Vertimus

I agree. Trust nothing from LDR's lips except a specific date, or, much better, an official release date from Interscope. Most trustworthy of all, the pre-order. Even with the unexpected 'Doin' Time' and 'Charlie's Angels' songs and the poetry book, there is no good excuse whatsoever for this endless release-date foolishness. It's grossly unprofessional. I'd prefer to have Interscope post, "December 1st 2019 is the release date for NFR" than hear "soon," "in a bit...", "in a couple months..." Or even have Interscope report, "February 15th, 2020 is the NFR release date."

Thanks. “In a bit” is even worse.

“Soon” could mean anything if LDR actually said that. Do we have objective confirmation, video or audio footage? “Soon” is relative.

The thing with a piano ballad is the melody. Strong melody = good song. Bad/No Melody = weak song. Most of LDR’s piano ballads have strong melodies.

Some of her best work ‘are just piano ballads,’ like ‘Old Money’ and ‘Is This Happiness.’

With cheekbones like hers, why drown them out with fillers? It makes no sense at all.

Also, wasn’t there talk of her dueting or featuring some reclusive rock legend on NFR? My earlier guesses were Brian Wilson of The Beach Boys, on whose last solo album LDR was supposed to be featured, or Axel Rose. Those are the two most reclusive rock legends I know, and she has connections to both.

If the song she’s doing with Ariana and Miley is due out soon, won’t that conflict with the release of the ‘lead single’ from NFR, assuming NFR will be out within two months, especially since we just had ‘Doin’ Time’? I sense release-date and ‘too much all at once’ trouble here.

It’s not a question of her willfully lying, it’s a question of her just being wrong again, due to general cluelessness, speaking irresponsibly, the poetry book release being delayed again or almost anything else.

A solid release date, preferably from Interscope, is what we need.

And even then..even if she did say something about two months..how reliable has she proven to be?...what if the poetry book is delayed or delayed again, and so NFR has to be pushed back again? This just isn’t solid enough data for me to have faith in. I want to see the cover art, a track list and especially a preorder.

One of the reasons I am glad LDR is using JA as a producer is because there were too many songs over the last several albums arranged like BAR, that is, they would start out low and slow, and then pretty quickly go bombastic. I do like BAR, but definitely wanted to see her do something else, something less predictable, and I think MAC and VB were good examples of different approaches that could be utilized.

. Re-recording them would defeat the entire purpose and just become another arduous project / process full of endless decision-making. Tori Amos has done something similar, and earlier, Kate Bush did. I expect one day we will get something from LDR like Amos’s massive ‘A Piano,’ full of personal favorites that have already been released, ‘b-sides,’ multiple remastered leaked songs, and completely ‘new’ songs, both those we’re aware exist, like ‘Yosemite,’ and others we have never heard of, or don’t know the names of, like the ‘four political tracks’ left off LFL.

She doesn’t say she almost loved him, she says he fucked her so good she “almost” says “I love you.” That’s two different things, because, often, in a rush of real physical passion, a person says, “I love you” because they're physically caught up in the moment. But while that can be an actual verbal reflection of genuine love, it can also be something blurted out in the heat of passion. I think most of us have experienced exactly that.

With the last three NFR singles, she announced them at least several days beforehand—and the same with the Sublime cover. Since we haven’t had an announcement, is it only her birthday that leads you all to think she might release something tomorrow??

It may be LDR recycled RBFY for NFR in original or revised form, but during the LFL release period, she described it as not a full song in itself, but only a kind of brief introduction to the LFL song cycle, which she then decided against using. I wish she had used it; I think it would have added a lot to an admittedly already-crowded album.

I welcome her doing pop again if she does it with the irony, verve and gusto she used to. I love songs like ‘National Anthem’ and ‘Radio.’ ‘Groupie Love’ seemed like an effort to rekindle that effortless sort of pop, but failed, at least to me, especially because of the clumsy lyrics towards the beginning.

But she hasn’t produced ‘Pop anthems’ since BTD. She really abandoned pop after that, strictly speaking, except for ‘Young & Beautiful’ and ‘Love,’ which had a very light pop-ish sort of touch.

Exactly! It seems like three career steps backward.

There’s no reason you should hate to agree with me. People sometimes develop the wildest misconceptions about one another here. I love Camille Paglia, Nico, Anderson East, R.E.M., Marianne Faithfull, the Cactus Blossoms, Carl Jung, Joni Mitchell, the Velvet Underground, Leonard Cohen, Frankie Lee, Tori Amos, 21 Pilots, Luke Winslow-King, Father John Misty, Kassidy, Jeff Buckley, Elvis Presley...what kind of monster can I be? Full agree with your other statements, and I am not afraid to say that. Who knows what her inner reasoning is. Like I said, I can only hope it will be something like MMITPM.

They may be popular, but they're not the kind of musician LDR has seemed to want to be, become, or be associated with. They're pretty much everything she's run from as fast as possible in her own career. I would as much expect LDR to collaborate with the Jonas Brothers at this stage.

She's been struggling to build 'artistic credibility' since UV, so I'm in the dark as to why she would collaborate with Miley and Arianna. I could see collaborations with 'older' artists like Courtney Love or Jakob Dylan, or those newer to the scene like Post Malone, Dylan LeBlanc or Ben Morrison, but I guess this is another example of her unpredictability and tendency to switch gears. She did do that sort of sort of sarcastic, cutting Pop really well, the 'Paradise*,' 'Meet Me In Pale Moonlight' and 'Making Out' kind, which I really enjoyed. Maybe this new collaboration will be a return to that? Is that too much to hope for from LDR in 2019? * song, not the album.

I agree. Now things are getting clearer. There was NFR (which she may have continued working on after she said it was completed), the poetry book (and the perhaps unexpected hassles that came with it), the 'Doin' Time' cover that had to be released at a given time, this new collaboration single, her concert appearances...so a release schedule had to be prepared that accommodated all of these in a satisfying and effective sequence, not just for LDR, but for the people she was partnering with.