![]() The album is filled with imagery of movement and not necessarily a decisive sense of direction either. She’s on the run, as she sings at the beginning of the album’s title track. On Chemtrails, though, Lana isn’t simply driving a newly bought truck in the middle of the night to spend time with her bar-t-t-tender in Long Beach. This builds on the yearning for escapism–dancing, throwing a party, or in the backseat in the arms of a lover–that filled Norman Fucking Rockwell!. A strange blend of all those things.” Like the film, Chemtrails is a road album, specifically a meandering hunt for freedom. In Lynch on Lynch, Lynch describes this film as “a road picture, a love story, a psychological drama, and a violent comedy. Lana’s self-constructed world is very much reflected within the film Wild At Heart: bad men, the open road, Elvis, the Wizard of Oz, trauma, car crashes, and she did duet “Wicked Game” with Chris Isaak at the Hollywood Bowl in 2019. Along with her groaning cover of “Blue Velvet,” “Wild At Heart” makes her career-long link to David Lynch obvious (it’s also present in the tinny vocal effects on “Yosemite”’s bridge that mirrors some of Lynch’s own forays into music. The tip of the hat to its consistent thematic vision may be the song “Wild At Heart” with its title taken from Lynch’s 1990 film of the same title, as well as the 1989 novel on which it’s based by Barry Gifford. ![]() As she explained t o Mojo Magazine, “It wasn’t so much that I thought the songs fantastically fit together with like seamless, sunkissed production–but you know, there’s a life lived there.” Though I’d hate to counter our blessed mother, I disagree. Even though Lana doesn’t seem to recognize it. For instance, “Yosemite,” with a guitar riff straight out of Leonard Cohen, may be one of her best written lyrics, including the half-spoken bridge that had me paging through my mental rolodex of Nick Cave’s lyrics as Lana’s question “How deep was the canyon that you came from?” sounds just like a description of earth-shattering love that would appear on Let Love In or The Boatman’s Call.īut more than simply the songwriting itself, Chemtrails is a fully-formed album with a clear theme and vision. Yet, despite the mixed-up timeline (though Lana seems to continually rework songs and poems from other eras), there’s a newfound maturity and assuredness to her songwriting that surpasses the previous albums. As she tells Jack Antonoff, who produced Chemtrails, along with her previous Norman Fucking Rockwell!, in Interview Magazine, the album is “not so much where I’ve been, but more like where I’m going.” On Chemtrails, Lana seeks freedom in the memories of her 19-year-old self, at her “Tulsa Jesus Freak”’s ranch, on the road in Lincoln, Nebraska, while avoiding becoming a cautionary tale like Tammy Wynette and George Jones, and while dancing the Louisiana two-step after-hours. While this freedom fixation fills Lana’s previous output, she never fully inhabited being pushed to a “nomadic point of madness” until her newest album Chemtrails Over The Country Club, which was released last month. And yet, like her many incarnations, this obsession for freedom is also Lana’s own, traversing her sonic landscape from the final “I am fucking crazy, but I am free” in “Ride” to her move out of the black and into the blue on Lust for Life’s “Get Free.” After admitting she was “born to be the other woman,” she reveals her “obsession for freedom that terrified me to the point that I couldn’t even talk about it and pushed me to a nomadic point of madness that both dazzled and dizzied me.” Of course, this monologue sees Lana in character as the road dog-loving queen of the gas station living life on the open road. She perhaps best articulates this search for freedom at the end of the monologue that opens her “Ride” video (which I’ll remind you, dearest readers, I expect to have recited at my funeral). Inextricably tied to the failed promise of America, Lana’s conception of freedom is lawless, wild, and always elusive. If Lana Del Rey’s music had to be defined by one drive (other than driving fast), it would be the pursuit of freedom. Sailor: Too bad he couldn’t visit that old Wizard of Oz, and get some good advice.
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