Lana Del Rey released her third major-label studio album Honeymoon on September 18, 2015.
The spacey, soothing record finds Del Rey at her most introspective and lyrically and sonically artistic: she goes on a mysterious honeymoon with herself in order to re-invent her self-perspective, ambitions and wishes. The album has such a deep sense of thinking that it feels like she's time-traveling through her mind, re-evaluating her past experiences with love, drugs, alcohol, analyzing her very present (which is now her past) as a woman and celebrity and projecting her wishes for the future (now her present onwards). Perhaps the reason she decided to make such a self-examining, vain and almost psychological album is the 'post-Ultraviolence trauma': her dark, self-destructing 2014 release, which Lana herself admitted it "went too far". However, it was necessary for her growth and evolution as a depressed being: her broken state of mind was clearly expanded throughout Ultraviolence. The time-travel is also represented in the production: the smooth mix of jazz-influenced instrumentation, trap beats that go backwards and forwards endlessly, operatic and retro-filtered vocals, a balance between programming and live recordings and, of course, the non-existent space between the songs -- Honeymoon is a gapless project.
The ambitious album opens with the cinematic, orchestral title track: it functions excellently as the opening song as it describes the absence of this troubled man Del Rey is longing for. She calls him "elusive" and at last embarks on this honeymoon with herself. Her trip included no other than the most Lana Del Rey destinations: Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Malibu, Hollywood (location that would later be the stage of the following record, Lust for Life) and also New York and Florida. "Music to Watch Boys To" is a sensual, playful number in which we find Lana taking, for the first time, a more dominating, empowered role: she's hypnotizing men with her echoed "I like you a lot so I do what you want", though it is "all a game to [her] anyway". She's watching them fade, fall one by one as she plays some Caribbean-influenced music and drinking lemonade lazily. However, this character is not strong consistently: the slow process to inner peace, happiness and independence has its highs and lows, and that is exposed in the vulnerable "Terrence Loves You". Now all the bad men are gone, but there is one that still haunts her: "I lost myself when I lost you", she sings in a jazzy tone. All the lines indicate she's describing her breakup with Barrie-James O'Neill, who Ultraviolence was mostly about, making these two projects sister albums: two chapters of the same story.
After being stuck in the past for a few minutes, we fly gently to the present: in "God Knows I Tried" she expresses that fame was not as she expected. The lyrics suggest she has her breakdowns alone in her room, lamenting everything she's going through; however. "I feel free when I see no one and nobody knows my name".
At this point, it is clear that Honeymoon is not like Del Rey's previous works, where production shined for its grandness and claustrophobic nature: this time, she is inspired, alongside producers Rick Nowels and Kieron Menzies, by ambient music and minimalism. There is so much space to breathe, to think, to stay silent, to sing as high and low as she can, to penetrate the words into your mind, to let the instruments and sound effects melt with each other.
The following track introduces an entire section of the album: we are in the present, as we noticed with "God Knows I Tried", but now the background music accompanies the travel: Lana Del Rey says welcome to trap music for the first time in her discography. Something must have happened when they were sent, though, because there's slightly different from what we know as trap: they're muffled and distorted or, how she calls it, muddy. The pioneer, forward-looking "High By the Beach" shares the same concept as the previous track, but instead of being reflecting alone in her house, now she's outside, ready to fight whoever obstructs her path, especially those who wish to attack her privacy. There is a feeling of danger and assertiveness -- she dreamily expresses her mundane wish to smoke weed in the shore, an activity most humans would enjoy without any problem, but she as a celebrity has to carry an enormous gun to shot down an helicopter full of paparazzi. Of course, this is a metaphor (though I am sure Lana, more than once, wanted to actually do this) to people wanting to know everything about her and questioning her so-talked-about authenticity and how she's using her ever-growing music to fight them. In this time and space she has found a new interest, a man of "leather black and eyes of blue" she begs him to "come to California" to be a freak with her and escape. She is aware of time even in the way they listen to whatever 70s band is playing: "We could slow dance to rock music". "If time stood still," she says, "I'd take this moment and make it last forever". The experimental "Art Deco" is perhaps the song that defines the sonical world of Honeymoon the best: back and forth beats, soft orchestra, layered vocals, timid yet epic saxophone and subtle electronic effects that sound like psychedelic drops of water.
The record is separated in two by a trippy, on-loop-like interlude: Lana is reading a part of "Burnt Norton", a poem by T.S. Eliot. The work explains that one individual, in order to grow and achieve peace, must momentarily leave the metaphorical space and forget the limits of time they're in and start to look into themself, a dimension where is always present. "Time present and time past," she reads, "are both perhaps present in time future / And time future contained in time past." The poem is part of Eliot's Four Quartets, a collection that "symbolically represented the completion of his former poems and his moving onto later works," very much like Honeymoon. In the following second half of the album, the present is set and there's no more traveling to the past -- we are, however, thinking and reflecting of it (which is different than dwell in it). The concept of escapism is the protagonist here; perhaps as a way to avoid the future or, oppositely, to actually travel to it -- to escape from this present of pain and uncertainty.
In "Religion", this time lapse is depicted just like that -- yes, her past is gone and "everything is fine now" but it's still the present and it's haunted. "You're my religion," she sings layered endlessly, "all my friends say I should take some space / But I can't envision that for a minute". In the song, Lana has fallen on the philosophical question of what to do when things are fine -- when the tangible horror is gone, what is next? Post-trauma feels like that. It's a void; you're not there anymore but the experience is now within you. In the bridge, the instruments go back and forth, as an effort to time-travel again, but it fails and we continue the story in the epic "Salvatore". What's around her is described, just like in "Religion", as fine -- gleaming lights in Miami, beatboxers and rappers by the beach, jazz and blues. However, the hypnotizing, empowered chanteuse from "Music to Watch Boys To" is back: she half-lies, borrowing the melody of the romantic "Careless Whisper" by George Michael, "The summer is wild and I've been waiting for you," only to play with her lover's mind again -- "Catch me if you can."
And we're back to the lows. Exquisitely positioned towards the end of the album, the spectacular centerpiece "The Blackest Day" is the result of so much thinking, lamenting, healing, speculation, delusion, time-travel and mind-playing: the ultimate breakdown. "Carry me home," she demands with her blue nail polish on as a tense pad plays in the background. "I don't really want to break up / We got it going on / It's what you gathered from our talk but you were wrong," again lost in the past. Like in "Religion", the present is such an empty concept for her now that there's nothing left to do other than go on. She finds no words to explain her state, this feeling of her life being one long dark day ever since that happened. So much soul searching has made her fall "deeper and deeper" and now she finds herself "looking for love in all the wrong places," making every word more dismal with a dramatic "oh my God!". Now the music is enormous; the sonic landscape of Honeymoon has so much empty space that it let "The Blackest Day" fill it all with its progressive music structure, ethereal, FKA twigs-like synthesizers and sawers and gentle, post-rock drums, beats and overall production. She is in denial with the future and what it takes to get there: "There's nothing for us to talk about / There's nothing for me to think about." At the end of the song, she has no other option than to accept her reality, because that's exactly what she needed: she already embraced her past, and now it was time for the present to receive the same treatment. "I'm on my own," she sings in a tone of isolation.
In the cinematic "24" she depicts her lover as a liar and a dog with fleas, only to slowly find peace with herself in "Swan Song", an ode to escapism and isolation. The fact that this process felt like one long day is strong as she sings "The world can change in a day if you go away". "Let's leave the world for those who change everything," she says apocalyptically, "Let's just get lost if that's what we want." It is also a reference to the 'white tennis shoes syndrome': the feeling that makes it seem as though there's always something interrupting us from doing our most important (and also most difficult) task. In her case, getting to a better place mentally and emotionally -- the worst of procrastinations. "Why work so hard when you could just be free?". Entelechy at its finest.
The album closes with a cover of the classic "Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", where she sings "No one alive can always be an angel", justifying her ever-changing and postponing behavior throughout the project. She is trying, and her intentions are always good: she only needed space and, of course, time, for no one to interfere with her thoughts and, what she fears the most, misunderstand her. However, she must know (as she does on Lust for Life), total isolation does not do, especially when the relationship with oneself has been broken and tortured.
Omg you guise, I saved the song for my early-ass (5AM) drive this morning and it was HEAVEN in my car, like it's painful/ unsettling to listen to but damn is it beautiful. I love how loud it is too, I felt like I was inside the fucking piano.
Someone may have mentioned this already, but it makes me think of Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. In AA we joke about how members chain smoke cigarettes and drink bad/ burnt coffee. And the first few of the Twelve Steps involve admitting powerlessness over alcohol, and a belief that a higher power/ God can restore us. Also, we can choose to share our experiences ("spill my guts") with alcohol, and meetings frequently occur in church basements.
Absolutely agree. Like he's above it all and doesn't need it to have his power. He's lascivious and manipulative (like when he talked to Gallant when he said his iconic line "The hole you need filled isn't in your face or your ass, it's in your heart.") without having to resort to the physical act.
I think it makes him a better character to not use sex or be interested in it at all.
Like when it looked as if he had those intentions as he asked Venable to take her dress off, but it was just to humiliate her for her spine deformity. And how he payed no attention to when Maddison asked if she had to give him a blow job to get out of Hell.
That made him more powerful.
Guys it's been 13 days and I'm still so in love with this album, I can't believe that I like every song, I wasn't expecting to at all and I'm just so happy and full of candy
My favorites are (no order) MAC, NFR, VB, Cinnamon Girl, Bartender, The Greatest
Also, does the beginning of Love Song remind anyone else of the instrumental beginning of the Blue Jeans video? The chords at the beginning of LS just recall the grandiosity of the Blue Jeans chorus for me for whatever reason.
Guys it's been 13 days and I'm still so in love with this album, I can't believe that I like every song, I wasn't expecting to at all and I'm just so happy and full of candy
My favorites are (no order) MAC, NFR, VB, Cinnamon Girl, Bartender, The Greatest
Also, does the beginning of Love Song remind anyone else of the instrumental beginning of the Blue Jeans video? The chords at the beginning of LS just recall the grandiosity of the Blue Jeans chorus for me for whatever reason.
Guys it's been 13 days and I'm still so in love with this album, I can't believe that I like every song, I wasn't expecting to at all and I'm just so happy and full of candy
My favorites are (no order) MAC, NFR, VB, Cinnamon Girl, Bartender, The Greatest
Also, does the beginning of Love Song remind anyone else of the instrumental beginning of the Blue Jeans video? The chords at the beginning of LS just recall the grandiosity of the Blue Jeans chorus for me for whatever reason.
Guys it's been 13 days and I'm still so in love with this album, I can't believe that I like every song, I wasn't expecting to at all and I'm just so happy and full of candy
My favorites are (no order) MAC, NFR, VB, Cinnamon Girl, Bartender, The Greatest
Also, does the beginning of Love Song remind anyone else of the instrumental beginning of the Blue Jeans video? The chords at the beginning of LS just recall the grandiosity of the Blue Jeans chorus for me for whatever reason.
Guys it's been 13 days and I'm still so in love with this album, I can't believe that I like every song, I wasn't expecting to at all and I'm just so happy and full of candy
My favorites are (no order) MAC, NFR, VB, Cinnamon Girl, Bartender, The Greatest
Also, does the beginning of Love Song remind anyone else of the instrumental beginning of the Blue Jeans video? The chords at the beginning of LS just recall the grandiosity of the Blue Jeans chorus for me for whatever reason.
Guys it's been 13 days and I'm still so in love with this album, I can't believe that I like every song, I wasn't expecting to at all and I'm just so happy and full of candy
My favorites are (no order) MAC, NFR, VB, Cinnamon Girl, Bartender, The Greatest
Also, does the beginning of Love Song remind anyone else of the instrumental beginning of the Blue Jeans video? The chords at the beginning of LS just recall the grandiosity of the Blue Jeans chorus for me for whatever reason.
Guys it's been 13 days and I'm still so in love with this album, I can't believe that I like every song, I wasn't expecting to at all and I'm just so happy and full of candy
My favorites are (no order) MAC, NFR, VB, Cinnamon Girl, Bartender, The Greatest
Also, does the beginning of Love Song remind anyone else of the instrumental beginning of the Blue Jeans video? The chords at the beginning of LS just recall the grandiosity of the Blue Jeans chorus for me for whatever reason.
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