Yet the world she spins - even a pandemic world where she appears “kinda regular” - remains alluring and vaguely unreal.
Contemporary references to lockdown, Mr Brightside, Black Lives Matter, and the Santa Clarita fires (not to mention the typically funny “You name your babe Lilac Heaven / After your iPhone 11 / ‘Crypto forever’ screams your stupid boyfriend / Fuck you, Kevin” on ‘Sweet Carolina’) don’t jar: they anchor her usual wash of nostalgia firmly in the now. Her father and Chucky appear as co-writers on final song ‘Sweet Carolina’.Ī pandemic rages - “It’s LA, “Hey” on Zoom, Target parking lot / And if this is the end, I want a boyfriend / Someone to eat ice cream with and watch television” - and like all of us, she yearns for normality: “The girls are runnin’ ’round in summer dresses / With their masks off and it makes me so happy”. Her sister Chucky’s “makin’ birthday cake / chickens runnin’, bare feet, there’s a baby on the way”. There’s a photograph on the wall of Lana on a John Deere tractor. The songs inside are sometimes homely, too: defiantly first-person, present-day accounts. On the cover, she sits barefoot on a wooden veranda between her two dogs, Tex and Mex. But ‘Blue Banisters’, her eighth album, arrives to relatively little fanfare: a few false starts, a quiet press cycle, social media silence. Her real-life girlfriends adorn the cover of her previous album, March’s ‘ Chemtrails Over The Country Club’, while her now-deleted Instagram account offered grainy photo dumps of daily life, alongside notably gauche outbursts that made fans groan and reach for the Frank O’Hara line “oh Lana we love you get up”.Ī brilliant chronicler of American culture in his own medium, poetry, O’Hara’s defence of camp glamour and tabloidy celebrity culture features heavily in much of Lana’s work too: a body of music that’s rightly established her as a great American songwriter. Of late, and to mixed effect, Lana Del Rey has administered several doses of reality into her mythic shtick.
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