Coachella veteran Snail Mail charting a distinctive musical path

Lindsey Jordan, who performs under the name Snail Mail, is shown on stage at the 2018 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival in Indio. She performs Wednesday in San Diego at the Music Box.

San Diego Union-Tribune

Aug. 19, 2019 11:23 AM PT

Lindsey Jordan, who performs under the name Snail Mail, was just 18 when she made her debut at the 2018 Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival.

If she had her way, audiences would focus only on her music. Or, as she told an interviewer last year: “I would love people to just listen and not be so obsessed with the fact that I’m a girl, or that I’m gay, or 18. Being a girl is not a genre.”

Jordan began studying classical guitar when she was 5, although you wouldn’t know it from the spare chords she favors for many of her proudly lo-fi, indie rock songs.

Her singing is delivered with a similar lack of fuss, but Jordan’s melancholic lyrics sound wise beyond her years. She explores matters of identity and the heart with admirable sensitivity and candor on her accomplished debut album, “Lush.”

What results at times suggests a fetching mix between Liz Phair and Juliana Hatfield, by way of Fiona Apple and Avril Lavigne in her most downbeat moments. With more time to develop her already impressive skills as a singer-songwriter, Jordan could really come into her own and develop a niche all her own.

Snail Mail, with Choir Boy: 7:30 p.m. Wednesday. The Music Box, 1337 India St., downtown. $18-$20. (619) 795-1337. musicboxsd.com

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George Varga

San Diego Union-Tribune music critic George Varga began drumming in rock bands at 12 and writing professionally about music at 15. A Louisiana native who grew up mostly in Germany, Varga has earned three Pulitzer Prize nominations for his writing at the U-T and is a voting member of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In addition to providing live coverage of the Grammy Awards and festivals from Coachella and KAABOO to the 1994 edition of Woodstock, he has interviewed everyone from Miles Davis, Britney Spears and (over a game of chess) Ray Charles to Willie Nelson, Kanye West and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis. A triple first prize-winner for criticism and arts writing at the 2022 San Diego Press Club awards and a double first prize-winner at the 2022 San Diego Society of Professional Journalists awards, Varga is also a contributing writer for Jazz Times magazine and has written for Billboard, Spin and other publications. After attending San Diego City College and San Diego State University, he created and taught the 2002 UC San Diego Extension course, “Jazz in a Post-Ken-Burns World.” Varga has written liner notes for more than a dozen albums, including by jazz sax greats James Moody and Michael Brecker, and contributed two chapters to the book, “Dylan: Disc By Disc.”