FEATURE:
A Buyer’s Guide
PHOTO CREDIT: Joe Pugliese/August
Part Ninety: Lana Del Rey
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I recently featured Lana Del Rey’s 2012…
album, Born to Die, a few weeks back. I am revisiting it for this ninetieth edition of A Buyer’s Guide. With her eighth studio album,. Blue Banisters, released last year, I wanted to look more widely at her work. Before recommending the four essential albums, the underrated gem, the latest studio album and a book about her, I wanted to bring in some biography from AllMusic:
“Lana Del Rey envisioned a Southern California dream world constructed out of sad girls and bad boys, manufactured melancholy, and genuine glamour, and then she came to embody this fantasy. At first, her stylized noir-pop garnered skeptical sneers -- the rise of her 2012 debut, Born to Die, was impeded by a tentative live debut on Saturday Night Live -- but Del Rey proved to be tougher than her soft exterior suggested. Following a hit remix of her single "Summertime Sadness," she steadily gained not only popularity but respect; her second album, 2014's Ultraviolence, received positive reviews to accompany her sales, and her imitators (of which there were many) became merely an alluring accessory. With subsequent albums like 2019's Grammy-nominated Norman Fucking Rockwell! and 2021's Blue Banisters, Del Rey grew more and more into the ideal she intended to be: a damaged torch singer designed as the tragic romantic icon for her age.
Lana Del Rey's journey to this stardom was a long, steady climb. Born Elizabeth Woolridge Grant in New York City to a pair of wealthy parents, she was raised in Lake Placid, not starting to pursue music until she was out of high school and living with her aunt and uncle on Long Island. Her uncle taught her how to play guitar and soon she was writing songs and playing New York clubs, sometimes under the name Lizzy Grant. While she attended Fordham University, she continued to play music and she started getting serious around 2005. In April of that year, a CD of originals was registered under her birth name with the U.S. Copyright Office and she recorded elsewhere, finishing up an unreleased folky album called Sirens under the name May Jailer.
Reverting to the name Lizzy Grant, she signed with 5 Points Records in 2006, recording an EP called Kill Kill with producer David Kahne, who would prove to be her first pivotal collaborator. Kill Kill appeared digitally in 2008, and over the next two years, Grant became Lana Del Rey, digitally releasing a full self-titled album under that name in 2010. Not long after its release, she teamed with managers Ben Mawson and Ed Millett, who helped her separate from 5 Points (rights to her recordings reverted back to her) and moved to England, where she began crafting the Lana Del Rey persona.
The first unveiling of Lana Del Rey arrived in 2011 via YouTube videos that quickly became a viral sensation, led by the moody, murky "Video Games" and followed by "Blue Jeans." Much of her success was limited to the Internet, but it soon started to spill over into U.K. pop culture. By the fall of that year, she released "Video Games" on Stranger Records, an independent division of Interscope/Polydor, in the U.K., and she won the Next Big Thing trophy at the Q Awards. Del Rey's full-fledged debut album, Born to Die, appeared to considerable anticipation in January 2012. Greeted by mixed reviews, Born to Die's launch also suffered a setback after Del Rey's halting appearance on Saturday Night Live on in January 2012, but that apparent stumble ultimately had the effect of raising Del Rey's profile, and soon Born to Die became a steady seller. That November, Del Rey released the Paradise EP -- at eight tracks and 33 minutes, it was essentially a mini-LP; some pressings bundled Paradise with Born to Die -- which, supported by the single "Ride," charted at ten in the U.S.
Throughout 2013, various singles and videos surfaced -- these included a cover of Leonard Cohen's "Chelsea Hotel #2," as well as a cover of Lee Hazlewood's "Summer Wine" performed with her then-boyfriend, Barrie-James O'Neill -- but her biggest release of the year was the new song "Young and Beautiful," penned for Baz Luhrmann's adaptation of The Great Gatsby. Ultimately, this single was overshadowed by Cedric Gervais' remix of Born to Die's "Summertime Sadness," a remix that turned the song into her first Top Ten hit in the U.S. At the end of 2013, Del Rey released a short film called Tropico, which was accompanied by an EP of the same name. All of these releases -- including a cover of the Disney standard "Once Upon a Dream" for the Disney film Maleficent -- kept Del Rey in the spotlight as she worked on her second album.
Del Rey hired Dan Auerbach, the leader of Ohio blues-rockers the Black Keys, to produce the majority of Ultraviolence, the sophomore set that appeared in June 2014, preceded by the singles "West Coast," "Shades of Cool," "Ultraviolence," and "Brooklyn Baby." Ultraviolence found a more receptive initial audience than Born to Die: not only were the reviews positive, so were the sales, with the album debuting at number one in both the U.S. and the U.K. Ultimately, Ultraviolence didn't generate hits as big as Born to Die, but it performed the crucial task of elevating Del Rey's critical reputation, illustrated by her selection to sing the title song for Tim Burton's 2014 bid for an Oscar, Big Eyes.
Del Rey wasted no time following Ultraviolence. During the first months of 2015, she worked on a third full-length album and announced a co-headlining summer 2015 tour with Courtney Love. As the summer wound to a close, Del Rey announced the September release of Honeymoon, an album she said was "very different from the last one and similar to the first two, Born to Die and Paradise." Her claim was borne out by the album's first two singles, "High by the Beach" and "Terrence Loves You." Honeymoon saw release on September 18, 2015. The album topped the charts in a handful of countries, peaking at number two on the Billboard 200. In addition to touring in support of Honeymoon, she contributed vocals to the Weeknd's chart-topping third LP, Starboy, and began recording for her own follow-up.
In early 2017, she released "Love," the first single from her fourth full-length album, Lust for Life, which arrived that July. Along with debuting at number one on the Billboard 200, the album earned Del Rey her second Grammy nomination for Best Pop Vocal Album. The following year, she began rolling out singles in advance of her fifth album, Norman Fucking Rockwell!, beginning with "Mariners Apartment Complex" and "Venice Bitch." The trickle of new music continued throughout 2019 with a steady stream of new songs, some one-offs, and some album tracks. After ramping up excitement for the record with a cover of Sublime's "Doin' Time" and a two-part joint single, "Fuck It I Love You"/"The Greatest," Norman Fucking Rockwell! was released in late August 2019. It received Grammy nominations for Album of the Year as well as Song of the Year for the title track. The following year, Del Rey issued Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass, a book of poetry that also yielded a spoken word album of the same name.
The official follow-up to Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Chemtrails over the Country Club, appeared in March 2021. Only a few months later, Del Rey released three more singles including the song "Blue Banisters" from her forthcoming album of the same name. Blue Banisters arrived in October of that year, featuring production on some songs from Kanye West and Kid Cudi producer Mike Dean”.
To highlight the incredible work of Lana Del Rey, this A Buyer’s Guide combines the albums that you must hear. If you are a new fan of hers, I hope that the details below are of some use. To me, Del Rey is one of the greatest artists…
IN the world.
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The Four Essential Albums
Ultraviolence
Release Date: 13th June, 2014
Labels: Polydor/Interscope
Producers: Dan Auerbach/Lana Del Rey/Paul Epworth/Lee Foster/Daniel Heath/Greg Kurstin/Rick Nowels/Blake Stranathan
Standout Tracks: Shades of Cool/Brooklyn Baby/West Coast
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=697600&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/1ORxRsK3MrSLvh7VQTF01F?si=oblY2JJmReGb0a7v4QfFdQ
Review:
“The title of Lana Del Rey’s new album is a portmanteau coined in Anthony Burgess’ bloody dystopian fantasy A Clockwork Orange, which Stanley Kubrick turned into one of his signature films in 1971. Kubrick would have loved Del Rey — a highly stylized vixen who romanticizes fatalism to near-pornographic levels, creating fantastically decadent moments of film-noir melodrama. It’s an aesthetic that demands total commitment from both artist and listener, and it would be difficult to buy into if she didn’t deliver such fully realized cinema. Ultraviolence masterfully melds those elements, and completes the redemption narrative of a singer whose breakout-to-backlash arc on 2012’s Born to Die made her a cautionary tale of music-industry hype.
The addition of producer Dan Auerbach enhances Ultra‘s air of everyday menace, and finds Del Rey digging deeper. The Black Keys frontman doesn’t push — he’d rather let her shape-shifting moan brush up against dusty drum loops and dead-eyed bass drones. The spacey, sinister groove of ”West Coast” proves that frequent Auerbach collaborator Danger Mouse’s style has rubbed off on him too, and ”Pretty When You Cry” evolves from a woozy mumble into a widescreen blast of guitar heroics. Del Rey’s dark urges — for love, for money, for pure pleasure — don’t evoke the Clockwork droogs as much as they do Tom Cruise’s Dr. Bill Harford from Kubrick’s final film, Eyes Wide Shut. Like Harford, Del Rey has spent countless hours stalking the night, searching for answers and trying on various guises — and Ultraviolence is the masked bacchanalia that finally unleashes the full potential lurking beneath the hype. A” – Entertainment Weekly
Choice Cut: Ultraviolence
Lust for Life
Release Date: 21st July, 2017
Labels: Polydor/Interscope
Producers: Lana Del Rey/Rick Nowels/Kieron Menzies/Dean Reid/Benny Blanco/Boi-1da/Emile Haynie/Tim Larcombe/Sean Ono Lennon/Max Martin/Metro Boomin/Mighty Mike/Jahaan Sweet
Standout Tracks: Lust for Life (with The Weeknd)/White Mustang/Get Free
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=1212427&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/7xYiTrbTL57QO0bb4hXIKo?si=eDp5aMpFTTKgtNrN1r8Sxg
Review:
“For those who haven’t paid attention to Del Rey’s career since its first flourish – the sighing, sorrow-drenched Video Games – the Californian artist’s music has remained locked within a small range of emotions, most of which revolve around awful men (often elderly bikers or gangsters) doing awful things and Del Rey remaining belligerently in love with them. However, the world has changed considerably since 2015’s Honeymoon, and, much like Katy Perry’s ambition to make “purposeful pop”, Del Rey has decided to puncture her long-running narrative and reflect the troubled times we are in.
Here, her political approach is rooted in escapism. Del Rey’s longtime producer Rick Nowels recently declared When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing a “masterpiece” for its lyrical message about finding pleasure in the Trump era. Meanwhile, Coachella – Woodstock in My Mind is a sedated trap track; one that attracted derision for its title, given that Del Rey is the patron saint of wearing a flower garland at a celebrity-filled festival. It is a sweetly innocent song about observing an audience of young girls dressed just like her, and praying for their safety amid a period of global terror.
The triumphant God Bless America was written before the Women’s Marches of earlier this year and is a response to the Republicans’ attack on women’s rights – a relief for parents who’ve fretted over their children’s obsession with a singer who has a habit of romanticising toxic relationships. (Del Rey recently admitted that she no longer sings the Crystals-sampling lyric, “He hit me and it felt like a kiss” from her song Ultraviolence.) You can hear the pleasure in Del Rey’s vocals on Beautiful People Beautiful Problems, a piano ballad she shares with Stevie Nicks, which is comparable to Harry Styles’s vague, state-of-the-nation balladry.
But, for every socially conscious sentiment, she paints another pastel coloured paradise full of feted actors (“I’m flying to the moon again / Dreaming about heroin”), doe-eyed infatuation, and 50s girl-group appreciation (“My boyfriend’s back ... and he’s cooler than ever”). Groupie Love is spoken from the perspective of a devoted fan and features quintessentially Del Rey-like lines such as: “This is my life, you by my side / Key lime and perfume and festivals.” 13 Beaches is inexplicably about the time Del Rey travelled to 13 beaches before she found one with nobody on it. It’s surface-level stuff, but perhaps there’s a deeper message in there somewhere: the overwhelm of fame? Overpopulation? Climate change?
Still, Del Rey’s music has always been more about a feeling than an explicit lyrical message. This album features some of the most sophisticated production and shifting of moods from her four-album career. A$AP Rocky and Playboi Carti feature on the lazy rap track Summer Bummer, its eerie production and futuristic melancholy sounding closer to a track from Frank Ocean’s Blonde than her usual 50s and 60s enthralled shtick. The Beatles-referencing Tomorrow Never Came features vocals by Sean Lennon. It’s a strange, melodic reworking of the Beatles’ Something, a vintage glow that rubs up against the sleek contemporary-sounding soundscapes elsewhere. The Chris Isaak school of monochrome melancholy echoes around icy production. The old and new entwine throughout” – The Guardian
Choice Cut: Coachella – Woodstock in My Mind
Norman Fucking Rockwell!
Release Date: 30th August, 2019
Labels: Polydor/Interscope
Producers: Jack Antonoff/Lana Del Rey/Rick Nowels/Andrew Watt/Zachary Dawes/Happy Perez/Kieron Menzies/Dean Reid/Mighty Mike
Standout Tracks: Mariners Apartment Complex/Cinnamon Girl/The greatest
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/lana-del-rey/nfr-new-version/lp
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/5XpEKORZ4y6OrCZSKsi46A?si=IgTguzC8QbewVslfa_zdiQ
Review:
“Radiating new dimensions of sensitivity and eloquence, “Mariners Apartment Complex” is a towering peak on Norman Fuckng Rockwell!, a four-minute drama about fateful potential romantic energy. But its turbulent grandeur could speak to the whole Lana Del Rey story. “You took my sadness out of context” and “They mistook my kindness for weakness” are bold refusals to be misunderstood. Referencing Elton John with her pristine declaration “I ain’t no candle in the wind,” a phrase originally inspired by the early deaths of Marilyn Monroe and Janis Joplin, is a patent embrace of life from a woman who once wrote, “I wish I was dead.” When she sings, “I fucked up, I know that, but Jesus/Can’t a girl just do the best she can?” it could be a mic-dropping rebuttal to the ludicrous standards she faced from the start (and the overblown, Internet-engineered Lana outrage that now seems sexist and pathetic). The Hollywood author Eve Babitz once wrote, “Once it is established you are you and everyone else is merely perfect, ordinarily factory-like perfect… you can wreak all the havoc you want.” Lana’s evolution follows suit. “Mariners Apartment Complex” is the sort of ballad that makes teens want to bang on pianos and spill their souls.
Lana zooms out to find her zenith. A piano ballad to close down the bar at the end of the world, “The greatest” collapses time, as if Lana is writing the zeitgeist on a typewriter, her lines raving up with fevered reference to rock’n’roll and depression and a proverbial “Kokomo.” Turning the weight of a generation into light, her words crest like the white of a tidal wave—“L.A.’s in flames, it’s a getting hot/Kanye West is blonde and gone/‘Life On Mars’ ain’t just a song/Oh, the livestream’s almost on”—and they feel on arrival to have existed forever. As ever, Lana regards the despondency of existence as a realist, offering a funhouse reflection of the way we live.
Call her Doris Doomsday: “The culture is lit/And if this is it/I had a ball,” she resolves with ecstasy and fire, a lightning rod of humor, sadness, and perception; flip jadedness and abiding love. Fanning the flames of a culture ablaze, Lana sings each word like a prayer, finessed with conviction and smoke, chaos and control. “The greatest” is a galaxy-brain moment in the pantheon of pop, and it belongs to a generation fully aware we are at risk of being distracted into oblivion, Juuling towards early death while watching Earth burn.
But hope does not elude us yet. And Lana has an anthem for that, too. The title of Norman Fucking Rockwell!’s grand finale is itself a doomy 16-word poem called “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but I have it.” Whatever it was that brought Joni Mitchell and Leonard Cohen together half a century ago, that middle ground is in the solemn mood, hollowed space, and spiritual fortitude of this haunting song. In the muted resignation of her voice you can see her “trust no one” tattoo. She rejects a world of luxury, rejects happiness and sadness both, calls herself “24/7 Sylvia Plath.” And in this slow, glowering procession, she points more directly to her own personal history than ever—“spilling my guts with the Bowery bums” as a volunteer, FaceTiming her father “from beyond the grave”—and soberly she sings: “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman with my past.” In the vacant spaces between her dark phrases is the unassailable fact that people bury their pasts in order to endure them.
Norman Fucking Rockwell! is the apotheosis of Lana Del Rey, songs of curiosity and of consequence, darkness and light, a time capsule of 2019, proof that a person cannot escape herself but she can change. Lana has said hope is dangerous because of her own experience, because in Hollywood she “knows so much.” Hope is dangerous because women are rarely taken seriously, from matters of authenticity to cases of assault. Hope is dangerous because the world fails women, and the bigotry to which American power is currently pitched ensures it. Lana calls herself “a modern-day woman with a weak constitution,” witnessing “a new revolution,” with “monsters still under my bed that I never could fight off.” What makes this final song of survival so cutting is the palpable difficulty in her delivery. When she lands on “a gatekeeper carelessly dropping the keys on my nights off,” it sounds like an oblique image of corrupted power, as upsetting as it ought to be, one to finally drain her of hope. But she still has it. In a piercing falsetto we rarely if ever hear from Lana, perhaps saved for her most pressing truth, she touches the sky: “I have it, I have it, I have it.” And when she does, you believe her” – Pitchfork
Choice Cut: Venice Bitch
Chemtrails over the Country Club
Release Date: 19th March, 2021
Labels: Interscope/Polydor
Producers: Jack Antonoff/Lana Del Rey/Rick Nowels
Standout Tracks: White Dress/Tulsa Jesus Freak/Let Me Love You like a Woman
Buy: https://www.roughtrade.com/gb/lana-del-rey/chemtrails-over-the-country-club-black-friday-2021
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/6QeosPQpJckkW0Obir5RT8?si=0xIuyqMqTgqATX4blNNnDA
Review:
“Lana Del Rey's 2019 album Norman Fucking Rockwell! represented a new level of artistry, as the singer moved further from the disaffected Hollywood starlet persona of her early recordings into something more restrained, subtle, and mature. With seventh album Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Del Rey shakes off the cocoon of her slick pop days completely, continuing the nuanced songwriting and hushed perspectives of NFR! and turning in her most atmospheric set of songs to date. Much like its predecessor, the arrangements on Chemtrails are toned down, keeping the rhythmic elements minimal if they show up at all. This puts her layered self-harmonizing in the forefront of most songs, and also makes room for colorful smears of laid-back '70s-style lead guitar or delicate, jazz-informed touches. Del Rey again pairs with Jack Antonoff for production, and the duo map out every song with slowly evolving subtleties. "White Dress" opens with spare piano and a drawn-out vocal line, and slowly adds nearly imperceptible layers of sound as it goes on. On the surface, the song appears to be a simple nostalgic reflection, but the introduction of each new instrument adds tension and uneasiness, shifting the emotional undercurrents. In the first moments of the album, Del Rey delivers surreal and devastatingly sad commentary on the brutal machinery of the music industry and the sinister side of her own journey with fame, all deftly disguised with lyrics about remembering simpler days spent listening to the White Stripes and talking all night with friends. The title track is similarly sad and subdued, with willfully trite lyrics about the slow passing of an idyllic summer pushed forward by a dark, simmering instrumental.
While NFR! also had a restrained approach, there were multiple moments of accessible pop in the moody cover of Sublime's "Doin' Time" and the classic rock grandeur of "The Greatest." There's barely a hint of that here, with the booming bass and steady drum loop of "Dark But Just a Game" being the closest Chemtrails gets to pop production. There are more tendencies toward ghostly folk, as with the acoustic guitars and bongos of "Yosemite" or the lonely, drifting strumming of "Not All Who Wander Are Lost." Del Rey experiments with expanding the depths of her long-established persona, occasionally breaking the fourth wall with overtly personal lyrics. "Wild at Heart" includes one of several moments where she alters her phrasing to fit extra lyrics into a single line, wondering aloud about what would happen if she escaped her music career for a more frivolous existence. The opening lines of "Dance Til We Die" refer to "covering Joni" and the next song is a pristine cover of Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the Canyon classic "For Free," with vocal contributions from Weyes Blood and Zella Day. The track is a perfect closer for an album that further advances Del Rey's evolution from a constructed pop persona to a complex artist. It's on an entirely different page than the club-ready remixes of her earlier material, but with Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Del Rey shows her softest moments can be her most powerful” – AllMusic
Choice Cut: Chemtrails over the Country Club
The Underrated Gem
Honeymoon
Release Date: 18th September, 2015
Labels: Interscope/Polydor
Producers: Lana Del Rey/Kieron Menzies/Rick Nowels
Standout Tracks: Honeymoon/Music to Watch Boys To/Terrence Loves You
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=884682&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2DpEBrjCur1ythIZ10gJWw?si=hTb95k62TzSNzIrd6FC5DQ
Review:
“Earlier this year, Lana Del Rey said that her third album 'Honeymoon' would be "very different" to her previous release, 2014's underselling 'Ultraviolence'.
That album had seen the ‘Video Games’ singer work with Black Keys frontman Dan Auerbach to strip away the more modern elements of 2012 debut 'Born To Die' in favour of a vintage, smoky feel. The constant was the character that Del Rey – real name Lizzie Grant – has fostered: a brooding femme fatale, a stray extra from a Tim Burton film, the sultry face of sadness.
Three albums in, the challenge of ‘Honeymoon’ is not only to reconnect with the audience who bought 'Born To Die' but also to see how far she can push that character before it becomes a caricature. It's the album on which she can widen her world or typecast herself for good, but the words "very different" were an exaggeration – bad boys, sadness, mortality and the myth of California are still on the menu, even if its crisp beats snap the album back to 2015.
The grainy video for the title track has the singer reclining on a bank by a freeway, battered paperback in hand; the song has sounds like the theme for a desolate Bond film directed by Lars Von Trier. Del Rey was, apparently, in the frame for Spectre at one point, and spy soundtracks inform much of the album, from the pensive 'God Knows I Tried' to the quietly powerful 'Terence Loves You'. Out of Bond mode, the mood is languid and tortured, the pace slow and intense even when underpinned by trap hip hop influenced beats as on 'High By The Beach'.
An intoxicating listen, ‘Honeymoon’ is designed for the red neon glow of a smoky cabaret bar, a Californian answer to the chanson tradition. Its lyrics are pulled from the jaws of tragedy, and its melodies evoke the uneasy state between wakefulness and dreaming. Lana seems more fragile, and more human this time. And it makes you think: perhaps it's not a character after all” – NME
Choice Cut: High by the Beach
The Latest Album
Blue Banisters
Release Date: 22nd October, 2021
Labels: Interscope/Polydor
Producers: Lana Del Rey/Gabe Simon/Zachary Dawes/Drew Erickson/Dean Reid/Loren Humphrey/Mike Dean/Barrie-James O'Neil/lRick Nowels
Standout Tracks: Blue Banisters/If You Lie Down with Me/Cherry Blossom
Buy: https://www.discogs.com/sell/list?master_id=2344513&ev=mb
Stream: https://open.spotify.com/album/2wwCc6fcyhp1tfY3J6Javr?si=BBvBVP-gQNSBHEBSIR23mQ
Review:
“Let’s keep it simple, babe/Don’t make it complicated,” Lana Del Rey purrs at the start of “Beautiful,” a track from her eighth studio album, Blue Banisters. The lyric serves as a statement of purpose, reflecting the album’s pared-down arrangements, as in the glistening, interlocking piano chords on “Beautiful,” the emphatically plucked acoustic guitar on “Nectar of the Gods,” and plaintive brass instruments on “Arcadia” and “If You Lie Down with Me.” The decision to keep the music sparse draws focus to the lyrical content, which is some of the most razor-sharp and bitingly funny of Del Rey’s career: “‘Crypto forever!’/Screams your stupid boyfriend/Fuck you, Kevin,” she quips on “Sweet Carolina.”
Where this past spring’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club underlined its genres of choice—country, folk, jazz—via overt lyrical and musical references, Blue Banisters merely hints at its own with far-off pedal steel (“Text Book”) and tittering jazz drums (“Black Bathing Suit”). This is, perhaps, due to the absence of producer Jack Antonoff, replaced here with less well-known collaborators like Gabe Simon and Drew Erickson. Hip-hop stalwart Mike Dean also contributes to one track, the piano-driven “Wildflower Wildfire,” but his presence is as much of a tease as the Morricone-quoting “Interlude – The Trio,” whose big, rattling 808s erupt out of nowhere on an album with otherwise minimal percussion.
A fascination with color, a recurring thread that’s ever-shifting in its meaning, is weaved throughout Blue Banisters. When, on “Beautiful,” Del Rey quips, “What if someone had asked/Picasso not to be sad…there would be no blue period,” we understand “blue” to represent not just a state of depression, but one that yields inspiration. On “Nectar of the Gods,” the singer admits that she gets “wild and fuckin’ crazy like the color blue,” suggesting inspiration morphing into impulsiveness. To further confound the motif, across the two distinct choruses of the title track, Del Rey describes a man who promises to paint her banisters blue and enliven her dreary existence. Later, after “a baby’s on the way,” her sisters come to paint her banisters “green and gray,” as if to highlight the man’s empty promise.
“Blue Banisters” marks a new wrinkle in Del Rey’s portrayal of gender. Her music has long explored the charged dynamics between men and women, but Blue Banisters ventures into untrod territory for her. “Thunder” sees the artist rebuking a man whom she knows so intimately that she sees through the veneer he puts on for other people. Del Rey is fraught yet also wiser for how she acknowledges the salve of love while questioning her own obsession with it. Ultimately, she finds a man’s attention unsatisfying and unfulfilling.
Elsewhere, “Violets for Roses” manages to be both beautiful and silly, contrasting city life and the countryside, with Del Rey making mention of a lover forcing her to trade her “new truck for horses” but reminding herself of the “simple life” that she chose. These and other references to a Midwestern existence are more detailed and self-aware than the idealizations on Chemtrails Over the Country Club, where the bucolic is merely seen as the antithesis to city life.
Del Rey’s vocals are as cherubic and distant as ever, stuck in a daydream but exactingly so. She’s torchy on “Dealer,” pushing herself to the brink of tears and her register to its highest reaches. On “Wildflower Wildfire,” she revs up an ever-accumulating force of melody. Sure, there’s an odd bit at the end of “Living Legend” where Del Rey’s trilling is processed through a wah-wah pedal, and there are several, perhaps inevitable, instances of thematic retreads from past albums. But by stripping back the sonic density of her previous work and taking its sweet time to unfold, Blue Banisters further fleshes out Del Rey’s increasingly vivid personal world” – SLANT
Choice Cut: Arcadia
The Lana Del Rey Book
Lana Del Rey: Her Life In 94 Songs: The Early Classics
Author: F.A. Mannan
Publication Date: 18th September, 2020
Publisher: Eyewear Publishing
Synopsis:
“Lana Del Rey seemed to appear fully-formed with her melancholy viral hit 'Video Games' - but the story started long before. In this anatomy, F.A. Mannan considers everything that has gone into the equation: the music, poetry and films but also the places and experiences that allow the songs to communicate despite the media circus around them” – Waterstones.co.uk
Order: https://www.waterstones.com/book/lana-del-rey-her-life-in-94-songs/f-a-mannan/9781913606190