It shifts, subtly, from tender folk rock – replete with references to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s 1970 album Déjà Vu – to a heady swirl of synthesiser and guitar feedback, to a refrain based on Tommy James’s Crimson and Clover. Nearly 10 minutes long, Venice Bitch hypnotises the listener for its entire duration. Co-opted by rather than commissioned for the film, its saga of fleeting youth and celebrity fits its story perfectly, the melody is exquisite.
Young and Beautiful (2013)īy some distance the best thing on the star-studded soundtrack to Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, Young and Beautiful is Lana Del Rey at her most haunting. Lou Reed was meant to sing backing vocals, but died the day of the session. Self-baiting autobiography, or bitchy hipster character assassination? It isn’t clear, and perhaps it doesn’t matter: just luxuriate in Brooklyn Baby’s swooning melody, the lovely moments where the beat drops out, leaving just Del Rey, a trebly guitar and the buzzing of an amplifier. You can hear his influence on The Greatest, a gorgeously elegiac song that could have made it on to Goodbye Yellow Brick Road: its everything-is-screwed mood – “I want everything to feel like it used to” – however, is pure Trump-era America. Shortly after the release of Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Lana Del Rey shared a cover of Rolling Stone with Elton John. Released in the aftermath Born to Die’s success – and appended to the album’s deluxe Paradise Edition – Ride was produced by Rick Rubin and drenched in strings, but beneath them lurks a supremely classy country-soul song: for someone whose vocal abilities were mocked early on, Del Rey’s octave-leaping performance is nervily powerful. How you take it probably depends on how old you are, but there’s no arguing with the power of the tune, or the sweet reference to the Beach Boys’ troubled ballad Don’t Worry Baby. Love (2017)Īn ambiguous ode to youth: the lyrical message is be-young-be-foolish-be-happy but the tone of the vocal coolly indifferent, there’s something noticeably ominous about the music.
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A distant spiritual cousin of Joni Mitchell’s For Free – which she covered – White Dress breathily suggests she was happier as a waitress or unknown singer: ironically it’s set to the kind of irresistible tune that sent her Chemtrails Over the Country Club album to No 1. Tellingly, Lana Del Rey’s songs have gone from fetishising fame and success to yearning for a life without either. The lyrics leap without warning from posturing (“Let me show you how bad girls do”) to tearily confessional (“I’m not friends with my mother”), the music from exquisitely controlled – the tempo shifts in the chorus – to unravelled and chaotic. Lana Del Rey’s lockdown song, which captures something of the lockdown experience by being impressively scattered. The first evidence of Ultraviolence’s sonic shift – aided by Dan Auerbach of the Black Keys – into more guitar-driven territory: the initial riff is equal parts Blondie’s Atomic and the Beatles’ And I Love Her, the lyrics a tribute to a mythologised California, the sudden slowing of tempo that announces the chorus is fabulous.
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With its song titles borrowed from Neil Young and its lyrical nods to Joni Mitchell, Norman Fucking Rockwell! is an album immersed in Laurel Canyon’s late 60s singer-songwriter scene, an inspiration that finds its fullest expression on Mariners Apartment Complex, a beautifully sullen, icy update of said scene’s folk-based style. Lana Del Rey at the 2016 Outside Lands Music and Arts festival in San Francisco in 2016.
The height of Lana Del Rey in Stepford-Wife-as-pop-star mode, National Anthem pitches her blank vocal delivering satirical sex-and-materialism lyrics – “Money is the reason we exist, everybody knows it” – against jarring musical euphoria: a skyscraping chorus, a string arrangement with a hint of Bitter Sweet Symphony about it. But it’s hard to be cynical while it’s playing – just a piano and voice, it’s the model of elegant simplicity. Hope is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have – But I Have It (2019)Ī cynic might suggest that, from its title to its lyrics (“24/7 Sylvia Plath”, “spilling my guts with the Bowery bums is the only love I’ve ever known”), this is a song that teeters on the verge of self-parody. Like Dory Previn’s Mary C Brown and the Hollywood Sign, Lust for Life is haunted by the 1932 suicide of failed actor Peg Entwhistle: like the relentless pulsing synthesiser in the background, the allusions to it add a dark undertow to what initially sound like bullish assertions of strength from Del Rey and Abel Tesfaye: “We’re masters of our own fate.” 13. It’s jazzy in the sense that a torch song is jazzy, but – beyond the parched, reverb-heavy guitars that recall Mazzy Star – the most obvious influence is John Barry’s Theme From Midnight Cowboy, echoed in the lovely descending vocal melody. Lana Del Rey’s favourite song from Honeymoon, apparently because it was “jazzy”.
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