Snail Mail & Soccer Mommy

$49 General Admission | $39 Member General Admission $490 Premium Group Seating** | $392 Member Premium Group Seating** Reserve your spot online or by calling the Box Office at (479) 657-2335. Not a member yet? Join today to enjoy priority access to concerts and member-only events all year long. Please allow 24 hours for new memberships purchased online to process before purchasing your member-priced ticket. To purchase your membership and tickets together today, call our member priority line at (479) 418-5728 or by emailing [email protected]. *Student tickets available to guests with a valid student ID, presented upon entry. ** Premium Group Seating tickets admission for four (you + three guests), a reserved table in a designated seating area, and dedicated table service. Limited quantity available. On Ricochet, her third album as Snail Mail, Lindsey Jordan returns to assert herself as a generational songwriter, clear-eyed and honest as ever. Time has passed, but she remains a sensitive soul, and here her incisive introspection is tethered to newly expansive and hypnotic melodies and ornate string arrangements. While writing Ricochet, Jordan found herself fixating on concerns she’d previously pushed out of her mind, namely death and what happens after. These 11 songs are colored by the anxiety of watching life slip through your fingers, as well as the vulnerability of loving deeply rather than frenetically. Ultimately, Ricochet is an album about realizing—and accepting—that the world still turns no matter what is going on in your tiny life. Jordan’s early music largely dealt with matters of the heart, a territory that she tried to step beyond on Ricochet. “Misery feels safe to write about because I am good at it,” she says, “but I’m not bathing in my own agony anymore.” To feel the pain of everything and then nothing is a lonesome contradiction. Ricochet is a record about being caught in this whirlpool, but Jordan’smusic has never been so transcendent. The luminous opener, “Tractor Beam,” is driven by jangly guitars, but is ultimately about dissociation and “feeling othered while acknowledging that you’re spending a lot of your time and energy figuring out how to float away.” While writing Ricochet, Jordan found herself drawn to art that explores the concept of life itself. The questions of artistic worth, ego, alienation, self-destruction, and failure posed by Charlie Kaufman’s 2008 film Synecdoche, New York cast a long-lasting existential shadow. “Nowhere” is informed by Laura Gilpin’s 1977 poem “The Two-Headed Calf,” about a young animal whose congenital condition allows it to see twice as many stars (the gentle stuff just kills her). On “My Maker,” she imagines flying a plane to heaven and overstaying her welcome at the airport bar. “Another year gone by,” she laments atop swirling guitars and spaced-out sprawl. “What if nothing matters?” “Oh, bouncer in the sky,” she wearily pleads on another song. “Let me in, I’m scared to die.” Ricochet’s interiority reminds Jordan of Lush and other early music written in her Maryland childhood bedroom. “I was writing those songs for so long, my whole life,” she says. “It was my diary.” On the grunge-gaze song “Dead End,” she mourns the simplicity of a suburban adolescence, of parking in a cul-de-sac and smoking with friends. “I’ve aged out of thinking that you’ll have everybody forever. Many of these songs are about friendships, friends that I’m sad about,” Jordan says,“But I’m also talking to myself.” “Looks like you made it/Somebody would be so proud,” she sneers on “Hell.” “But you isolated/Alienate your friends/‘Cus they’re just a means to an end.” “Sometimes it’s devastating to be close with people. You’re busy during a birthday party. Then it happens again,” Jordan says. “All of a sudden, you haven’t talked to somebody you care about in years. You wake up one day and realize you’ve put yourself in a snowglobe, and it’s cold and weird and plasticy.” To this end, emotional detachment can be self-imposed and involuntary, a protective impulse and a clinical blunting. “Numb myself out/What else should we do?,” Jordan sings on “Nowhere.” “You covered me all in kisses/I said I couldn’t feel it, but I wanted to.” Slipping into the abyss can become a comforting guilty pleasure. “Fireworks going off from above/Lit up the sky like lightning bugs/Felt so alive then, I can’t explain,” she sings on “Cruise.” “Couldn’t wait to get home and hide my face/Couldn’t wait to get home and slip away.” Ricochet’s cover is the first not to feature Jordan’s face. Instead, a distressed deep blue expanse is filled by a spiral shell. A spiral moves in dual, opposing directions. Inward winding suggests contraction to the point of disappearance, while outward motion implies the promise of infinity. Distance and time may lead us away from the epicenter, and growth may be uneven, in fits and starts, and maybe a few steps backwards. It’s easy to get tan