FEATURE:
The Best Next American Record
IN THIS PHOTO: Lana Del Rey photoed for Rolling Stone UK in 2023/PHOTO CREDIT: Chuck Grant
Lana Del Rey: Our Greatest Living Modern Songwriter?
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I have been thinking about Lana Del Rey…
PHOTO CREDIT: Mat Hayward/Getty Images
recently for a few reasons. As Glastonbury tickets are not going on sale for longer than expected, it made me think about this year’s festival and why Lana Del Rey was not chosen as a headliner. Her set was captivating, leading many to wonder why she was not deemed headline-worthy (at a festival that has not had enough female headliners through the years). I am also thinking about the fact that the great Joni Mitchell celebrated her eightieth birthday on 7th November. One of the greatest songwriters and poets of her age, where does she rank alongside fellow legends like Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen or even Kate Bush? There are a lot of great modern songwriters whose lyrics and images will last for decades. Taylor Swift must be up there. In my view, the greatest living modern (as in, of her generation) songwriter is Lana Del Rey. Her songbook could be a modern-day equivalate of the Great American Songbook - the loosely defined canon of significant 20th-century American Jazz standards, popular songs, and show tunes – in terms of its impact, variety and brilliance. Many might disagree, though you listen to her songs and get immersed in these distinct and wonderful worlds. I am not alone in thinking that Del Rey is a modern-day icon. On Friday, she was heavily nominated by the GRAMMYs. If she wins in any of the categories, that will be her first win. Long overdue recognition of a modern-day colossus. There are a couple of features/interviews I will bring in that discuss her songwriting and different perspectives. Bringing in visions of the 1950s together with huge vistas, modern-day characters and wonderful visions, there is nobody quite like her! Back in 2020, Bruce Springsteen called Lana Del Rey one of the greatest songwriters.
Not tied to any anniversary or occasion, I am thinking about songwriters in general. There are so many artists out there, yet there are a reserved few who can create their own worlds and stand out. Lana Del Rey reminds me of a classic poet. Maybe someone from the 1950s or 1960s. Whether talking about distinct areas or sides of American culture or delving more into her own experiences, her words and vocal delivery are exemplary. I am going to start with a Rolling Stone interview published earlier this year. I am interested on the subject as Lana Del Rey as the greatest living songwriter, as more than a couple of articles have suggested it. Hannah Ewens spoke with Lana Del Rey around the release of her new album, Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd. If you place other songwriters above Del Rey, Rolling Stone UK declared her “the greatest American songwriter of the 21st century”:
“Her ideas were before their time and heralded a new era of alt-pop where Lorde, Halsey, Sky Ferreira and the next generation’s biggest pop star, Billie Eilish, emerged young, moody and sad. Maybe if some people her own age — Del Rey was then 27 years old — had reviewed and written about her, it might have been different, she thinks. That’s not to say that some critics couldn’t recognise her distinct star power. In an article in the Guardian — one of many that circled the unimportant question of her ‘authenticity’ — a pop-culture magazine editor defended her, saying, “I think she cares about the art that she is creating. I don’t think that’s fake at all,” and adding that, “Lana Del Rey can go anywhere she wants to go. She’s going to one day be the cover of Rolling Stone.”
By retreating, she believes she has begun to see the culture more clearly. Her albums have followed suit, increasingly humorous and observational in their commentary. Meanwhile, regardless of genre, her sound has distilled into something that is pure Lana: classic and glamorous with her trademark airy, theatrical vocals. She found a fellow partially off-grid companion in Antonoff. “Jack Antonoff and I are super similar in the way we know about so much that’s going on culturally, but we have no idea how. We definitely don’t read that much about it or hear that much about it, but all of those turning points in culture, somehow we’re always aware,” she explains. Often, she and Antonoff will sit together in the studio and discuss what they’re doing to try to survive the negative waves of trends in tech, self-promotion, music and society. “I think even if I was in a remote area, I would always know what’s going on and I’ve always had a little bit of an intuitive finger on the pulse of culture,” she continues. “Even when I started singing, I knew it wouldn’t completely jive right away.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Chuck Grant
From Ultraviolence onwards, male and female critics accused Del Rey of glamourising abusive relationships. Meanwhile, other women — including Del Rey and her fans — were living out those common painful or toxic relationships. “The one thing I’ve never been spared from is having these normal, somewhat contentious relationships,” explains Del Rey, punctuating thoughts with raised eyebrows or a pointed tone. “It’s not like if you become a singer, when you date people, they feel like they have to be nice to you because if they’re not, maybe they’d be called out. That never happens. They’re still themselves completely. And I think that’s why some people might call some of my stuff polarising, because either you’ve been in a contentious family dynamic or interpersonal relationships, or you haven’t. So, if you haven’t you might use the words or phrases I’ve heard like ‘feigning fragility’, or ‘glorifying being submissive’. OK. Maybe it’s also just trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel?” To bring these narratives into a musical context and make them sonically depressing or the accompanying visuals unappealing wouldn’t work for Del Rey. “You’re writing what happened but you’re also trying to lift it up a little bit, maybe melodically in the chorus,” she says.
PHOTO CREDIT: Chuck Grant
If emotionally abusive relationships are all you’ve ever known, there are relational lessons that have to be completed to proceed to healthier dynamics. That’s probably why Del Rey’s songs are increasingly self-possessed and full of humour about these relationships (“God damn, man child,” she practically winks to us as she opens ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell!’). Often these lessons come directly from specific people, Del Rey says, referring to a relationship with one particular man: “The lesson was so shocking and it didn’t even really take the sting out of it. But I realised only that person with that particular look and stature and cheerful disposition that people considered him to have — that almost made me look like I wasn’t the positive one — only that kind of person could’ve brought me to my knees in the way that I needed to see what else I could add to my life to have a baseline foundation so that I could always come back to myself.”
The metaphysical and the romantic are entwined in her mind. A recent relationship she had with someone entrenched in their own personal problems comes up and Del Rey describes the mysterious way the question of whether to go or to stay in a partnership can manifest change. “I was laying on the grass and I was so pleased with myself because I was committed to this idea that I was like, ‘It doesn’t really matter, things don’t have to be traditional or perfect, you love him, that’s fine,’” she recalls. “And as I committed, he came home and was like, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ Tessa always says as soon as the person who is somewhat ambivalent tries to put two feet into the relationship, if it’s not right the universe has a way to sweep both people out immediately.”
So, when I ask why the overarching theme in her work is romantic love, the answer seems so obvious, as though we’re repeating ourselves. “Everybody finds themselves in a different way,” she replies. “Some people really find themselves through their work, some people find themselves through travelling. I think my basic mode is that I learn more about myself from being with people, and so when it comes to the romantic side of things, if you’re monogamous and it’s one person you’re with, you just put a lot of importance on that.” It’s different to her now, though, as part of this puzzling mood shift. Now in life and in writing she is orientated towards what’s happening day to day, “not being reactive to what appears to be the reality of the current circumstance and being as proactive as you can but letting everything go.”
That Did You know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd feels once again so different from what she’s done before and yet a collage of everything she’s ever made — it even ends with the grimy, heavy, original and unheard version of ‘Venice Bitch’ — is testament to where Del Rey is nine studio albums into her career. “Lana is boundaryless,” says Antonoff. “She’s reached a point in her work, which is really my favourite place to work from, where there’s nowhere to go but way out into the fucking wilderness artistically. Go chase radio? That’d be so stupid. Go chase trends? So stupid. She created all the trends. It’s a freeing place, if you can accept it. The only place to go is to be a leader.” So, she sauntered ahead with the bird on her shoulder to create what was, according to her, the easiest album she’s ever made”.
In August, The New Statesman celebrated a truly great American poet. An artist who definitely does not write in a conventional and commercial way, her songs are going to be dissected decades from now. Having just celebrated the eightieth birthday of Joni Mitchell, I am thinking about an American modern-day contemporary (Mitchell is Canadian) who has a similar poetic and imaginative flair. If Mitchell’s writing is beyond comparison, I do feel that Lana Del Rey will rank alongside the all-time best songwriters years from now. Her latest album continues to amaze and show new sides to her craft and genius:
“In “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd”, Lana Del Rey makes the tunnel an American legend. The song starts with an exhale, the kind of breath taken to subdue a panic attack, or avert the onset of tears. It’s why her voice, when it arrives, is steady. “Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard?” she asks. “Mosaic ceilings, painted tiles on the walls”. A drum beats, bearing us ceaselessly back into the past, ceaselessly forward into the present. Violins call to something lost, irretrievable, something that never existed. “I can’t help but feel somewhat like my body marred my soul,” she sings. “Handmade beauty sealed up by two man-made walls/When’s it gonna be my turn?… Don’t forget me!”
It builds and builds, then there is the supernova. If, as Del Rey sings, Harry Nilsson’s voice breaks at precisely 2.05 in “Don’t Forget Me”, then hers breaks at the four-minute mark. Her voice ascends as she pleads her final “Don’t forget me!/Like the tunnel under Ocean Boulevard”, a vision of pain that sounds like ecstasy. The song circles a central enquiry: the question “did you know?” is seemingly the star that it orbits. But only at the end do we understand that it’s really a black hole – swallowing all questions, all answers, until all that remains is the inescapable gravitational pull of that desperate “Don’t forget me!”. It’s telling that the title contains no question mark. Del Rey always knew that the tunnel – and all of LA, all of America, including herself – was doomed to be forgotten. If, for Jean Baudrillard, LA was the apotheosis of “American reality”, then Del Rey is the city’s greatest poet. She understands that the story of the Jergins Trust Tunnel is part of some greater American story, one of boom and bust, of oil money and land banking and short-sighted capitalism, of pioneer spirit and metropolitan decay. And so she immortalises it, gilds it: spins it into the myth of the United States.
To paint Del Rey as conservative is to fundamentally misunderstand her work. Her interest in how seemingly small stories inform larger narratives allows her to compellingly communicate the climate crisis in a way no other artist does. Take, for instance, the ending of “The Greatest”, “Hawaii just missed a fireball/LA’s in flames, it’s getting hot/Kanye West is blonde and gone”. Here, celebrity culture exists not to distract or undermine the climate crisis, but to strengthen it: the dream of America is dead. What initially seems disaffected is replaced by the affect of somebody who knows it is too late to even grieve. These are the facts, Del Rey tells us. What else is left to say? The cover of Norman Fucking Rockwell! is at first glance so beautiful, so American-made, all gleaming yacht and Stars and Stripes and Hollywood progeny. It’s only when you look closer that you see it: the California shoreline engulfed in fire and smoke. “Blue Banisters” contains the devastating line: “Jenny was smoking by the pool, we were writing with Nikki Lane/I said, ‘I’m scared of the Santa Clarita Fires,/I wish that it would rain.’” It has the quality of a panicked interjection, a white-hot horror building in the veins. But, as with “The Greatest”, it’s simply a paean. There’s nothing to be done but bear witness.
There have been many proposals for the vacant Jergins Trust Building lot. Some of them have involved sealing off the tunnel, some have planned to incorporate it into a new project. An individual who purchased the land in the 1980s, whose plans involved destroying the structure to build a five-storey subterranean car park, didn’t even know the tunnel existed when he bought the lot. Nothing has yet been built. The tunnel is still there, mostly forgotten, and the sounds of the traffic above echo off tiles the orange of Long Beach sunsets before fading into the darkness.
In “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd”, Lana Del Rey tells us of a girl who “sings ‘Hotel California’/Not because she loves the notes or sounds that sound like Florida/It’s because she’s in a world preserved, only a few have found the door…”. Del Rey knows that narrative is the only way to truly immortalise. This is the ballad of America, and she is its poet”.
I have a lot of respect and love for Lana Del Rey. She should have headlined Glastonbury this year. Even though she is a young artist, it is clear that she is influencing a new generation. In terms of a ‘modern songwriter’, I mean those who are maybe not on the same level as the all-time legends, though they are the very best of their generation. I think Lana Del Rey can claim that. With this rich and fascinating songbook already penned, there are going to be more albums and revelations from one of the most distinct artists ever. There is nod denying the fact that New York City-born Lana Del Rey is…
A modern-day queen.