Lana Del Rey has at all times written about her fascination with Americana. The open street, popular culture icons, romance and tragedy, and holding out optimism for the American dream. The alternative-pop icon has conquered singing about all over the place from Brooklyn to California, and the Plains in between. It solely is smart then that she would flip to writing about one other nice, sophisticated American establishment: household.
Lana Del Rey’s ninth studio album Did you know there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, which comes as she’s arguably on the peak of stardom and affect of her profession, is a gorgeous, deeply private album about household and domesticity, and all of her questions surrounding them. How is it that there are such a lot of synchronicities inside her familial lineage? Will she discover the one? Is she fitted to motherhood? Del Rey’s been on the prime of her songwriting sport for years, reaching one other degree together with her 2019 magnum opus Norman Fucking Rockwell!, and Ocean Blvd continues to cement her as a grasp of Americana storytelling.
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The singer, born Elizabeth Grant, has been vocal about how this album is centered on her most intimate relationships, telling Billboard, the “overall theme” is “family of origin.” 2021’s Blue Banisters was her first report to take action extensively, with songs like “Sweet Carolina” devoted to her beloved sister Chuck and “Wildflower Wildfire” about her seldom-discussed, distant relationship together with her mom — and that was an album she just lately mentioned that she did not need anybody “to listen to” due to how confessional it’s. Despite telling Billboard she “was so uncomfortable” about diving into her household historical past on Ocean Blvd, Del Rey added that she “felt completely unburdened” when she lastly mined it.
She is unburdened when she’s musing in regards to the Grants’ historical past and her personal home life. Most of the tracks are co-piloted by frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff, in addition to her ex-boyfriend Mike Hermosa, and so they’re largely sparse, mystical sounding, piano ballads — save for a number of trip-hop stand-outs. It permits her affecting prose to land like she’s flipping by means of previous photograph albums of sepia-toned photos which may be frayed across the edges, however seize variations of her family members she needs she might maintain onto perpetually. Album opener “The Grants” units this tone. Later, songs like “Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing” and “Kintsugi,” discover how she sees the best way her relations lived like a type of poetry. She feels as if she will solely be so fortunate to “let the light shine in” and do the identical.
While she might have a Rockwellian imaginative and prescient, she’s at all times been fast to acknowledge the melodrama beneath it. At the middle of that is the delirious “Judah Smith Interlude,” which options preachings about lust and upholding love from the superstar pastor — an eerie snapshot of American worth that LDR is on the monitor laughing at. Her fascinating hit single “A&W” expertly particulars the poisonous sagas her previous; whereas “Candy Necklace” incorporates Lana-isms (“Rockefella,” suicidal tendencies) as she equates the drama of relationships to cleaning soap operas. “Fishtail” builds on this theme as she indicts a companion for “wanting [her] sadder.” Here, the patron saint of sad girl alt-pop herself admits she no longer wants to be a magnet for melancholy as her voice bleeds into the watery production. Most arresting, though, is “Fingertips,” in which her mezzo soprano is so high, it’s almost difficult to decipher the tragedies she spews in a stream of consciousness (her reliance on her father and siblings, the traumas from her estranged mother, a wayward youth). Just as she flips through family flashbacks across the album, it’s also as if she dissects a Super 8 of her own path to decipher just exactly how she came to be.
What she discovers, thanks to her family (blood and chosen), is certainty in what she wants, both existentially and in love. Even if she’s not quite sure when it’ll arrive, she warms her legion of hopeless romantics on “Margaret,” the Bleachers-featured track about Antonoff and his partner Margaret Qualley, chanting, “When you know you know,” before ultimately delivering the caveat, “So if you do not know/Don’t surrender/Because you by no means know what the brand new day would possibly carry.”
While Ocean Blvd is admittedly sonically similar to her recent records, it gives the self-mythologizing, one-liners, and dense lyricism their ground. It also makes the several tracks that mark her trip-hop return all the more welcomed, like “Fishtail,” “Peppers,” which samples rapper Tommy Genesis’ “Angelina,” and “Taco Truck x VB.” Like her boyfriend’s addicting candy necklace she can’t help but keep biting off, they’re delicious entries that maintain her intrinsic camp and sex appeal in her recent home-minded lens. Especially as album closer “Taco Truck x VB” interpolates her own “Venice Bitch,” she sends off Ocean Blvd how her previous led her right here and the place it is taking her. A quiet life, the easy luxurious of being barefoot within the yard, a love that feels timeless, her poetry being the following nice entry into the Grants’ lineage, and maybe a child in the future — she’s holding out hope and searching ahead to all of it.
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