Vertimus

She writes so fast that it seems to be that LFL, NFR!, COCC, and BB have more or less been thrown together in the end, with no absolute direction, master plan or clear concept that 'stuck.' COCC seems the most cohesive of the four to me, and I think the songs on LFL (for the most part) and BB work well together. So it seems to me that LDR9 may be another fun hodgepodge or musical stew, a little of this and a little of that, with highs and lows, dynamic songs and somewhat flat ones.

DNC = Dagon Not Cthulhu

Speaking of which, I wish, in 'Arcadia,' she had sang that her 'breasts,' not her 'chest,' were the Sierra Madre.

I'd settle for just any hard kernel of news.

I'd like LDR9 to have a few powerful, domineering, non-piano-driven songs like 'Serene Queen,' one of my favorites of all her songs. How different LFL would have been with it instead of Roachella.

Thank you, I really enjoy your posts too. Artists are often prescient and intuitive, and Lana certainly was also apocalyptic on ‘The Greatest’ as well as ‘Change.’ We know she’s had fantasies of the world’s end for some time, at least since ‘Last Girl On Earth,’ which I love.

Full agree about everything. Some of my favorite Lana songs are on LFL.

I love it, with exceptions, and didn't mind the incohesive quality.

It's funny, if Lana meant LFL was for Stans, then she really failed, as Stans seem to vastly prefer UV and especaiily HM.

America and the world are in a much bigger mess now, and I don't hear anyone carping about that in the arts community, but that's the way it always is. Tori Amos is silent! As far as LFL goes, I guess it depends on whether 'for the fans' meant, or means to us, 'for the Stans' or for the casual fan (or newcomer). I always assumed it meant the latter. If so, then the casual fan doesn't know Justin Parker from a hole in the wall, or Emile's or Tim's name either. Nor, most likely, ASAP or the Weeknd. I can't see 'Yosemite' being written for the casual fan either. On the other hand, the title track, 'Love,' 'BPBP,' and 'TNC' might certainly appeal to the newcomer or, at least somewhat, as 'poppier' pop songs, to fans of BTD/P.

I remember, after UV's release, she said she wanted to "rerelease it with different songs," which made no sense to me, and then came HM without much lead-up or fanfare, leading me to guess that the HM tracks were, at least in part, the songs she intended for the UV 'rerelease.' If so, then that shows an obvious connection between the two albums.

Yeah, I tend to disbelieve it too, or, if she did mention it, it might be an idea that came to her well after the fact. There's not very much that BTD/P and UV have in common.

LFL may have been made for fans (in lana's own words), but, if so, why are 'Heroin,' 'Change,' and 'WTWWAWWKOD' on it? I don't consider '13 Beaches' fan-friendly either, especially non-Stan general public fans. What set of fans was 'Summer Bummer' made for? Except for the title track, 'Love,' 'BPBP,' and 'TNC,' as a record, it really isn't 'fan friendly.' I think it's more likely that there was an original concept, and then the album and the concept got reworked and changed multiple times, and some 'fan friendly' songs were thrown on (as in, 'Gee, Lana, can you put something on the new record that we can use as a single and that's a little 'fan friendly'?), 'Yosemite' was removed, and it ended up being the compromise that it is. However, I still like it a good deal.

Maybe it's a general prototype for future merchandise, and the 'DNC' was just a placeholder, and the designers could have used any three letters or a symbol.

"Orchestral yet menacing vibes" sounds like '13 Beaches' to me. I like 'Del Norte County as a title for a track and/or an album, but have we confirmed that the DNC jacket was made by her team? Isn't it possible it's merchandise reflecting some other product and she just happened to have it on? Look at the way she's dressing day-to-day now, it's almost anything goes, but in the plainest manner possible.

I would have rather 'The Trio' start the album off then, be the first track...maybe it would make some sense to me. Just as '13 Beaches' should have started off 'LFL.' 'White Dress' was the right song to open 'COCC.'

And to WFWF.

Lana clearly has an expansive mind and knows a lot about music, but I wouldn't automatically assume she knows and admires Morricone's vast catalog of work, famous as he is and was throughout his lifetime. Even with her own song 'Morricone,' we can only guess she named it 'Morricone' after the composer. Half Italian myself, I don't know how common a surname Morricone is. She might have known a young man named Morricone for all I know. Has she mentioned Ennio anywhere else, in passing, in an interview? And while I consider him a complete genius, he composed over 400 film scores, a great deal of which, to my mind, is pure junk, since he had to compose all kinds of incidental and 'action' music which was often just a lot of chaotic noise, especially since, in the first 3/4ths of his career, he would compose for just about any film, no matter how Z-graded it was.

The whole album is hypnotic if you give it a chance. I was just as happy to see Lana utilizing Morricone as I was seeing her tap Nino Rota's 'Romeo & Juliet' theme for 'Old Money,' one of my favorites of hers. I wasn't particularly happy with BB's use of 'The Trio,' but it's good to know she's listening to and aware of Morricone and his vast catalog of work.

'The Trio' is a snippet from the 1966 classic soundtrack of the Clint Eastwood film, 'The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly,' the score written by the late, great Ennio Morricone. 'The Trio' is 5:00 minutes long in whole. Check out the entire score, it's magnificent, even frightening. An orchestra leader named Hugh Montenegro covered the title song ('The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly') and made it a huge pop hit in the America of 1968.

I'm not so sure a few semi-'intimate' photographs make a boyfriend. She likes the bad boys, we know. She has shown a lot of interest in different men even since 2012, she seems to be something of a 'rover' in love, so I wouldn't put too much stock in this new 'romance' or friendship. Outside of Barrie, from what we know, a few months seems to be her limit. And since 'The Trio' had been known to me for years, I found the snippet on BB the album's lowpoint and eliminated it from the e-album.

Lana has so many unreleased songs, including 'the political songs' from the LFL period, the 'bombastic' songs she made with JA, and the songs cut from the original conception of BB, who knows what the other songs were that she offered to 'Euphoria'? Just from the LFL period forward, she probably has at least 20 songs about which we know nothing. So unless she tells us so, one or many of those could end up on the current album, or, more likely, none will, and LDR9 will just produce more songs that are sidelined and become mythical in our imaginations, as 'Yosemite' did for a couple of years. It's a truism that artists are poor judges of their own work, but I have seen this again and again, most often with Tori Amos, who typically leaves her best compositions off her albums.

And that's something we have to remember---she changes her mind so often, and a lot of times, her comments on an upcoming album, and what is eventually released, don't seem to jibe... Even the songs that she refers to with the excessive lyrics might be cut from the album, or may have already been, between the time she did the interview and the the day it was released (yesterday). Do we know for certain that the interview was done much earlier than the photos? Lana almost always takes us down the rabbit hole in terms of expectations and what ends up being released. Let's not forget that she dropped perhaps as many as half of the new BB songs and changed that album's course in what might have been midstream. When not even release dates or album titles remain in place, or are accurate, there's nothing we can hold as definite.

It's smart not to put yourself through the awful NFR! experience again, should that manifest. Would W have put her on the cover if nothing was being released until next year? It's not as if she didn't discuss a new album and tell us something about it. Presumably, that was the point of her being on the cover and the interview.

They're thinking of Joni Mitchell's 'Hejira,' I think.