town needs an enema!” Especially following another snarly election season. And so, here is Jack McBrayer’s Kindness Show to be that… enema. Filled with positivity, smiles, and talking crayons, this all-ages series seems to be a completely earnest attempt at throwing a lasso around the sun to bring its warmth just a little closer. And isn’t that the perfect vehicle for McBrayer, who you know as the irrepressibly positive Kenneth The Page on 30 Rock? No. It’s not. That was the mixture of McBrayer’s sweet with Triumph The Insult Comic Dog’s salty on The Jack And Triumph Show, but this looks pretty cool, too. The world is always in need of a Mister Rogers-type. Go get ’em, Jack. Watch it on Apple TV+.
If you find yourself commiserating with Penn Badgley’s obsessive serial killer Joe Goldberg when You’s third season drops this week, don’t take it personally. Relocating to a small town and having to interact with mommy bloggers and uber-masculine tech-daddies sounds like hell, sure, but it’s what he deserves. The show’s latest installment picks up where season two left off — with Joe and his new wife Love Quinn (Victoria Pedretti at her best here) moving to the suburbs and trying to curb the worst of their shared homicidal tendencies. A new baby, new romantic distractions, anti-vaxxers, feminist wine retreats, and bro trips that end rather bloody all threaten their planned quiet life. And really, no amount of couple’s therapy can save a marriage when one spouse is constantly fantasizing about murdering the other. Happily ever after just isn’t in the cards for these two — but more dead bodies piling up in their basement certainly is. Watch it on Netflix.
Netflix’s most popular show in, well, ever continues to burn up the discourse, and internet bandwidth all over the world. It’s been a while since we had a full-on phenomenon like this one. Get in there if you haven’t yet, or maybe get in there again if you have, if part to enjoy (?) all the class-based cynicism and murderous children’s games, and in part so you have something to talk about with your family during the quickly-approaching holiday season. Watch it on Netflix.
Love Life ended up being the HBO Max original show to launch the service, and a new anthologized story is upon us with Anna Kendrick’s Darby passing the baton to a new unlucky-in-love protagonist, Marcus, who will be portrayed by William Jackson Harper (i.e., Jacked Chidi in The Good Place). Darby’s still in the show a little bit, but she got married, so this is all about Marcus finding himself launched from a long-term relationship and into the hell hole known as the dating world. Godspeed, Marcus. Watch it on HBO Max.
Dexter Morgan, who’s arguably TV’s most beloved serial killer of all time (sorry, Hannibal fans), is back, baby. The new season is a bloody good time for all and works hard to erase the sins of the lumberjack past. Ghosts of the past rear their heads, and it’s going to be a trip to see how Dexter can survive having to tend to something else beyond his inner war and that dumb hurricane. Dexter’s out of his element, and it’s so much fun to watch. Watch it on Showtime.
It’s a mitzvah in a world like this to turn the other cheek, bite the tongue, and generally disregard the impoliteness, ridiculousness, and stupidity of others. But wow, what a lift. Perhaps that’s why it’s so freeing to see Larry David and a cavalcade of stars and familiar faces push against the minutiae of polite culture with serial honesty. Who else could reject someone’s plea to pray for a sick relative without getting stabbed or mock the fakery of gazing deeply into someone’s eyes during a toast when all you want to do is freaking eat? Larry is no hero. He’s an asshole, but he’s our asshole and he’s back for another round of Curb. Watch it on HBO.
Narcos is back once again, with stories about real-life drug cartels and the DEA agents who are after them, many of whom have pretty tremendous mustaches, including, as pictured above, Scoot McNairy. The third season of the Mexico-based spinoff picks up where season two left off, with various cartels at war and a very young El Chapo starting to make a name for himself. It’s a good time. Violent and sad and intense in parts, but still, good. Watch it on Netflix.
Big Mouth returns for a fifth season of hormone monsters, musical numbers, and talking pillows. Along with returning cast members Nick Kroll, John Mulaney, Maya Rudolph, Jason Mantzoukas, Ayo Edebiri, Jordan Peele, and Richard Kind, season five also features new characters voiced by Pamela Adlon, Keke Palmer, Kumail Nanjiani, and Chloe Fineman. Watch it on Netflix.
Everyone’s favorite collection of monsters is back, once again, this time for a slightly delayed third season. Things left off with the Roy family in turmoil, as always, although this time from friendly fire, thanks to noted screw-up and amateur rapper Kendall making a big move. The new season should get ugly in the best possible way, so hop on board week-to-week if you’re already a fan or load up a binge and get caught up to see what everyone’s yammering about all fall. Watch it on HBO Max.
Each week our staff of film and TV experts surveys the entertainment landscape to select the ten best new/newish movies available for you to stream at home. We put a lot of thought into our selections, and our debates on what to include and what not to include can sometimes get a little heated and feelings may get hurt, but so be it, this is an important service for you, our readers. With that said, here are our selections for this week.
What we have here is an old-school erotic thriller — think Basic Instinct or Fatal Attraction — with White Lotus star Sydney Sweeney as one half of a curious couple who spends a not-insignificant amount of time spying on their exhibitionist-type neighbors. Things get weird and twisted and steamy, as they do in these kinds of movies, which were super popular in the 1980s and 1990s and have since just about disappeared. Might be worth it to give it a try, but think about closing your own blinds first. Watch it on Amazon Prime.
The Velvet Underground is one of the most influential bands of all-time. But unlike other iconic 1960s groups like, say, the Beatles, there’s not a ton of footage of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Moe Tucker performing. To get around this, director Todd Haynes has made a documentary that captures the “idea” of the VU rather than a Wikipedia summary. Don’t walk, but “run run run” to watch The Velvet Underground! Watch it on Apple TV+.
James Wan, he of the Saw and Insidious and Conjuring movies, is back with a new horror film. This one focuses on a woman who has terrifying visions of brutal murders, which are ruining her life a little (as terrifying visions of brutal murders will do) and are also –surprise — actually happening in the real world (which is bad). None of it sounds like a good time for her. For you, though? Maybe. Watch it on Netflix.
The dark spirits compel us to remind you that Megan Fox has a horror-comedy coming to Netflix this week. It’s likely this reminder is retribution for how terribly we treated Fox’s other terrific horror entry, Jennifer’s Body. Will this one be as good? Who knows? It looks promising enough though, with Fox and Sydney Sweeney hamming it up as two LA-based Goth queens who mix a bit of human blood into their green smoothies. Lucy Fry and Debbie Ryan take up the most screen-time, playing a pair of hard-partying undead millennials that look to be the worst Uber passengers you’ll ever meet. It’s a wild noir-infused romp through the city that doesn’t seem to take itself too seriously. Watch it on Netflix.
The spooky business all gets rebooted here, with the franchise focusing in on a collection of teens, one of whom is on a mission to discover what happened to her mother. Does she uncover a secret? Is the secret described in the preview materials as “a terriying truth”? Buddy, you know it is. We’ve all see enough of these movies to know that. But it doesn’t make them any less fun. Watch it on Paramount+.
Halloween Kills is a direct sequel to 2018’s Halloween, which was a sequel to 1978’s Halloween that ignored all the previous sequels in the franchise. It’s confusing, but really, all you need to know is that it’s a Halloween movie with Jamie Lee Curtis, “The Shape,” and an eerie score from John Carpenter. ’Tis the season (to watch horror movies). Watch it on Peacock
What we have here is Benedict Cumberbatch as an eccentric old-timey artist whose — and we’re just going to go ahead and quote Amazon’s summary because there’s no improving on this phrasing — “playful, psychedlic pictures transformed the public’s perceptions of cats forever.” Yeah. And Claire Foy is in there, too. It’s a whole thing. Watch it on Amazon Prime.
Netflix bet on dead with Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead, and that bet apparently paid off handsomely, which is a good thing because there’s already a prequel in the can. Matthias Schweighöfer returns to the franchise as Dieter, a then-bank teller who’s recruited by Nathalie Emmanuel (who promises “a life less ordinary”) to begin his heisting career. Of course, this prequel isn’t entirely devoid of zombies, but the focus is on those safes, which are cracking. Watch it on Netflix.
You like Turner and Hooch, right? Of course you do. Tom Hanks + a dog = good ’80s movie. OK, well, what if Turner and Hooch was set in the post-apocalyptic future… and instead of working as a cop, Tom Hanks is one of the last people on Earth and he travels the planet with his dog and a robot… and the movie was directed by the guy who did the awesome “Hardhome” and “Battle of the Bastards” episodes of Game of Thrones. It’s Finch time. Watch it on Apple TV+.
At long last, Dune is here. Denis Villeneuve’s science-fiction epic starring everyone you like (including Timothée Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Stellan Skarsgård, Dave Bautista, Zendaya, and Jason Momoa) should probably be seen on the biggest screen possible. But it’ll still look darn good at home. Watch it on HBO Max.
Jeymes Samuel’s slick, stylish Netflix Western is a “pick your fighter” lineup of gun-slinging, swag-dripping Black cowboys ready to dust off the history books and give us a more accurate, diverse representation of the Old West. Jonathan Majors is having a hell of a year and here, he imbues the deadly Nat Love with some impressive comedic beats that make it easy to root for the vengeance-minded outlaw – unless, of course, you’re swayed by the prospect of Regina King riding a horse and f*cking sh*t up in every scene. (Who wouldn’t be?) Idris Elba, LaKeith Stanfield, and Zazie Beetz round out the main cast members with the most things to do on screen and all of the shoot-outs and train robberies and saloon fights are timed perfectly to an eclectic mix of Reggae/Dancehall bangers produced by Samuel and collaborator Jay-Z. This ain’t your grandpa’s Western, and really, that’s kind of the point. Watch it on Netflix.
“Stay” was released on July 9, and if it did indeed reach a billion streams today, November 4, it did so in 118 days. (As of this post, the Spotify desktop and mobile apps indicate the song has 994,497,008 streams, although it’s possible that count is not current.) The reported previous record-holder, Ed Sheeran’s “Shape Of You,” was released on January 6, 2017 and reached a billion Spotify streams on June 8 that same year, which is 153 days later. So, even if “Stay” didn’t actually hit a billion streams today but does so in the next couple days — or even in the next month, which it will almost certainly do — it will handily surpass Sheeran’s mark.
“Shape Of You,” by the way, is Spotify’s most-streamed song ever and currently has over 2.9 billion streams. At the time “Shape Of You” hit a billion streams, it was just the third song to do so on the platform, following Drake’s “One Dance” and The Chainsmokers’ Halsey-featuring hit “Closer.” Times have certainly changed, as now, at least 100 songs now have 1 billion Spotify streams; As of November 3, Spotify’s 100th most-played song, The Weeknd’s “Can’t Feel My Face,” has over 1.2 billion streams.
Meanwhile, Olivia Rodrigo recently came close to breaking Sheeran’s record before Laroi and Bieber did: Spotify reported on October 26 that Rodrigo’s “Good 4 U” surpassed a billion streams, 165 days after its May 14 release.
Ed Sheeran is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Lil Nas X’s 2021 year just got a little better as he was one of many celebrities that were honored at The Wall Street Journal‘s 2021 Innovator Awards. He received awards at the ceremony along with Kim Kardashian, Lewis Hamilton, and Ryan Reynolds, and during an interview on the red carpet at the event, he was asked for an artist he believed is an innovator and he pointed to someone in the hip-hop world.
“I’d say Playboi Carti,” Lil Nas X, the Music Innovator Award recipient, said. “Me personally, I feel like he’s become like this huge rockstar in the rap realm. He’s a pretty entertaining performer, like, he goes out of the way and he does his own musical style. He’s gonna try what he wants to. I love that. I think that’s innovative.” He then spoke about his own work and how he tried to do things differently with his recent releases.
“As I was writing these songs and going into the booth, I was changing internally,” he said to The Wall Street Journal. “I was telling all these stories and also letting go of a lot of things that had, like, pent up through my music.”
The honor comes after Lil Nas X was given his own day in his hometown of Atlanta after he returned home to celebrate his debut album, Montero.
You can watch Lil Nas X speak about Playboi Carti in the post above
The not-Zodiac Killer strikes again. Ted Cruz was practically dancing over GOP victory in Virginia (he posted a video of his celebratory moves, if you have the stomach for them) with Glenn Youngkin taking the win over ex-Governor Terry McAuliffe. Ted was so happy that he did the microphone rotation all day on Thursday, and he got so excited that he tried to slip a lie in while visiting with Fox News host John Roberts, who promptly called him out for the falsehood.
It was a bizarre lie to tell, too. Cruz could have chosen not to be a sore winner, but nope. He decided to revert to his recent grilling of Attorney General Merrick Garland, who Ted recently pounced upon (while defending far-right parents who lose it during school board meetings and give Nazi salutes). Ted declared that Garland’s stance on chaotic school board meetings was a big reason why Youngkin won Virginia. Not only is that a far-out claim, but yeah, here comes that lie (the “domestic terrorists” part):
“The arrogance of the Democrats saying ‘parents have no control over that,’ and even worse, the attorney general (Joe Biden’s attorney general) calling those parents domestic terrorists. I think that directly led to the result last night.”
To that, Roberts responded, “In fairness, he said that they weren’t domestic terrorists. It was the National School Boards Association that said that.”
Roberts was correct, of course, and the National School Boards Association has since apologized for using the “domestic terrorists” term (which Garland did not use in his memo that addressed possible threats made at school board meetings), but Ted really has it out for Garland, so who knows what fiction the Texas lawmaker has going on in his head. It’s worth noting, though, that Ted tweeted out a clip of the same Fox News segment that cuts out the fact check. Oh boy.
When Suzy Shinn was growing up, music wasn’t an option — it was the only option. At just 26, Shinn has already settled into a prolific career as a producer and recording engineer for artists like Katy Perry, Sia, Dua Lipa, Panic! At The Disco and many more. But when she was a kid, it took her mother’s coaxing to get started on guitar, followed by voice lessons, and then everything started to click. She always had range, though spanning from showtunes to the Beach Boys to Blink-182.
“My mom forced me to play guitar and got me in voice lessons,” Shinn remembers during a recent phone interview. “I was a little showtune person! And I was into playing Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton, all the rock classics. Then, I discovered the Beach Boys, and Blink-182, and that whole Warped Tour scene, because it was the only concert that came through Wichita, Kansas. That’s kind of what inspired me.” Eager to turn everything into a song, Shinn would set her friend’s poetry to music and perform anywhere a mic could be found — cafes, open mics, bars or pubs. It was slim pickings for a precocious pre-teen in Wichita.
“My mom got me a MacBook, GarageBand, and Logic, so I started recording my own songs when I was about 12,” Shinn says. “I would crank the AutoTune up to 100 because T-Pain was popular then. And obviously I was also on MySpace.I started off playing guitar, but I loved singing.” Graduating high school a year early in a desperate attempt to get out of Kansas quickly, Shinn attended Berklee College Of Music in Boston, studying both as a guitar major and the school’s prestigious, production major.
“At the time production was the hardest major to get into,” she says. “You had to test into it and you had to interview into it. My friends, my guy friends, in particular, were always recording themselves, and I wanted to do that too. They were making music, and producing, and really creating soundscapes. It opened up this whole world of production that I had no idea existed. I didn’t know that there was an art and a science behind it.”
But after her first few years at Berklee, Shinn got an internship at a recording studio in Los Angeles, and it went so well that she decided to continue working in the field instead of returning to Boston. Still, working at a recording studio as a young woman, particularly a woman of color, didn’t come easy. The music industry is notoriously male, white, with low pay and all manners of nepotism and sexism. Shinn remembers taking odd jobs like scrubbing toilets, putting up mics, and getting food — working 24/7 to make ends meet and prove herself in the early years. And there was always the implication that, as a girl, she had to be twice as good just to get by.
“As a girl, you have to work twice as hard,” she said. “You have to know your stuff two, three times more and better than any dude out there. But I learned more in a summer of interning than I did in my major degree that was supposed to teach me all about that. Real experience is always going to outweigh the education component, I think, in this particular field.”
As Shinn got more established in Los Angeles, she began to work with artists that plenty of recording engineers would dream of, especially in the pop space. But in working with some of the biggest names in the world, she was also lucky to find that fame wasn’t the whole story. “With these artists that I get to work with, it’s raw talent,” she marveled. “Brendan Urie, from Panic! At The Disco, he’s just so talented, and on top of that, he’s a kind, hilarious, cool person. Or Katy Perry, I was so scared and nervous to work with her because I’d listened to her music for so long. But she started to sing and it was like ‘Yup, that’s Katy no matter what microphone you put in front of her.’”
And aside from being a complete professional in the booth, Katy is also a great person to be co-working with. Why? She’ll go out and pick up Taco Bell, and bring some back for the rest of the crew, too. “After she walked in for the session, she went out to get Taco Bell and offered to bring me a burrito — just a cool human,” Shinn laughed. “She’s an extremely gifted, highly-successful person, but I would also hang out with her anytime.”
In Shinn’s experience, when it comes to working with pop artists, the vocal production is the most important thing. Pop tends to be more sample-based with less live instrumentation, and vocals, melody, and lyrics are what she focuses on when working with an artist in that genre. “Pop artists are not as instrument-based,” she explained. “That will be sample-based and it’s more focused on the vocal production, the lyrics, the melody — those three together are it. Pop is a singer, in a way, so those three things need to be in sync, and they need to be mind-blowing. And each in their own way: Katy Perry is not the same as Dua Lipa is not the same as Courtney Love. But my focus will be on the pop vocal cutting through.”
As a young woman who is thriving in the engineering space, Shinn hopes that her story will help more girls and young people trying to break in to know that women are doing it. The music industry is tough, yes, but representation is coming slowly but surely. “I’ve read some quotes over the years being like ‘where are the women?’” she said. “I’m like, I’m busting my ass! I’m here. What I want to say to young women is: Don’t walk away. I’ve been in this for over ten years and it hasn’t always been pretty, but we need more of us. If you don’t give up, you’ll find good people. If you don’t walk away, it will come.”
Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.
Kristen Stewart casually revealed this week that she’s engaged to her girlfriend of two years, Dylan Meyer. “We’re marrying, we’re totally gonna do it,” the Spencer actress said on The Howard Stern Show. “I wanted to be proposed to, so I think I very distinctly carved out what I wanted and she nailed it. We’re marrying, it’s happening.” Congratulations to the happy couple! Now that the proposal is out of the way, Stewart and Meyer can focus on what really matters: getting Guy Fieri to officiate the wedding.
Stewart told host Howard Stern she and Meyer would likely officiate the wedding themselves, but admitted, “We did hear that Guy Fieri from the Food Network officiates a lot of gay weddings.” She added, “So, the idea of that man — that sweet, sweet spiky-headed man — coming to our wedding and officiating it, it just makes me laugh so much.”
In 2015, Fieri officiated 101 gay weddings in Miami, Florida, in honor of his late sister, who was gay. Why 101? The ‘101 Gay Weddings’ celebration was named after the 101 Dalmatians animated film to target Florida attorney general Pam Bondi, who had actively fought against lifting the same-sex marriage ban,” according to the Hollywood Reporter.
Guy Fieri rules. Kristen Stewart rules. I don’t know much about Dylan Meyer, but she once tweeted, “You either recognize the 1996 Bax Luhrman Romeo and Juliet soundtrack as the apex of soundtracks or you don’t know what soundtracks are,” so she rules, too. Fieri officiating the wedding needs to happen. Someone needs to get in touch with him. It’s probably not too difficult. I bet Guy still has a Yahoo! email address.
When I interviewed Lindsey Jordan of Snail Mail in 2018 I was — like the scores of other music journalists who spoke with Jordan upon the release of her debut Lush — thoroughly charmed. She was funny, self-possessed, and seemingly wise beyond her relatively young age of 18. While she was appreciative of the hype that greeted Lush, a surprisingly classicist ’90s guitar rock throwback, she was also refreshingly skeptical of the media narratives already being projected upon her music.
“I’m just a songwriter before anything else,” she said. “It’s mostly the categorization of Snail Mail being this woman-centric rock outfit that has everything to do with my age, gender, and sexuality, and nothing to do with the music… [It] feels like a pat on the back that I don’t want, for things I can’t control.”
Wow, I thought. She really is going to take over the world.
As impressive as Jordan was, however, I also couldn’t help feeling a slight twinge of concern. She seemed to be working awfully hard at an age when most people are doing bong rips and playing video games. Snail Mail was fixture at indie festivals and music websites. There wasn’t an opportunity — a tour, an interview, a TV appearance, a streaming video performance — that she seemed to turn down. And then there was the cult of personality surrounding Jordan, which resembled similarly intense fan bubbles around other young woman indie artists such as Phoebe Bridgers, Mitski, Lucy Daucus, Julien Baker, and Clairo. Like those singer-songwriters, Jordan was adored for vividly recreating personal traumas in her music, to the point of fostering a devoted (and potentially toxic) following that crowded out all appropriate personal boundaries.
Judging by the very good new Snail Mail album out Friday, Valentine, Jordan has set about re-establishing some of those boundaries. In recent interviews, Jordan has talked about a 45-day rehab stint that occurred after the busy Lush tour cycle. She also references this in one of the most stinging tracks from Valentine, the deceptively poppy synth-rocker “Ben Franklin.” Elsewhere on the album, nearly every song includes a lyric that could be construed as a comment on Jordan’s own suffocating indie fame, including the title track (“Those parasitic cameras, don’t they stop to stare at you?”), the wistful jangler “Headlock” (“Felt the crowd was wrong to claim you / Won’t they ever quiet down?”), and the wispy bedroom folk number “c. et al” (“Even with a job that keeps me moving / Most days I just wanna lie down.”)
In an interview with Pitchfork, Jordan admitted she used to “channel the actual events of the songs” she wrote, which would sometimes cause her to break down on stage. She’s since come to see how unhealthy this is. “It was exhausting,” she said. “My emotional boundaries are so different now. Like, they exist.”
But is that a risk? Fans of Lush responded to Jordan’s eagerness to expose herself in her music, particularly as a young woman with an uncommon ability to articulate feelings most people her age struggle to fully grapple with. On Valentine, she’s just as honest and insightful, it’s just that the message is, “Step off, please.”
The “reaction to indie fame” aspect of Valentine is only one part of the story. This is also Jordan’s “level up” record, the ambitious follow-up to the ingratiating but relatively simple Lush. On the first record, she focused almost solely on guitar, to the point of aligning herself with indie “shredders” like Kurt Vile and Steve Gunn. But on Valentine, she’s expanded her musical palate significantly, layering her songs with keyboards and strings in a manner consistent with “mature sophomore efforts” from young indie phenoms.
Assisting Jordan is producer Brad Cook, an increasingly common presence in the liner notes of acclaimed indie albums. At times Valentine resembles one of Cook’s most celebrated recent productions, Waxahatchee’s Saint Cloud, another post-substance abuse effort marked sonically by a roomy, expansive naturalism. The arrangements on Valentine are more expansive than on Lush, most notably on “Forever (Sailing),” in which Jordan sings about an obsessive relationship over a bed of piano, synths, a sneaky-jazzy bassline, and drum machines. On “Madonna,” she dabbles in bump-and-grind R&B on the verse before unexpectedly downshifting to a chunky indie-rock chorus. For “Light Blue,” a stark acoustic melody is elaborated with a string section that edges Jordan in a coffeehouse direction.
For Jordan, the grown-up, MOR indie of Valentine is a subtle hint that she’s no longer a precocious wunderkind of Lush, and therefore shouldn’t be fetishized solely for her youth or confessional lyrics. And yet Valentine isn’t fully grown up, just as nobody at 22 is fully grown up. Jordan still portrays herself in these latest songs as a person who falls in love a little too hard, and then has to deal with the consequences when things fall apart. This, of course, is the most “young person” subject matter imaginable. (She apparently wrote the songs for Valentine back at her childhood bedroom in Baltimore.)
Along with the asides about indie celebrity, Valentine unfolds like a song cycle in which the protagonist drifts into romantic obsession before slowly coming to accept the punishing reality of being alone. This point arrives on the album’s final track, the doleful “Mia,” in which Jordan sings in a cracked, vulnerable rasp, “Lost love so strange / And Heaven’s not real, babe / I wish that I could lay down next to you.”
Herein lies the tricky balance that Jordan strikes successfully more often than not on Valentine — she’s moved on from childhood, but not all the way. She’s expanded her musical range, but the core intimacy of her songs remains their most urgent attribute. Her heart has been broken, but she has the wherewithal to move forward. She may have re-set her boundaries, but Snail Mail’s music is as inviting as ever.
Valentine is out tomorrow on Matador. Get it here.
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Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. These cookies do not store any personal information.
Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website.
