Longing, Lust, Love, Life, Lana
On Lana's 'Americana' & the dream behind her fantasy
In a recent interview with Harper’s Bazaar, the journalist interviewing Lana questions her authenticity. Are the lawn chairs wilting in her yellow grass garden real, or were they bought as pieces of girl-next-door set design? The journalist wonders about the nature of Lana’s connection to her true-blue fans, and how they would interpret her disarmingly modest home:
“I am not the first or last to perceive her with quizzical suspicion. But the people in the queue in Arkansas? The waitress at the tavern? Del Rey received from them only acceptance and appreciation. Would they take her at her word? Would they love this house and everything in it? Would they want to chill with her here? Yes, she feels they would. “That’s it,” she affirms when I suggest this connection. “And that sums it all up with a period.”
This connection illustrates Lana as I understand her: a dreamer of places and faces she’s never seen, and ones she has and can’t shake. Rooted in her Lake Placid childhood, Lana grips onto the comfort and warmth of backwoods, country culture through her songwriting. Whether or not she herself has experienced true backwoods living (did she elect to live in a trailer park in New Jersey, or did she just live in a trailer park?) is, when it comes to this connection, an artistic choice. Lana as an artist romanticizes her experiences, and her idea of rural America, in a uniquely aesthetic way; turning ideas of road trips along faded American highways into epic ballads of impulsive wanderlust, painting a portrait of (and subverting, with a puff of her vape, a side eye glance) Norman Rockwell-esque Americana. Lana, in her songs and stories, is always self-assured, even when she’s vulnerable: riding on the back of a Hell’s Angel’s motorcycle, putting her hand up his white t shirt, crying softly in the shower before going on stage to sing.
There’s the history of Lana lore: her first album was torn apart by critics, they accused her rebrand (from singing under her real name, Elizabeth Grant) of being fake, her 60’s pop-art femme fatale aesthetic as being too “put on,” her lyrics “antifeminist.”
This context doesn’t strike at the centre of the story, which is the connection between Lana and her character, and the metamorphosis of her music from aesthetic, Americana portraiture to the amazing grace of softly spoken meditations on death, ancestry, California. Yellow wallpaper, white nightgowns. Family, home, heaven, dreams, men, marriage, motherhood.
There’s a comfort to Lana’s original aesthetic that I crave: her modest, humble home, her shitty boyfriends. She’s sitting shotgun in a truck, a passenger princess with a hand on her thigh, music loud, hair long, riding in the wind. Listening to Lana’s earlier music feels like coming home to a place that you can’t go back to, or a plane in time that exists just beyond: “Over there,” Lana said, about Love, during the interview, gesturing towards the fence at the edge of her yard with a flick of her hand. What she meant: Love & Home exist somewhere else when you aren’t settled in yourself.
Texting with a friend about Lana, she said:
no one and nothing is truly americana
americana exists “over there”
Lana’s earlier albums take you “over there.” They’re less personal, more world-building, and in them she’s painting a portrait: of the 60s, dive bars and pool tables, old men and older money, Brooklyn, Coca Cola, Hollywood, diamonds, gambling, Lolitas, Gatsby-era glamour, bad boyfriends, Love as eternal devotion.
“Over there”, in Lana’s Americana daydream: long stretches of highway, no end point in sight. Free as a freak, I’m a Venice bitch. High by the beach, I watch the filmy sky dim as the sun dips behind the canyon. Reckless and emotional, I’m at the back door, the porch light’s on, I’m screaming because I want to come in. I’m in a white dress, serving coffee, an angel in LA. The freedom to fly and fall that Lana conjures in these nascent albums is intoxicating. Dreams of dark paradise are sweet: like heaven, she sings.
When life in the city feels particularly flat and grey and hard, I lean into these dark, theatrical dreams of glamour (Born to Die, Ultraviolence) and romanticize memories of true comforts: core knowings, the can’t-be-taken-away identity pieces (Chemtrails Over the Country Club, Ocean Blvd). Small town, silence all around in the middle of the night, endless black sky sprinkled with bright stars out my bedroom window. Sixteen, crammed into the back of a pick up truck in dirty skinny jeans, arms wrapped around a case of Bud Light, peeling off into the night.
I wouldn’t want to go back there or live in those places again — they never quite fit — but when I feel out of place, like I can’t swim fast enough to keep up in the city, I go somewhere else in my mind, and Lana’s music helps me get there as a 24 year old girl/baby woman — not to any past memory of home, specifically, but to the place “over there.” Sometimes backwards, sometimes forward, sometimes placing me in the present. I want to ride, but this desire stays safe in my earbuds.
Lana’s later work, like Norman Fucking Rockwell and Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Boulevard, is personal and poetic, shining light on her inner world. The Americana landscape melts into neon green bar lights that illuminate her sitting on a stool, singing scribbled diary entries. She’s listening to a voice note from her friend’s fiancé, detailing a dream. She’s sitting in a church pew with her friends, giggling during Sunday sermon, recording the preacher’s rambling on her iPhone. She’s a girl from the north country, singing about the mountains bordering her hometown, praying for her father’s protection. She says that she hasn’t seen her mother in a long long time (is that true? I thought when I first heard the opening line to “A&W”). There’s a mature confidence to her self-exploration, a comfort with the shape of her life, the stillness and slowness, and a questioning of where it’s going (“will the baby be alright”) that makes my throat tight — like on “The Grants,” her Ocean Blvd opener:
Do you think about Heaven? Oh
Do you think about me?
My pastor told me
"When you leave, all you take
is your memory”
And I'm gonna take mine of you with me
Here, she’s looking up at the sky alone: thirteen years ago, heaven was a place on earth for two.
In the interview, Lana describes how she’s built a home within herself; her heart is a warm hearth, she says. She’s no longer “over there,” she’s right here, sitting on her porch stoop. You can never go home again, but you never forget where you come from. Dreams and memories and visions of something greater shine through NFR and Ocean Blvd in kaleidoscopic colour. I see the shine of these familiar feelings glisten in the eyes of my friends: the girls hold hands at the party, singing along to Lana, go play your video games. In the back of the car, the glow of orange street lights flicker behind my half-closed eyelids, I’m listening to West Coast with my hand out the window, fingertips weaving through the wind. There’s an everywoman magic to Lana’s storytelling that makes me feel at home within myself, and angelically divine; I’ve cried in a taxi, I think about heaven, I see three white butterflies and hope it’s a sign.