You cannot fire Lana Del Rey; she gives up.
Months after a series of cascading cancellation attempts – here she was concentrating her white privilege; here she was wearing a mesh face mask in the middle of a pandemic; here she was insisting that she was obviously not racist because she had rappers as boyfriends – the most glamorous headline creator in pop music is back with a fascinating new album about getting out of the spotlight to find a simpler place where haters can’t take it down over there.
Repeatedly in “Chemtrails Over the Country Club”, which was released on Thursday night, Del Rey sings about throwing his fame away as if it were a heavy coat. She dreams of leaving Los Angeles, the foster home that was so prominent in “Norman F— Rockwell!” 2019 for “a little piece of heaven” in Arkansas or Nebraska. She describes how to wash clothes and wash her hair with the kind of sensuality she used to use while singing about getting high on the beach.
At the opening of the ballad at the LP piano, “White Dress”, the 35-year-old actress fondly remembers her days before stardom as a struggling waitress: “I was not famous, I only heard Kings of Leon”, she sings – a strangely poignant indication of how anxious she is to get out of the microscope.
Del Rey’s public relations crisis, which started in May with an Instagram post about how she was treated differently from other female pop stars – most of whom she cited, including Beyoncé and Nicki Minaj, were women of color – closely followed the rapturous reception of “Norman F— Rockwell !,” which won the best reviews of 2019 and a Grammy nomination for the album of the year and paved the way for the publication of a real poetry book by the singer.
The lash, then, was undoubtedly severe. However, in fact, it is unclear how carefully Del Rey tracks her perception, or at least how seriously she takes it all. In interviews, she talks about living a happily basic life behind the scenes; she says she likes to go to Starbucks and have brunch with her friends – which is not exactly an image in line with the themes of glamor and danger that permeate her music.
Therefore, it is possible that the conspicuous midwest configurations in “Chemtrails” are merely the product of a search for open spaces without COVID or of his recent relationship with Sean “Sticks” Larkin, a Tulsa Police Department official who said to the New York Times that he and Del Rey “went to Target” and “Super Bowl partyed” with their “police friends and their wives”. (The couple split up; Del Rey is now engaged to Clayton Johnson, a singer from Modesto).
This is the tricky part of analyzing Del Rey’s records. Since she came up with a decade ago with “Video Games” – a classic instant meditation on the modern celebrity that has spawned countless debates over her artistic authenticity – the singer alternately looked like The majority and at least pop musician with media experience.
More than once in the past year, as she ignited her accumulated goodwill, you might wonder if she really knew what she was doing – that perhaps her disconcerting movements were part of some larger creative project about the sick American soul at Donald’s age Trump (whom, by the way, she appeared on a radio chat to absolve her of her complicity in the January Capitol riot).
What is indisputable is that she has become one of the best composers of her generation, with a lyrical and melodic touch that encourages an emotional investment in her music far beyond anything it reflects in her real life. In “Chemtrails,” his singing reaches a new peak as well; she never inspired such empathy as she moved between her light-headed voice and her sensual chest voice in these vividly detailed songs about escape, loss and memory.
Working again with Jack Antonoff, who produced “Norman F— Rockwell!”, Del Rey invites comparisons to Taylor Swift’s dual approach to “Folkore” and “Evermore” in 2020 (in which Antonoff also participated): Where each of the singer’s previous recordings took on a distinct sonorous character – from the 2012 “Born to Die” trip-hop to the 2014 “Ultraviolence” garage rock to the 2015 “Honeymoon” slow motion songs – this one remains right in the zone psychological and gentle that she and Antonoff created for their predecessor.
But if the sound is familiar – think of the very sweet point triangulated by Sandy Denny, kd lang and Velvet Underground’s third self-titled album – the scenarios can still flatten you, like in the beautiful “Wanderlust”, about someone defending your impulse to catch the road and “Wild at Heart”, in which Del Rey draws a line connecting generations of women examined relentlessly, from Princess Diana to Kim Kardashian:
I left Calabasas, I escaped all the ashes, I ran into the darkness
And it made me crazy at heart
Cameras have flashes, they cause car accidents, but I’m not a star
If you love me, you love me ’cause I’m wild at heart
“Breaking Up Slowly” is a duet rooted with promising alternative country Nikki Lane, which rhymes “life of regret” with “Tammy Wynette”; “Yosemite” puts more old-time thoughts into a haunted acoustic groove. In “Dance Til We Die”, which begins as a dark lament of last call before suddenly bursting into 70s funky rock, Del Rey further populates the lineage she presents in “Wild at Heart” with screams for Joni Mitchell , Joan Baez, Stevie Nicks and Courtney Love (who “almost set my house on fire”, according to Del Rey’s memory of a night when you had to be there in Los Angeles).
Then she closes the album with an impressive version of Mitchell’s “For Free” that she shares, since she lived a year and a half ago at the Hollywood Bowl, with two of her current canyon ladies: Zella Day and Weyes Blood.
“I play for fortunes and those called velvet curtains”, sings Del Rey, comparing himself somewhat shamefully to a street musician who works for nothing.
She can ask for forgiveness; your need for attention may be more difficult to shake.