2023 - USA
Singer-Songwriter, Art Pop, Baroque Pop, Chamber Pop
There is one string of serenity in Margaret.
At one minute and ten seconds in the eleventh song off the album, there’s a discreet string in the background, lush and tensed. It happens that this string sounds exactly the same as the one opening Love Song on Norman Fucking Rockwell. A small detail, just one note, a simple orchestration hiding in the shadow. A detail of serenity.
With her ninth album Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean blvd, Lana Del Rey comes back with a very well-orchestrated chaotic album that feels both like a rush of feelings and an in-depth exploration of some of her most thoughtful remembrances. The main quest she follows throughout the sixteen songs has to do with her origins. “Do you contemplate where we came from?” she asks on Sweet. But what happens when your origin is rotten? “What kind of mother was she to say I’d end up in institutions?” she pronounces on the gut-wrenching Fingertips, saying “mother” like a cursed word, before going: “What the fuck’s wrong in your head to send me away, never to come back? Exotic places and people don’t take the place of being your child.” Lana Del Rey was sent to a boarding school around the age of 14, went through alcohol addiction and joined a host family in Spain at the age of 16. If there’s a figure you won’t find in Lana Del Rey’s discography, it’s one of innocence.
During her entire career, she has always followed patterns of self-destruction and reconstruction. “I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was nine / I haven’t seen my mother in a long long time” open A&W by connecting the joy and freedom of childhood with the unbearable presence of her father’s wife. On Blue Banisters’ opening song Textbook, she recalls that “there was the issue of her / I didn’t even like myself or love the life I had / And there you were with shining stars”. Lana Del Rey has always been struggling with her origins and she used to talk about these men who put “stars in her eyes” and lifted her up, usually for bad reasons, just like when she’s abandoned in Blue Banisters and feels “invisible” on Fingertips because of abusive masculinity. As soon as her face and body became public, her every move was discussed and trashed by people, from the first time she appeared in the music video of Video Games until when she gained weight during Covid. The cover of Chemtrails Over the Country Club was an answer to that: her surrounded by women.
That’s this experience she connects with in A&W when she sings “I mean look at my hair / Look at the length of it and the shape of my body / If I told you I was raped / Do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?” The first time in the song she sang “I mean look at me, look at the length of my hair, my face, the shape of my body” these were words of strength and self-affirmation. But here she repeats the very same things and shows us how words can be twisted by men that turns feminine power and independence into whore behavior. An American whore with an escape hatch, when the beat starts to sound threatening on A&W, when the trap-like vibe is taking over. Many mention Lust For Life in correlation to this song but Lust For Life was about stardom and frailty, trap beats were used in a lush and self-affirming way. Here the trap beats are not the same. They come from Blue Banisters’ Interlude – the Trio where Ennio Morricone’s remixed with heavy trap beats. This track was a middle finger to her detractors, a brilliant statement of her inalienable freedom as an artist. That’s the same energy invading the space of A&W. Lana Del Rey’s inalienable freedom swirls and whirls to distort her voice. She becomes this monstrously powerful woman crushing down everything on her way. In this final act, the frequent Lana characters “Jimmy” and “getting high” are no longer those glamorous themes she was embracing in her early works. They are now drenched in this bubble of trap energy Lana fills with her eerie voice and relentless words.
Because something changed, the “shining stars” in Textbook are no longer in someone else’s eyes, they are in hers on Sweet. This means she is no longer inspired by toxic men, but by herself and her “hiking up Griffith”. Through her entire discography: places. Ocean Boulevard, Long Beach, the Rocky Mountains, the Ramada etc, her body was a “map of LA” in Arcadia, and she still embraces those wild spaces. Lana Del Rey’s words feel like a modern Joni Mitchell back in 1976 when her body was pierced by a lonesome road on the cover of Hejira. Not all those who wander are lost, and for Lana Del Rey this connection to the motherland is her poetry in motion, a spiritual quest nourishing her.
But some of those places are gone. Not physically speaking, but in people’s memories. Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard could be translated by “Do you remember I exist? I’m this secret under the plain view. Will you let me unheard, unspoken and untouched?” As an incarnation of America, Lana also is this old memory of a past that has been forgotten. On Fingertips, she asks “Give me a mausoleum in Rhode Island with Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, and Dave who hung himself so high in the National Park sky”. This mausoleum also is an abandoned place in Rhode Island that says a lot about Lana’s fear of death and forgetfulness. In recent history, Lana lost her uncle and her grandmother. That “family line” she recalls on the beautifully moving opening The Grants is something she’s battling with. If the title track is about a self-destructive behavior to forget her wounds, constantly repeating “open me up, tell me you like me, fuck me to death until I love myself”, Lana also reached that newly found maturity of a broken face with no sunglasses.
“I’m crying right now to get to you, to save you, if I take my life / Find your astral body, put it into my arms / Give you two seconds to cry / Take you home, I’ll give you a blanket / Your spirit can sit and watch TV by my side.” In Fingertips she wants to bring her uncle’s back to Earth for a little while, just to heal. A fingertip is this frail connection between your skin and the surface of all things. Here it’s this very thin thread between her desire of life and her desire of death, “sittin’ on the sofa feelin’ super suicidal”. But Fingertips is a mythological rebirth, ending with “Like the waves in the sea / Call me Aphrodite, as they bow down to me”. From the water emerges this new “fallible deity wrapped up in white” that has been broken in the past. But since then, Kintsugi went by. This Japanese art is all about repairing broken objects by mending the areas of breakage with dusted and powdered gold in order to keep the scars visible. “I’ve had to let it break a little more / Cause they say that’s what it’s for / That’s how the light shines in.” Kintsugi repairs, but it’s not only matter that you put on the breakage, it’s light. With gold, kintsugi creates a bridge between the outside and the inside of an object. That’s the philosophy Lana Del Rey adopts in this album in opposition to this darkness she keeps inside herself.
On the darkest song off the album, Candy Necklaces, the pre-chorus goes “Rockefella, my umbrella.” The city skyscrapers are shielding her from the light of the sun, and that way she can’t let the light in. That’s why the strings of Candy Necklaces sound so dark and frightening. But because, as she says on Fishtail, “Maybe I’ll take my glasses off so I stop painting red flags green”, she can finally see that “you the best but baby you’ve been bringing me down / I can see it now”, reversing the lyrics of Summertime Sadness back to her more glamorous femme-fatale era where she “just wanted you to know / That baby you’re the best”. To fight this darkness of men who continuously “wanted [her] sadder”, the trap beats continue to create a space for her to unleash her feminine energy in the final three-track run, Fishtail, Peppers and taco Truck x VB.
During these three final songs, Lana Del Rey get rid of everyone else’s looks as she sings on Taco Truck: “Before you talk, let me stop what you’re saying / I know, I know, I know that you hate me” while on the absolutely addictive Peppers she shares the stage with Tommy Genesis, having a good time, “skinny-dip in my mind’. Ending with a trap remix of Venice Bitch, Lana tackles the two sides of her being because “although it seems I’ve gotten better I can be violent too” and the gracious Venice Bitch gets a bit violent too, freeform and more incisive than before. Still devoured by uncertainty, not knowing if she will ever feel ready to have a child of her own because “It’s said that my mind is not fit, or so they say, to carry a child”, she manages to “give [herself] two seconds to breathe and go back to being a serene queen”.
On Margaret, at one minute and ten seconds, there’s this single string of serenity. Because like always, the biggest life drive Lana Del Rey finds is among her loved ones and among other inspiring careful beings. Next to Jon Batiste, she finds a way to free herself from any clear form of music on their transcendent interlude. Next to Father John Misty, she finally lets the lights in while Pastor Judah Smith, accompanied by a wonderful mystical piano instrumental, helps her understand that even if he “used to think my preaching was mostly about You, I’ve discovered my preaching is mostly about me”. About me. Lana takes some time to breathe, for herself. That’s what drives “Did you know”’s strength. So, hand in hand with SYML’s wonderful instrumental on Paris Texas, she can find the confidence to say “It’s time to go”. So, with a gospel choir on The Grants she finally is “doin’ the hard stuff […] for us, for our family line”. More than ever before, intergenerational guidance from regretted loved ones, inspirations from her friends’ success at happiness and her very own will and creativity take Lana Del Rey to entirely new places that still haven’t been named nor forgotten. And on that dense, dense road, she’s takes us with her, with her “sister’s first born child”, with her “grandmother’s last smile”, to make this road “a beautiful life”. Let’s remember that too.
At one minute and ten seconds in the eleventh song off the album, there’s a discreet string in the background, lush and tensed. It happens that this string sounds exactly the same as the one opening Love Song on Norman Fucking Rockwell. A small detail, just one note, a simple orchestration hiding in the shadow. A detail of serenity.
With her ninth album Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean blvd, Lana Del Rey comes back with a very well-orchestrated chaotic album that feels both like a rush of feelings and an in-depth exploration of some of her most thoughtful remembrances. The main quest she follows throughout the sixteen songs has to do with her origins. “Do you contemplate where we came from?” she asks on Sweet. But what happens when your origin is rotten? “What kind of mother was she to say I’d end up in institutions?” she pronounces on the gut-wrenching Fingertips, saying “mother” like a cursed word, before going: “What the fuck’s wrong in your head to send me away, never to come back? Exotic places and people don’t take the place of being your child.” Lana Del Rey was sent to a boarding school around the age of 14, went through alcohol addiction and joined a host family in Spain at the age of 16. If there’s a figure you won’t find in Lana Del Rey’s discography, it’s one of innocence.
During her entire career, she has always followed patterns of self-destruction and reconstruction. “I haven’t done a cartwheel since I was nine / I haven’t seen my mother in a long long time” open A&W by connecting the joy and freedom of childhood with the unbearable presence of her father’s wife. On Blue Banisters’ opening song Textbook, she recalls that “there was the issue of her / I didn’t even like myself or love the life I had / And there you were with shining stars”. Lana Del Rey has always been struggling with her origins and she used to talk about these men who put “stars in her eyes” and lifted her up, usually for bad reasons, just like when she’s abandoned in Blue Banisters and feels “invisible” on Fingertips because of abusive masculinity. As soon as her face and body became public, her every move was discussed and trashed by people, from the first time she appeared in the music video of Video Games until when she gained weight during Covid. The cover of Chemtrails Over the Country Club was an answer to that: her surrounded by women.
That’s this experience she connects with in A&W when she sings “I mean look at my hair / Look at the length of it and the shape of my body / If I told you I was raped / Do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?” The first time in the song she sang “I mean look at me, look at the length of my hair, my face, the shape of my body” these were words of strength and self-affirmation. But here she repeats the very same things and shows us how words can be twisted by men that turns feminine power and independence into whore behavior. An American whore with an escape hatch, when the beat starts to sound threatening on A&W, when the trap-like vibe is taking over. Many mention Lust For Life in correlation to this song but Lust For Life was about stardom and frailty, trap beats were used in a lush and self-affirming way. Here the trap beats are not the same. They come from Blue Banisters’ Interlude – the Trio where Ennio Morricone’s remixed with heavy trap beats. This track was a middle finger to her detractors, a brilliant statement of her inalienable freedom as an artist. That’s the same energy invading the space of A&W. Lana Del Rey’s inalienable freedom swirls and whirls to distort her voice. She becomes this monstrously powerful woman crushing down everything on her way. In this final act, the frequent Lana characters “Jimmy” and “getting high” are no longer those glamorous themes she was embracing in her early works. They are now drenched in this bubble of trap energy Lana fills with her eerie voice and relentless words.
Because something changed, the “shining stars” in Textbook are no longer in someone else’s eyes, they are in hers on Sweet. This means she is no longer inspired by toxic men, but by herself and her “hiking up Griffith”. Through her entire discography: places. Ocean Boulevard, Long Beach, the Rocky Mountains, the Ramada etc, her body was a “map of LA” in Arcadia, and she still embraces those wild spaces. Lana Del Rey’s words feel like a modern Joni Mitchell back in 1976 when her body was pierced by a lonesome road on the cover of Hejira. Not all those who wander are lost, and for Lana Del Rey this connection to the motherland is her poetry in motion, a spiritual quest nourishing her.
But some of those places are gone. Not physically speaking, but in people’s memories. Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard could be translated by “Do you remember I exist? I’m this secret under the plain view. Will you let me unheard, unspoken and untouched?” As an incarnation of America, Lana also is this old memory of a past that has been forgotten. On Fingertips, she asks “Give me a mausoleum in Rhode Island with Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, and Dave who hung himself so high in the National Park sky”. This mausoleum also is an abandoned place in Rhode Island that says a lot about Lana’s fear of death and forgetfulness. In recent history, Lana lost her uncle and her grandmother. That “family line” she recalls on the beautifully moving opening The Grants is something she’s battling with. If the title track is about a self-destructive behavior to forget her wounds, constantly repeating “open me up, tell me you like me, fuck me to death until I love myself”, Lana also reached that newly found maturity of a broken face with no sunglasses.
“I’m crying right now to get to you, to save you, if I take my life / Find your astral body, put it into my arms / Give you two seconds to cry / Take you home, I’ll give you a blanket / Your spirit can sit and watch TV by my side.” In Fingertips she wants to bring her uncle’s back to Earth for a little while, just to heal. A fingertip is this frail connection between your skin and the surface of all things. Here it’s this very thin thread between her desire of life and her desire of death, “sittin’ on the sofa feelin’ super suicidal”. But Fingertips is a mythological rebirth, ending with “Like the waves in the sea / Call me Aphrodite, as they bow down to me”. From the water emerges this new “fallible deity wrapped up in white” that has been broken in the past. But since then, Kintsugi went by. This Japanese art is all about repairing broken objects by mending the areas of breakage with dusted and powdered gold in order to keep the scars visible. “I’ve had to let it break a little more / Cause they say that’s what it’s for / That’s how the light shines in.” Kintsugi repairs, but it’s not only matter that you put on the breakage, it’s light. With gold, kintsugi creates a bridge between the outside and the inside of an object. That’s the philosophy Lana Del Rey adopts in this album in opposition to this darkness she keeps inside herself.
On the darkest song off the album, Candy Necklaces, the pre-chorus goes “Rockefella, my umbrella.” The city skyscrapers are shielding her from the light of the sun, and that way she can’t let the light in. That’s why the strings of Candy Necklaces sound so dark and frightening. But because, as she says on Fishtail, “Maybe I’ll take my glasses off so I stop painting red flags green”, she can finally see that “you the best but baby you’ve been bringing me down / I can see it now”, reversing the lyrics of Summertime Sadness back to her more glamorous femme-fatale era where she “just wanted you to know / That baby you’re the best”. To fight this darkness of men who continuously “wanted [her] sadder”, the trap beats continue to create a space for her to unleash her feminine energy in the final three-track run, Fishtail, Peppers and taco Truck x VB.
During these three final songs, Lana Del Rey get rid of everyone else’s looks as she sings on Taco Truck: “Before you talk, let me stop what you’re saying / I know, I know, I know that you hate me” while on the absolutely addictive Peppers she shares the stage with Tommy Genesis, having a good time, “skinny-dip in my mind’. Ending with a trap remix of Venice Bitch, Lana tackles the two sides of her being because “although it seems I’ve gotten better I can be violent too” and the gracious Venice Bitch gets a bit violent too, freeform and more incisive than before. Still devoured by uncertainty, not knowing if she will ever feel ready to have a child of her own because “It’s said that my mind is not fit, or so they say, to carry a child”, she manages to “give [herself] two seconds to breathe and go back to being a serene queen”.
On Margaret, at one minute and ten seconds, there’s this single string of serenity. Because like always, the biggest life drive Lana Del Rey finds is among her loved ones and among other inspiring careful beings. Next to Jon Batiste, she finds a way to free herself from any clear form of music on their transcendent interlude. Next to Father John Misty, she finally lets the lights in while Pastor Judah Smith, accompanied by a wonderful mystical piano instrumental, helps her understand that even if he “used to think my preaching was mostly about You, I’ve discovered my preaching is mostly about me”. About me. Lana takes some time to breathe, for herself. That’s what drives “Did you know”’s strength. So, hand in hand with SYML’s wonderful instrumental on Paris Texas, she can find the confidence to say “It’s time to go”. So, with a gospel choir on The Grants she finally is “doin’ the hard stuff […] for us, for our family line”. More than ever before, intergenerational guidance from regretted loved ones, inspirations from her friends’ success at happiness and her very own will and creativity take Lana Del Rey to entirely new places that still haven’t been named nor forgotten. And on that dense, dense road, she’s takes us with her, with her “sister’s first born child”, with her “grandmother’s last smile”, to make this road “a beautiful life”. Let’s remember that too.