Vertimus

Agreed. As I see it, album cover and interior art are not a strong point of Lana's.

A-men. No muffled sounds.

I'd add anything by Tame Impala. A lot of Taylor Swift. I like three Kate Bush records, but her other albums are screechy and shrill, and 50 Words For Snow is awful. 21 Pilot's Clancy and Scaled & Icy are pretty self-indulgent and go-nowhere. To me, the worst song ever--going way back---is The Logical Song by Supertramp--and just about anything else by Supertramp. Most artists, even great artists like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, the Rolling Stones, and R.E.M. have bad songs and occasionally, entirely bad albums.

Exactly—that would be just another football. I love Lana and her music, but being a fan and not a Stan makes the wait easier.

I'd like the same. I was listening to LFL yesterday, and it still smarts that Serene Queen, Yosemite, the original version of the title song, and Next Best American Record were left off while several crappy tracks like _________ and _________ made the cut.

I'm beginning to find all the delays, conception changes, and excuses exhausting. It's not fun or even time-filling anymore. I'm becoming apathetic, especially since Lasso, it seems will be another compromised album like LFL and BB (and perhaps Paradise and Ultraviolence). How many times can she pull the football away as we go to kick it?

Dragon Slayer* Live or Die* Serene Queen* California Last Girl on Earth* Angels Forever* Crazy For You Caught You Boy Hollywood French Restaurant* Making Out Wild One JFK Us Against the World Meet Me in the Pale Moonlight Fine China * Favorites

She's rarely looked better. Viva Lana!

I agree—Country Roads is such a classic—as several of Denver's songs are—that it's almost foolhardy to attempt it. You might as well try to cover A Change Is Gonna Come, Stairway to Heaven, Bohemian Rhapsody, Cornflake Girl, or Lover, You Should Have Come Over. I can see Lana attempting it in the studio, but when it falls as flat as it did, why release it? Maybe she tried it several ways, with big instrumentation, etc., and the released version was the best.

I follow Lana on Google News and received this in my feed from New Musical Express in April from a Courtney Love interview: "I haven’t liked Lana since she covered a John Denver song, and I think she should really take seven years off,” said Love. “Up until ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’ I thought she was great. When I was recording my new album, I had to stop listening to her as she was influencing me too much.” As I've said here before, it's ironic that Lana sang about John Denver's authentic vocal style on The Grants but then released a tepid cover of Country Roads that sounded like little more than a run-through or something like a road trip singalong. What was the point? If it was the first track of hers I ever heard, I wouldn't have bothered exploring her as an artist. I didn't care for Season of the Witch, which she didn't do anything interesting or fresh with. I neglected to add You Must Love Me among Lana's covers that I do like. Thanks.

I forget The Other Woman is a cover sometimes, as it fits so well with some other parts of Ultraviolence. I'd prefer no covers unless it's an entire album of covers and she's really had timwe to think about what she wants from the album and each track. I didn't care much for Blue Velvet either, which was probably a shout-out to David Lynch (which worked).

I'd like to see Lana do covers only when she really feels moved to, and when she puts some passion and deep feeling into them, like The Other Woman. I don't care for most of her others, though Heart-Shaped Box, Summertime, and Doin' Time are certainly serviceable. Country Roads was ho-hum, dull, and passionless, and I'm not surprised that Courtney Love criticized it. Lana's interpretation of For Free puts a happy spin on the song that isn't in the original and undercuts its poignancy. On the topic of folk ballads, it's interesting that some old British folk and border ballads address female empowerment (Tam Lin), cross-dressing (The Handsome Sailor Boy, which Kate Bush covered as a b-side, which asks, "Why are all the sailors hot for that new cabin boy?"), and even acknowledgment of same-sex attraction (in Willy O'Winsbury, the king says to his daughter's handsome lover, "And it is no wonder that my daughter's love you did win, for if I was a woman, as I am a man, my bedfellow you would have been").

A lot of folk songs that came here from the British Isles and then blossomed in Appalachia are about rape, murder, ghosts, fairies, tribal war and slaughter, treachery, betrayal, etc., and have musically shifted into 'Americana' and early country music since the 17th century. The House of the Rising Sun is an excellent example of that and the Animals did it justice. It sounds as if you would know that Robert Johnson claimed to have sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads. You're absolutely right about the mix of genres that bleed into what we're now calling Southern Gothic, and of course the South also has the loss in the Civil War and the destruction of their previous way of life in their past, with an estimated 260,000 Southern soldiers dead. If you've ever seen the Ken Burns documentary about the Civil War, then you've seen stills of dozens or hundreds of amputated legs in one pile and a nearly equal pile of severed arms in another. And another 360,000 soldiers were killed in the North. Then Sherman marched to the sea and burned everything in his path, including Atlanta. Consider all the slaves who died of torture or neglect or both, and add New Orleans Voodoo and Southern Hoodoo to the mix, as well as Christianity and gospel music. Earlier, there were pirates and privateers in the area when Florida was part of the Spanish Main. So it's easy to see why the American South feels haunted--all those crumbling old graveyards along the coast and the Smoky Mountains themselves--and I hope Lana legitimately taps into its rich atmosphere and history. There's no other part of America like it. But knowing Lana, I'm not holding my breath, especially after the apparent shift she's made about the project. As I said yesterday, it could be that half or more of the original concept has been chucked out the window.

I mean the part at the end that goes "I'll always be right here." There are enough people in the world already writing sappy, 70s-style schlock ballads, and probably always will be, since there's a huge general audience for them. It's a message people like to here over and over, generation in and out. But Lana is capable of much more, and so I feel she rather hobbles herself with songs like HTD. I personally don't want to see her move in a bland, all-audiences Life is Beautiful direction.

I agree, but sometimes her storytelling can be sappy of late, as in the last chorus of How to Disappear, which sinks the song for me.

I agree with everything you've said, AW, except that it's a great album. I personally place it at the bottom of Lana's catalog. Musically, it is not cohesive--not to my ears--though cohesion is not a requirement. We know that with LFL and BB, she changed the overall concept mid-way or more than once, and that's also true to some degree of UV and whatever happened to Tropico or whatever it morphed into (or simply died). More than anything, I'd say these albums have a compromised quality, and we, as fans, pick and choose the tracks, or the few tracks, we like. Even with COCC, Lana said something about feeling uncomfortable about releasing it as it was, somewhat under-arranged, etc. And we know she wasn't very happy with the final production on BTD. Now it appears she's doing it again on Lasso. So who knows what it's going to sound like or have as a theme or themes? If any? Besides Tough and Henry, Come On, I hope everything else is new to our ears, no bland, one-take Country Roads cover, no Prettiest Girl in Country Music, etc. I'd like it to be fresh, vibrant, realized, dynamic, and with some verve. Not sleepy. It would be great to know that Lana has released an album she really loves, is 100% proud of, believes is fully realized, and matches her original conception. Her Court & Spark, her Abbey Road, her Blurryface, her Grace, her Sticky Fingers, her Under the Pink or Boys for Pele, her Rumours. I realize a lot of members and fans believe she's done this already with NFR! and perhaps with OB as well. And Lana may feel that way about both of those albums as well.

Like That's The Night That the Lights Went Out in Georgia?

For an artist of her stature, reach, and means, her album covers and interior art are largely disappointing to me. She and her team are capable of so much visual creativity and conceptualization, but that all seems to come to a dead halt the moment the album visuals are considered. It's as if she's under a curse. The visuals don't have to be complicated or 'high concept,' they just need to be aesthetically pleasing and hopefully reflect the tenor of the music the way the Ultraviolence graphics did. I don't think she's achieved this in some time. So if she were to produce album visuals for Lasso like her first three albums, with their wit, I'd be surprised. I tend to keep my expectations almost at 0 regarding her album art.

I agree heartily with No. 14.

To me, the outro to Cinnamon Girl sounds like thunder, and it's one of my favorite touches on the album, though the song still sounded muffled to me production-wise. I like the production to be crystal clear, especially vocally, as on the refrain to Money Power Glory.

I'll quote Coyle Girelli: "I tried...to love you. What more can I do?" I appreciate NFR! but do not love it. To me, it's still Lana Reduced or Abridged. But I'm happy it's brought so much happiness and joy to so many here and across the globe. Happy birthday, NFR!

It's not my favorite on BB, but that's only because BB has so many great songs to my ears--IYLDWM, VFR, BB, TB, WFWF--I didn't care for Arcadia at first but it's grown on me more than any other of Lana's songs. Enjoy.

You are welcome. A lot of members say her vocals are poor on it, which I don't hear myself. I do hear weak vocals on Grandfather and other tracks from Ocean Boulevard, but not on Arcadia.

It's inexplicable why some people don't like Arcadia as it appears on BB. It's a matter of taste. Personally, I love it. About the time of the album's release, one of our members posted something technological that proved that the previously-leaked songs that appear on BB were very in fact very shoddy copies, perhaps previously downloaded and recopied hundreds of times--though there's no proof that they were necessarily ripped from Youtube. Whatever they are in fact, they aren't high-quality copies that were taken from wherever Lana keeps her original master copies. I assume it's possible the masters were lost, thus the inferior copies were used.

You've got your thinking cap on. Good play.