slang

The Dreaming is probably my favorite early album, although the early ones are all really dynamic and you can't lose by just going in chrono order. Also her discog is not that large. The second side of Aerial (Sky of Honey? one big track with different song segments) is probably the easiest way to get into her more adventurous side that still remains poppish (maybe even a little more poppish than that side of Hounds of Love with the connected songs). 50 words of Snow has some bloat on some songs but a lot of highlights too (among angels, snowed in at Wheeler St....the duet with Elton John, Misty). That's probably her most challenging album, and it's pretty clear she wasn't aiming for a comeback with it. And for those that don't think Honeymoon is a pop album, they should compare it to FWFS (it's just about as long as HM too).

Yes, LDR really is interested in free will. She mentions the construct after the Ginsberg and the tweekers chapter, where says that what motivated "the fall" was "wanting to be too much like Him". Two short things: I've always thought that it was significant that both Adam and the snake are albinos and that she's sort of equally friendly with both (i.e. does the same kind of dance/grind thing with both). Perhaps she seduces the snake to get at the apple (who is not present in the scene where she actually takes the apple). LDR's biting of the apple seems clearly to be free will under this interpretation, but Shaun's choice could be the desire to follow her given the unbearable circumstance of her absence. Of course, this is free will too, but sort of ambiguously "free" imo. It's not like LDR's initial "I'm gonna get that apple". The other thing is the linking of Whitman to "the fall" combined with the failure of LDR to credit the Body Electric poem in the credits (which I think she recites). If this were intentional, it might indicate shade to Whitman in the sense of her rethinking her attitude toward him.

Wow, but this was posted 2 days ago when Trump was NOT president. Also it's not an FJM song but a cover. http://pitchfork.com/news/69632-father-john-misty-covers-tim-heideckers-anti-trump-song-trumps-pilot-listen/ I understand people are upset that Trump won, and I can understand that this is an interesting test case for free speech (i.e. pop songs as a kind of fiction (maybe Tim Heidecker has said something like that?); however, the lyrics make me uncomfortable. Whatever you think of Trump, he won fair and square. It is as unAmerican as anything you can imagine Trump capable of, not to give him, the people's choice, the chance to govern and "make America great again". I wish him success. I also hope the checks and balances in the system will prevent him from doing anything too horrible, which is always a danger for anybody in the office of president.

Yes, but I can't actually hear her singing it that way. If she's writing her lyrics into the movie posters, there's no guarantee she intended to sing the song that way as opposed to just modifying the lyrics to better fit the mood of the posters, which I take are some kind of early mySpace expression about her aesthetic. IDK; I'm just guessing. BTW are there any good interpretations as to the meaning of the song? This would include why the song might have originally been titled The Ocean.

What's interesting to me is remembering the comparison of May Jailer's work to Mazzy Star (whom Hope fronts) on a Youtube comment. This got me into Mazzy Star as a consequence (and they remain artists of interest for me). They write what I would describe as quietly haunting electric guitar-driven songs. Sometimes Hope and LDR have a similar vocal quality on quieter songs; however, UV is arguably as similar to an OURS album as it is a Mazzy Star one (imo).

Best depends on what dimension of her work you happen to value the most (at the current moment?), so I don't see best and favorite as all that distinct. Also, it's hard to think about a single best, if what you pay attention to is the artist's range over albums. However, I voted for HM just on the basis of listening to it as much as the others...and having a similar positive reaction to it. The singing and production slays me through most of the tracks. It's her best *focussed* retro album, if you happen to value the retro dimension of her work the most (e.g., old-school type singing). It's sort of like Amy's Back to Black but with a different retro target, though it is not as anal with respect to perfectly reproducing *new* classics from an older era. Instead HM has rougher personal statements that are pretty enigmatic too, imo. It goes deeper and deeper, harder and harder, darker and darker, and looks for pop in all the wrong places (omg).

So my take on the album rankings is: BTD is like a symphony, UV is like a concerto, and HM is like a string quartet, and most people don't like string quartets relative to the larger forms.

I remember an article or interview in which LDR said she'd *like* to release an album every 14 monthes or so. So my pessimistic take is that this DJ guy is just referring to that in an oblique way to make it seem like he has inside info (i.e., he's just being an ass). On the other hand, I think it's important for fans to show enthusiasm about rumours like this just to show the artist how much their releases mean. On the BTD 2.0 issue, it's sad that with the leaks/unreleased, and not counting AKA, there's several BTD-like albums possible, so I think the correct approach is asking her to do more "leaked sessions" side projects just to preserve those efforts. This could also make her less inhibited about future material along BTD 2.0 lines. If "Subversive" were the title, the acronym shoud be SV, no? So R in SR has to be another word. Subversive Romance might rile a lot of people. Just saying.

I was expecting LDR to tweet something about Bob Dylan winning the Nobel in literature (or maybe his strangely non-vocal sphinx-like response to that). In the absence of anything specific, this instagram does really nicely. BTW https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/17/nobel-prize-bob-dylan-unable-to-reach

The math is actually harder than I thought. I said .003 cents but what I meant was .003 dollars. The value I'm trying to remember is .3 cents (a third of a cent). Now as for radio being important, my guess is it works if you pay for the exposure, sure. But I haven't listened to it in years. I do remember hearing LDR on college radio though and did not mean to suggest that was worthless.

She does have younger fans, but she also has older ones with disposable income. More interestingly I've seen HM (the mp3 album) on sale at Amazon for $5 dollars on several occasions. This is not because the album is crap. I've also seen, and bought mp3 albums by artists I really, really like for $5 or less when I happen to notice them go on sale. I think it's a part of the streaming logic as to why artists do this (i.e., if a lot more people buy inexpensive music than people who buy regularly priced music, then the artist can make more money on the first option).

As she isn't played on commercial radio, I think she's embraced the idea (as I have) that commercial radio is dead (unless you're driving and your CD player is broken) and streaming is the de facto new radio (for her it is; I realize other artists use radio as promotion; they probably pay for it too). 200 million streams on an album's tracks, while not as great as some artists, is still very significant. If you believe the numbers for album equivalents or royalty payments (1500 streams = 1 album sold; .003 cents per stream to the artist, I think both of these are Billboard estimates) ... just do the math to see how happy you would be with that. Also does anyone know if she does as well as spotify on the other user-driven, on-demand streaming services (Apple, Tidal, Amazon), or is spotify the only service that gives statistics on artists?

Excellent choice for a Nobel Laureate also the first recently appointed NL I was familiar with prior to the award. Interesting the pop twittersphere isn't blowing up much with this; yesterday was a great day for pop music when you think about it. http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-bob-dylan-literature-1476401068

I believe they used the studio versions of everything, but they may have used vinyl rips and/or re-recorded with slightly different equalizer settings (perhaps the case of Butterfly) just to differentiate the possible source of mp3 streams. The director's cut was really, really nice, and I enjoyed hearing Hana (especially Chimera) and seeing Aristophanes. It's sort of interesting that they (Grimes/Hana) act like a group but they are not a group. Wonder if they've talked about doing a joint record in the future.

LDR believes in free will (as Tropico states at about 17:30, after the GAM segment). Therefore, you get the U.S.A (and/or life) you choose (to some extent). Tropico is certainly ambiguous as to whether she's pro sex, drugs, violence, or believes in an exclusively good U.S. past (I mean she recites Howl, after all). She's not forcing a choice but feels she has to deepen her outside perception by the GP as someone who cares, but not someone that wishes to influence a choice. Her position is a contrast to other celebrities who wish to influence like Katy Perry and Azealia Banks. With regard to AB, I'm surprised this is still up: Is LDR demo or repu? Imagine what her stance on immigration, community service (elevated to the level of nations), and environmental protection is, and then speculate on who she is voting for.

You should have thanked @kristinaj for bumping the thread, I was responding (well just reacting) to her post above mine. Also it's interesting that I'm not getting notifications for @slang mentions in posts, which seems to be a change in forum behavior (I did before), perhaps it's because the name is also a word, or perhaps because it's a broken behavior for everyone. I'll @evilentity as a query about that; he might know if it's a legit bug. Lyrics are a complicated issue, and I've never thought of lyrics as the aspect that might be anti-produced in LDR's work, but I think that's a legitimate speculation/observation. Typically when I consider her lyrics I compare her to her peers and songs from the old days (i.e. the eras she's said to emulate) and I find her at least comparable (often favorably). It's interesting that when she covers a song they tend to have really excellent lyrics relative to the rest of the album (TOW, DLMBM) and she usually gets dinged for that in some reviews (e.g., "the song with the best lyrics is not hers", I think I've heard several times).

You're not so much ragging on LDR as your apparent neurosis with respect to her, or the perception of time wasted for being enthralled by her, which I guess is the unpopular opinion. I can certainly sympathize feeling uneasy about that, given the amount of time I think about her. It may be that her voice is the last thing to survive your growing apathy. However, her music, lyrics, videos, physical appearance, and people's often polarized reaction to these things still intrigue me. I also don't get a sense that she's done anything spectacularly wrong career-wise, other than failing to promote herself like an aspiring rock star (which I don't much care about) or suppressing her earlier pre-BTD work (which I care about possibly too much). For her future, I just hope she continues to defy expectations and/or be "subversive" in her art. Listen to classical music (every era) and the masters of every genre by all means; it'll teach you a lot about a very human (?) kind of evolution, but this bears little on artistic merit of LDR, because art is judged (I would argue) on it's non-redundancies with other art. Things can be great for different reasons or have different agendas. I think LDR and the jazz/rock era more generally have some unique characteristics relative to classical music and a very different agenda (just as the Classical and Romantic eras have some uniqueness relative to the Baroque).

True that. But when's the last time you've seen a chandelier in a low-ceilinged room, and how hard would it be to throw lace up there? This might reinforce the idea that they were floating; however, I also recognize that she likes to be ambiguous.

typed [into google]: why did Lady Gaga call her new album Joanne and got this as first hit: http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/pop/7511076/lady-gaga-joanne-story-behind-album-title This is all news to me. The one thing that strikes me about Joanne the person is that she died very young (and before LG's birth) yet still has had a big effect on her (evident in her first album). So the album could be gearing to explain or describe J's effect on her or it might just be an honorific (as in dedicated to J). Hoping for the former. The cover is certainly OK; sort of Lana-esque but w/o wanting to seem Lana-esque (i.e., LDR's never used a profile shot on a cover). At any rate, any kind of full-facial shot suggests an album that is going to be personal or intimate in some respects, imo, but we'll just have to wait and see. Also here's the info on LG's Rilke tattoo, which frames the date of J's death. http://www.popstartats.com/lady-gaga-tattoos/rilke/ Rilke is an interesting influence to have, much like Whitman would be. Wonder if there were any college-style bull sessions about them between LDR and LG during the formative years of "So Legit".

Very articulate interview. I've been thinking LG sounds a bit like Judy Garland ever since Artpop. And now from the interview, we find out (about 10 mins in, pt 1) that she is involved in (and will musically curate!?) a remake of "A Star is Born". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Star_Is_Born_(1954_film) Here's also is a reference performance by Judy, by which you can compare their styles (vocal and performance). PI is also sort of like Judy (on PCP?), and I LOVE IT (way more than Applause). As LG has a great vocal range (e.g., she can also channel Julie Andrews), I think this album will be judged mainly by how much she takes songwriting risks and/or sings dynamically across songs. Hanging out with Beck, Father John Misty, and Florence are really good signs, at least in terms of her not doing what she's done before.

Brian Deering has some full performances on youtube:

Well the first 3 are on youtube (Ren Ralos):

Razorstarzz got a bunch of HQ videos up.

Haven't a clue really, but the careless, let's just get the idea out there before it is considered to death attitude only suggests a "jazz attitude" to me. For LDR, this attitude seems most prevalent in some (but not all) of the leaks/unreleased, May Jailer, some of AKA, and Honeymoon. I say Honeymoon because that album seems, imo, like an album most likely resulting from LDR, RN, and KM (the writers/producers) mainly jamming in the studio. BTD doesn't seem that; it had a calculated style (Thomas Newman style?) that songs were forced to fit into. This mostly worked, but sometimes it really didn't (e.g., the demos for Lucky Ones and Diet Mountain Dew seem much better). Also Carmen has an a cappela demo that sounds more like modern music than the period piece that made it onto the album (in that case fitting it to a style requirement worked rather well). Further we now know (i.e., after the original post) that UV started with some songs in sketch but fully-produced studio form, which were then used as a blueprints to fashion live alternate performance versions. As I recall, what impressed Auerbach about LDR (other than the quality of the songs) was LDR's ability to keep up with his more jazz-oriented studio musician friends as they interpreted the songs. As far as: "What I think I meant by anti-production was to contrast it to all the stupid things both pop stars and indie "kids" think they have to do nowadays. Lana Del Rey seems to think (quite rightly) that her ideas are more important than their execution of how they might rise or fall as to whatever professional standards people seem to expect and take for granted." All this suggests to me is her divergence in taste (which is broader and more older-targeted than most pop stars) combined with her desire to experiment. Both factors are going to make her seem different, because in fact she is. Also with experiments, there's the necessity of failures as well as successes, but this is tricky to assess, because her tastes are potentially broader than ours.

While I understand people being uncomfortable with Rick Nowels after Honeymoon, I'll point out that she was listed as lead writer and PRODUCER on HM, which does imply a "yes-man" role for Rick (or that he wants to put the blame for commercial returns squarely on LDR). However, I prefer to think of him as being devoted to translating her vision for a song as faithfully as possible. It doesn't mean he and Kieron didn't supply her with ideas. Other than that I hope he's encouraging her to get better at whatever musical techniques she relied on before she worked with producers (e.g., guitar, garageband, a cappella recording) to communicate with producers. I'll also mention that there is a breed of singer/songwriter that is self-produced (Kate Bush, Tori Amos, Catpower) and maybe LDR is evolving that way. On the other hand working with producers is probably what taught her the most and would continue teaching her stuff, so perhaps a compromise would be for her to revisit and finish off her older stuff with logical producers (as Lizzy Grant or May Jailer) while simultaneously developing however she likes (as Lana del Rey). I'm encouraged by her saying the next one is "in the same aesthetic" (musically) as HM, as it lowers everybody's expectations, which is in contrast to her previously saying HM was going to be like BTD, which I think she knows really backfired for her (given nobody agreed with her). Lowering expectations is reasonable if she wants to stay non-mainstream. However, I do believe she's going to do just what she wants on the next one, as she always does. The label issue: I'm wondering if her stance with Interscope is something very provisional as in an album-by-album basis, given she's exerting the creative control she does on her records. Something like: "you want another album from me?" and they say "sure". I mean if they're not promoting her expensively why should they care to lock her in to multi-record deal, and if she wants to exert creative control why should she want a multi-record deal? I mean it's not like there aren't independent labels out there she could move to for a next album. But maybe I'm just naive.