![]() ![]() And then, about four minutes into the acoustic, piano-driven song, a padded beat drops, then two, until a buzzing backline of bass propels the song into another dimension. She sings with striking frankness about rape culture, madonna-whore complexes, the double standard of aging while female: “Did you know a singer can still be looking like a sidepiece at 33?” She’s used to being the other woman, it seems, but it doesn’t make it hurt any less. “Do you really think I give a damn?” she asks, as if her resilience after 10 years of relentless paparazzi alone weren’t enough of an implied answer. The verses here are whispered, and words blend into each other - Del Rey used a method of meditative automatic singing to write the album - but they sketch out a map of her chaotic, sharpened mind. It starts with Del Rey cartwheeling at nine years old, and ends lightyears away in a strung-out lovelorn spiral. “A&W,” a seven-minute, winding epic, could stand in as a thesis statement for the entire Lana Del Rey project. And then, of course, there’s the mouthful of a song title, “Grandfather please stand on the shoulders of my father while he’s deep-sea fishing” - a collaboration with the classical pianist Riopy - which finds her looking for signs that someone is up above, sending her butterflies. “What the fuck’s wrong in your head to send me away,” she cries, and suddenly, it’s no wonder she’s having second thoughts about motherhood on the same song. Where is her mother? She’s a lacuna, an ellipsis in a later verse: “What kind of… was she to say I’d end up in institutions?” Del Rey sings. She wonders aloud if her father, sister, and brother will be by her side in 10 years - that is, if she makes it that long before her DNA atrophies. Lana lingers in her grief on “Fingertips,” singing about the death by suicide of her uncle, whose funeral she missed because she was performing for the Prince of Monaco. Ocean Blvd is marked by absence - through death, often, but just as poignantly, through omission. Even the 14-year-old can sing “Froggie Came A-Courtin,” yet here she is, the brightest star in the room, standing there wondering who will sing the songs she knows when her time comes. ![]() “How do my blood relatives know all of these songs,” she asks, genuinely incredulous. But more vulnerable, more real, more Lana, more Lizzy, is her alienation while surrounded by her loved ones. On “Kintsugi,” she recounts the last days of her grandmother’s life in predictable beats: tears, laughter, and a singular reference to her boyfriend, Salem’s Jack Donoghue, as a comfort during grief. But whenever she goes, she’s bringing her sister’s child and her grandmother’s smile to the pearly gates with her.įamily and death are twin ghosts haunting Ocean Blvd throughout the album, as if finality is the only constant in her life. As for her fate, she gestures towards it shakily throughout the album. “My pastor told me when you leave, all you take is your memories,” she sings, her voice drifting upwards as if to direct the song towards the sky. Opening track “The Grants,” the last single to come out before the album’s release, introduces us to the main characters of Del Rey’s world at the moment: her faith, her aging body, and her bloodline. ![]() Lana Del Rey might not have a family, but Lizzy Grant does, and on her ninth album, Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, they’re the centerpiece of her heartbreak. Her songs, even in their specificity, were written off as record label retconning, a ghostwriter drafting the heartbreak and torment that would fit on the lips of a woman called Lana Del Rey. But in choosing a stage name, the woman raised Lizzy Grant seemed to lose her ability to claim the person she was before her rechristening. Who was this mysterious all-American woman here to croon about blue-collar boys and the Hollywood Hills? How could she sing so knowingly about dive bar romances if she used a pen name? We could handle Lady Gaga, whose rebirth from Stefani Germanotta was cloaked in flank steaks and vaudevillian drama. In the age of generational grandstanding, when “nepo babies” break a sweat to deny their indisputable advantages in their parents’ lines of work, it now seems quaint that 10 years ago, Lana Del Rey was controversial for her acute lack of background.
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