INTERVIEW

At 31, JORDY is taking stock of the journey that has set him on the path to his fourth album, In Retrospect. What began as an outlet tipped towards frustration gradually transformed into a record about self-worth, healing and learning to let go of habits, feelings and expectations that no longer serve you. Digging deeper than ever before, JORDY confronts complicated feelings about love and experience, capturing an essence of validation that comes from within rather than others. Embracing the pop-rock element, JORDY leans into childhood inspirations for his most authentic creative direction to date.

 

Alice: Hey, you! How was the rest of your trip in London from when I last saw you?

 

JORDY: The rest of the trip was lovely. Everything was good, besides the fact that I got in a scooter accident and fractured my elbow.

 

A: Oh no!! That’s the worst. Those scooters pack some power!

 

J: We’ve learned lessons. I am getting better. I was worried it would affect my Mighty Hoopla performance, but it didn’t. It was still a lot of fun, and we made the most of it. So it was great. I love London.

 

A: Looking back at your earliest release. What do you think has changed most about you as an artist?

 

J: I think, for me, I'm just in such a different phase of life. When I put out my first record, I was probably 24 years old, and now I'm 31, and so the things I'm writing about are different, and the way I view the world is different, and the way I view myself is different.

 

I think on my first couple of records, I was still definitely getting over this relationship I was in at the end of college. I was trying to move forward from that, and to move forward, I was looking for validation in other men, and I think it took me probably until my third album, Sex with Myself, to start viewing that process differently. I think I was looking for validation in other men to move on from my ex, but what I really needed to be doing the whole time was looking deeper into myself. Sex with Myself was more about sexual liberation, but I think coming into this record, especially as it was my turning 30 record, I think the big lesson is that you're never going to find the missing piece from someone else; you can really truly only find that within yourself. And I think a lot of these songs reflect this, the anger of moving on from something.

 

The last straw for me was this toxic thing I got out of right before I wrote this most recent record, and I think leaving that was the cherry on top, the real motivating factor of getting my shit together, focusing on myself, finding myself, and it all coincided with turning 30. I think as the record progresses, you hear me letting go of bad habits and directing more of the energy I was directing towards men for a long time, other men, more towards myself. So I think that's what makes it stand out amongst the other projects.

 

A: I think it's such a normal thing, especially in your early 20s, whether it's coming out of a relationship or something else, finding that kind of security in someone else. I did it in my early to mid-twenties before I was forced out of it after a traumatic experience. It’s so interesting that we focus so much on teenage years being such pivotal formative years that I think people forget, or don't realise, how important your 20s are with such big changes.

 

J: I think people say your 20s are like the best years, and now people say your 30s because you’re at a place where you can finally, like, mentally handle the freedom. I think it's hard when you're pushed out into the world, and you're just like, okay, I guess I'm an adult now, and I need to figure this out. I think for some people it’s finding a partner or finding love, which I think is great, but I think for a lot of people, especially in today's day and age, it’s different; that's why I called the album In Retrospect. It's like I needed to go through all of that to get to where I am now, and now I feel I'm finally at a place where I'm even starting to consider putting myself out there again romantically. I needed that time to figure out my shit, so I just wanted to normalise that and make people feel a little more comfortable as they do it themselves.

 

A: It seems from the album, there's such a mix of like loud revelations and reflections as well as the quiet ones. Together, they have such an impact. I feel like In Retrospect, it was such an evolution. When did you realise the project had shifted into such a healing space, or was that always the plan?

 

J: Definitely, that's not where I saw it going. It's been hard to kind of discuss this, but I was a part of a toxic relationship for five years with someone I actually worked with. This was a professional relationship, there's a lot of vulnerability in being an artist in the industry, it can be hit or miss, and I have met the most incredible people during the course of my career so far, but there was also hard lessons I needed to learn, and one of those lessons was letting go of that professional relationship, even though it scared me, and that was a crutch for me, that relationship.

 

I think I wrote my song “Little Distractions”, and that was the moment when, after I left that toxic thing, I realised that I wasn't treating my body with respect. That professional relationship had nothing to do with my body, but I think it was more a representation that I let someone treat me like shit, and then I'd also been treating myself like shit, and one of those things was I had, like, a vaping addiction; I was very addicted to vaping and nicotine. I had a day when I was at the gym, and I didn't feel good. I literally went cold turkey and tossed my vape in the garbage. I’d been struggling with this for years, and I'm finally letting go of it. So I wanted to write a song about the little distractions in our lives, and in my life in particular. Whether it was nicotine or hooking up with someone, we use these as a bandage, and at some point you realise it’s not like the true healer; it's just like a temporary fix. It's things that make you feel less anxious in the moment, but then create a larger cycle of anxiety, and I think once I started looking inwardly and realised that, I started viewing myself differently. Letting go of that toxic thing proved to myself that I'm strong. I feel like I can do hard things; I can be strong. So the album suddenly became this very self-reflective project.

 

A: I love that. Was there a song that maybe surprised you emotionally?

 

J: That's a really good question. I would probably say one of them is “Normal People”. I think that I haven't allowed myself to mourn the idea that if I want to have a family one day, it's just going to be a different kind of process than most people go through, and I think that as a gay man, and as someone who's been very career focused, and not necessarily someone who thought I really want to have kids. I think I'm at a point where, if I meet someone and we fall in love and want to build something together, then ok, but I really can't see that. I think it's something that I've brushed off. I think when I was writing the song, I didn’t want to be a ‘normal’ person, and I didn’t want the white picket fence, but I think there are layers to it, because I think deep down, like, maybe I am a little sad that I might not get that. In “Normal People”, I talk about people fucking with the lights off; they can't even look at themselves, and although I know that’s true for some people, I also know people in very happy relationships. I think I tell myself I don't want certain things, so that it's easier for me to not want them, you know what I mean, but I think after writing it, I realised that there are parts of me that don't want that, and then there are probably parts of me that do. I think “Normal People” hit me in an emotional way, because it made me realise that when I was a kid, I probably saw myself married with kids by 31 but now I think the world is different, and I think people are doing that a little later in life, and I personally love to see that, but I think it can still be emotional and it can still be hard to grapple with.

 

A: This resonates a lot with me, becoming aware of whether I’m choosing things because I want to protect myself and my emotions rather than organically wanting them. There is a lot of nuance around it and discovery.

 

J: I think that there's value to also creating a career, but often we feel like we're running out of time, and we're not, but no matter what, everyone's on their own path, and there's no right or wrong answer.

 

A: Yeah, I think you're right, and I think that's it's kind of coming to terms with things being what they will be. When you are writing such deeply personal feelings and experiences, I know many people feel it’s therapeutic, but do you ever feel protective of these things and how much you want to share? I’m a big advocate of therapy, but I’ve learned over the years that my automatic switch to oversharing sometimes wasn’t as therapeutic or safe as I thought.

 

J: I relate to you because I talk about in therapy a lot how it really validates me to have a feeling be shared. I'm very guilty of writing a song and immediately sending it to my team, being like I love this. What do you think? Tell me what you think because I want it shared. I think it's a beautiful quality to be so open and outspoken, and I am that too. My gut thing is to be like, nobody is too much, and if somebody feels that, then they need to find less. I was literally talking to my best friend this morning, who's like going through a breakup, and she was talking about her first therapy session post-breakup, and she was talking about how her fear was that she is too much, and the therapist was like, well, maybe you are too much, too emotionally intelligent, too communicative, too open-minded for this person. I think your question is: how to balance my private life and hold things to myself when I have a job writing songs for the world? I think songs are a really interesting way to share my experience, because at the end of the day, a song is fully truthful, but it is also only a glimpse. I think that's how parasocial relationships form, where you listen to an artist's record, and you think you fully know this person. And you definitely know a good chunk of who they are, but you don't know them all. I mean, there's a lot that you can't fit into a three-minute song, and I think that there are specific things that I've gone through in my life that I am unable to share via songs, and there are also very forwardly blunt emotional things I've also said in songs. I think for me, if I'm in the studio and I'm writing and I get a feeling that I want to say something, I'm going to say it, but it is impossible for me to say everything, and I think I just trust that process.

 

A: I'm a big believer in fate, and things happening when they are supposed to. Why was now the right time, do you think, for this album?

 

J: I feel like I want to lean more towards it, kind of just it just happening the way it happened. I can look back on every album and see that it was very appropriate for that period of time. It's funny because my second album, Boy, was kind of marketed towards songs for my inner child, sampling a song from my childhood and making it queer. I almost felt like when I wrote Boy, that it was me having found myself type of record. It's really when your Saturn return hits you, and you're like, hold up, there's a lot I still need to figure out, and actually I needed to write Sex With Myself to get to this point. I also was carrying a lot of sexual shame for a while, and it was important for me to let go of that. When I started writing this record, it was very angry, and then it slowly became really reflective and really cathartic. I feel like it's more directed at me, and so I think it organically happened that way, and it's really cool to see.

 

A: Do you think you're the closest to your music and your authentic self?

 

J: Totally. I really do look back on my past albums really fondly; there were so many healing elements to those too. I think there's another layer to this record, which was the sonics of it. I grew up loving pop-rock music. I loved Avril Lavigne, and I would argue that early Hilary Duff songs were totally rock songs. I have always loved pop, but I was obsessed with Simple Plan and Good Charlotte, and I loved pop-punk bands. I think as a gay man, there were moments where I almost felt like I wasn't cool enough to like that kind of music, because I was also like a theatre kid and choir kid in school. But I'd come home and be listening to pop punk bands, so I feel like after my last tour, which was a tour supporting an album that was mostly like electronic dance pop, I realised that my show throughout my entire career has always leaned rock because I prefer to have a band over dancers. I love having a drummer, and I love having a guitar player. After the last tour, I realised how fulfilling it is to me as an artist and as a singer and as someone who loves putting on, like, a rock show. I wanted to actually lean into it this time. I want to commit to it. I wanted to make an album that feels really nostalgic. I really wanted to make the whole album feel cohesive with that kind of time and era, and that was also really fun for me.

 

A: Hearing how important it’s felt to your core and being so authentic to yourself, if you could describe In Retrospect, how would you?

 

J: I think I would say, healing and nostalgic and reflective. Even the ending of the record, I feel, is so symbolic to me, because it's me just exploring how I've spent so much time freaking out about shit that really doesn't matter that much. I think the older I get, the more I realise that we're all fucking human, and I'm never gonna be perfect. There have been many times I've beaten myself up for not being somewhere that I think I should be, whether it's in my career or romantically, so it's like whatever. I am at a point where I'm ready to let go of all of the moments I’ve blamed myself for things that are outside of my control. It was healing for me in that way. I've been doing this for a long time, and I plan on continuing to do this. Every album I've gone into, I'm like, maybe this is the one that breaks me into stardom, and I've kind of let go of that, because there's a lot I can't control, and we artists are just out here doing our best, and I'm really proud of this record. So at the end of the day, whatever happens, happens, and I'm proud of it no matter what.