The title is a fit-to-print stand-in for “American Whore,” and Lana cycles through her many avatars: an embattled attention-seeker, an illicit lover, an imperfect victim (“Do you really think that anybody would think I didn’t ask for it?”). “Did you know that a singer can still be looking like a side piece at 33?” asks Lana-unmarried and child-free at 37, a subject of constant physical scrutiny. There’s no rhythm, no structure, only the strings and the Wurlitzer picking up Lana’s breadcrumbs as she wanders the misty forest of her own memory.Įlsewhere, Lana throws stones into these still waters, most memorably on “ A&W.” She writes from the perspective of the other woman, a familiar figure in her discography-sometimes, a sympathetic lonely heart here, a symbol of the ire that unorthodox women unleash. With its solemn hush, meticulously rendered but opaque details, and lack of organizing logic, “Fingertips” seems disinterested in holding our attention. She was nervous to send early sketches to producer Drew Erickson, she said, and even in finished form, the material sounds like it’s for her ears only. It’s Lana, a self-made emblem of vulnerable womanhood-in her own words, “a modern-day woman with a weak constitution”-at her most genuinely unguarded. Such a sentiment could easily be extrapolated into a comment on millennial unease, but this feels more personal. “Fingertips” broaches the topic of motherhood with a devastating admission of self-doubt: “Will the baby be all right/Will I have one of mine?/Can I handle it even if I do?” The matter of bearing children-her sister’s daughter and Lana’s own hypothetical offspring-comes up repeatedly, on “The Grants” and “Sweet,” a tradwife fantasy tucked in a mid-century movie-musical score. She entreats her brother Charlie to quit smoking. On one song, she exhales a prayer amid jazzy squiggles, calling on her grandfather’s spirit to protect her father, a maritime enthusiast, while he’s deep-sea fishing. Lana, née Elizabeth Grant, opens Ocean Blvd with a track that bears her family name, and she holds her father, brother, and sister close throughout, as if bracing for loss. Here, Lana is after something more enduring, the matters “at the very heart of things”: family, love, healing, art, legacy, wisdom-and all the contradictions and consternation that come along with the pursuit.īlue Banisters, Lana’s album from 2021, introduced many of the ideas that stand out here: revisiting old material with new relish, releasing pop’s conventional structures and polish, writing about loved ones with tender specificity. ![]() Beauty-long Lana’s virtue and her burden-fades or is forgotten, like that titular tunnel, its mosaic ceilings and painted tiles sealed up and abandoned. ![]() It’s full of quiet ruminations and loud interruptions of visible seams and unhemmed edges, from the choir rehearsal that runs through its opening moments to the sound of the piano’s sustain pedal releasing at its end. Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd arrives as a sweeping, confounding work-in-process. It’s one that Lana takes up vigorously, even if that meaning is sometimes legible only to her. “My pastor told me when you leave all you take is your memory,” goes the chorus, resolute like a hymn, wrapped up with gospel backing vocals and orchestral ribbons, “And I’m gonna take mine of you with me.” To whittle the raw material of life into meaning, worth preserving-this is the writer’s task. “ The Grants,” which opens her ninth studio album, climbs to the metaphorical mountaintop, guided by John Denver’s sense of mystical wonderment, to receive wisdom from on high. But now, rather than an escape hatch, it’s a framing device through which to peer at her life. She is still talking-and singing-about death. In conversation with Rolling Stone this month, Lana described a great unburdening in her psychic space. ![]() In due course, particularly since the release of her 2019 national pulse check Norman Fucking Rockwell!, her songwriting received the recognition she always knew it deserved. Lana has lived many days since then and seemingly found some of them worthwhile.
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