For the moment, the verses are a snooze, for me ....
The chorus is what she shared with us, so no surprises, there, it's pretty.
The bridge is beautiful.
The instrumental is everything
It's like a mix of :
- Ultraviolence (album) : the verses
- Born to Die (album) for the bridge (the best part )
- and Wait for Life's scat ...
The shots left me a bit disappointed as well, I was hoping to see her in some sort of exotic environment, but to see the street right on the side is a bit .. Of course, she talks about boulevards and what not so who am I ...
The screenshots was simply serendipitous: someone bumped this thread, bringing it to the front page. Unfortunately some of the images beyond the 1st page are broken, so I couldn't use them.
I found out about Lynn's blog and his flickr through Lanalysis. I also got dates for Mizrahi from there, too. And anything else is just looking stuff up. evil's early shows section helped, as well as this list of interviews I had saved.
And it's good that I get to make this 2nd post because I want to add some stuff about Steven Mertens. Here's a bunch of interviews mentioning him, plus evilentity's world-class sleuthing:
Steve Mertens 1
In a Lizzy Grant-era piece for the Huffington Post, she told a reporter, “Strangest performance: Alone in a basement for a handsome record executive. Strangest [song] ever written: Back at his office while I was making out with him.” When I ask her if she regrets joking like that, given how often people perceived her as a puppet of some executive team, she says, no, the story was true: “I had a seven-year relationship with the head of this label, and he was a huge inspiration to me. I’ll tell you later when more people know. He never signed me, but he was like my muse, the love of my life.” (JUNE 4 2014, FADER)
(the referenced interiew is form May 25, 2011)
2
You could work with outside songwriters. Are you open to that kind of thing a bit more now?
Lana: Yeah, I’m more open to it now, ‘cause personally I’m not really feeling it. (Laughs) Like this guy I worked with eight years ago, Steven Mertens, who made my first record [editor’s note: David Kahne is credited as the producer of her debut, 2010’s Lana Del Ray a.k.a. Lizzy Grant; Mertens is a member of the Brooklyn band Spacecamp]. He knew me really well.
3
Now, I know you don’t love to talk about this because journalists have sort of mythologized your past but let’s talk about the trailer park you lived in for a few years- I shot you there when you were 22 [my note: 2007] and continued to shoot you there for a couple years while you were writing and entertaining and wrapping up your album with David Kahne. You were so sweet and happy that you had your very own place to write and reside in, and extra money from that $10,000 indie contract. It was also a sad time for you because you separated from Steven Mertens who had originally produced that record and who was your boyfriend at the time. I don’t really have to ask you this because as your sister, I think I already know, but would you say this was your most enriching time as an artist and happiest time in New York (despite the split from Steven.) (GALORE INTERVIEW 2014)
4 (the saddest one, imo)
Why did you choose to cover Nina Simone’s “The Other Woman” on Ultraviolence?
[Sings, “The other woman has time to manicure her nails, the other woman is perfect where her rival fails.”] I relate to being the person who people come to for “such a change from the old routine,” but not being the main thing. I had a long-term relationship for seven years with someone who was the head of a label and I felt like I was that change of routine. I was always waiting to become the person who his kids came home to, and it never happened. Obviously I had to seek other relationships, and I felt like that became a pattern. I was younger—24, 25 at the time. I had known what I wanted to do for a long time. I had been serious about music since high school, and I stopped drinking when I was 18. (Complex august 2013)
5
EVILENTITY ANALYSIS
TrailerParkDarling, 16 Aug 2013: Steven Mertens used to play back up w/ her, I guess at various gigs.
He used to w/ Regina Spektor, too
http://web.archive.o...ace.com/4026640
SitarHero, Aug 16 2013: But no seriously Sirens was 8 years ago and AKA wasn't...like I think she may have just actually referenced it. Hnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng
I totally overlooked the "eight years ago" part at first ( at a possible reference to Sirens or her other early recordings) but I'd been meaning to contact Steven Mertens for months since @Trash Magic and I put some things together about him (which perhaps belong in Lanalysis). When I saw she mentioned him by name in this article, I got on that immediately and sent him an e-mail. I'll report back any response, but please don't bother him in case it interferes with my attempts to correspond with him.
In addition to sharing the bill with her at a Cross-Pollination show, and playing in her backing band as TPD noted (he's the guy that looks sort of like McNulty from The Wire in the Canal Room videos), Mertens has actually been referred to in at least two other interviews with Lana. Remember that Megan and Menace in the Mornings interview?
When I was young, my boyfriend in the city made my first record. His best friend Jack was Regina [spektor]'s longtime boyfriend. They're married now.
(You can listen here at around 5:20.) Regina Spektor (who TPD notes Mertens also played for) is married to Jack Dishel who was in a band called The Moldy Peaches. Guess who else was in The Moldy Peaches? Steven Mertens. I wasn't completely convinced at first that that's who she was talking about (I thought it was more likely another Moldy Peaches member, Adam Green, since his initials are AG, likely a red herring) until @Trash Magic pointed out something I'd missed-- in that Mizrahi interview she said:
One of the first producers I worked with, Steven Saint, learned a lot from Dick Dale (father of surf music, pre-Beach Boys) so the beginning of the sound was influenced by some sounds from Hawaii and surf guitars, so that’s where the surf comes from.
A little digging shows that Steven Saint = Steven Mertens (see here and here).
6 (surf music + Steven Mertens is from LA)
I had a very handsome ex boyfriend from here [interview takes place in California] once. Surf punk rock bands. It was loud all the time in the house, in the car.
(KPRI interview)
(also notice she calls him handsome here and refers to the record executive as "handsome," too. Makes me think of For K Part 2: "how you get so handsome, my boy?")
For reference, a pic of Steven Mertens in 2008.
That thing where she mentioned feeling like a change of routine... wow. That got me, honestly.
And now for some more discrepancies...
Who are these people?
RADIO GUY
I mean you know people always said you know people will come out of the woodwork and change their mind about you. They’ll start to like you ‘cause you’re on the radio. And it is true but I don’t mind ‘cause I’d rather people be nice to me.
I don’t really care why people are nice to me I just lie it when it’s easier. I just wrote it when this guy that I used to know came back into my life. So now my life is sweet like cinnamon. Cause he came back. (ITALIAN INTERVIEW on FACEBOOK, MAR 12 2012)
RICH GUY
"It's a song about a man who thought I was one of the most exotic things he had ever seen and me indulging in his appreciation and love. On the outside he was handsome and wholesome, but under wraps he was running an illegal electronic business which ended up taking him and his friends under." (Unknown interview, about MDM)
Like, you know, I used to live a really crazy life and, like, OTTR is one of those songs were you can tell by the energy of it that I’m right in the middle of, like, a relationship where times were happy but also chaotic. We were travelling between LA and Las Vegas, he- I can’t gamble ‘cause I’m not good, he was gambling, I was just swimming. (ITALIAN FB interview, MAR 12 2012)
ALABAMA (this could be Mertens since one of the May Jailer pages listed Alabama as a place and that would've been pre-Lynn)
I lived down in Alabama with my boyfriend, I lived here in Brooklyn and in Jersey. I’ve been a lot of different people, I guess.” (FADER JULY 2014)
LONG TIME LOVE MAN + EX BOYFRIEND COUCH MAN
What about love and loss, the other dark note in her oeuvre? “I felt the same way for a really long time, and then I met someone who I guess I fell in love with,” she says. “I just didn’t know I could feel differently. That time with him became sort of a place that I fell back to in my memory.” And the breakup? “Well, I mean, the breakup is a part of it in the way that in the midst of loss you try to still look towards the light and not fall to pieces or do self-destructive things.”
[…]
Before she goes, I ask her where she lives. She’s looking to buy a place, but for now is in Williamsburg. “Staying with my ex-boyfriend,” she says nonchalantly, then bursts into nervous laughter and admits, “I live on his couch.”
I give her a look like, You just told me all that about falling in love and breaking up and you’re on the dude’s couch? She pins it on the touring, letting out another embarrassed laugh. “Because no, I’m busy though!” (FEB9 2012)
REHAB ROCK STAR (Jimmy Gnecco?)
Which lyric are you most proud of?
There was an older song that you've never heard called "Pawn Shop Blues". [sings] "In the name of higher consciousness / I let the best man I met go / Because it's nice to love and be loved but it's better to know all you can know." Because I remember I'd met someone so special and famous but I knew he wasn't enlightened about how to be a good person. I knew it would get in the way of me becoming a nice person. That's a difficult choice to make.
How did you meet this famous person?
Um, it was in a self-help group. [laughs]. He wasn't that famous. I just thought he was famous…
TV famous or movie star famous?
Rock star famous. Just middle of the road ish. To me he was famous because I didn't know anyone who was wildly recognisable. I remember thinking it was exciting at the time. (SEP 19 2011)
VIDEO GAMES MAN (MEN)
(supposedly VG is about Mike Mizrahi, and he supposedly tried to control her career)
Lana: Video Games was a song that came after I abandoned all ambition of becoming anyone noteworthy in music. It was only ten months ago. I just wrote it when I felt love again. It was about a time when it was nice to focus on a relationship and simple things; watching your boyfriend play videogames. It sounds sad, but it was sort of happy. I’d let go of the idea of being a singer because things had gone so terribly for so long.(SEP 23 2011)
LDR: A boy. I think we came together because we were both outsiders. It was perfect. But I think with that contentment also comes sadness. There was something heavenly about that life – we'd go to work and he'd play his video games - but also it was maybe too regular. At the time I was becoming disillusioned with being a singer and was very happy to settle with a boyfriend who I loved, but in the end we both lost sight of our dreams. Maybe there's something not-so-special about domestic life. (OCT 4 2011)
“The verse was about the way things were with one person, and the chorus was the way that I wished things had really been with another person, who I thought about for a long time,” she says, breaking into an acapella of the song. “‘Swinging in the backyard, pull up in your fast car, whistling my name’. That was what happened, you know? He’d come home and I’d see him. But then the chorus, ‘Heaven is a place on earth with you, tell me all the things you wanna do’ wasn’t like that. That was the way that I wished it was – the melody sounds so compelling and heavenly because I wanted it to be that way. The verse is more matter-of-fact because that’s how it was. It’s a mix of memories and the way I wished it could have been. Just because things happened a certain way doesn’t mean that that’s the way that they are. (Dazed 2011)
(NOTE: She's said in a more recent interview that many of her songs are like this - the verses about one person and the chorus about another. I am pretty sure she said this about West Coast; I need to track that interview down)
BTD, VG, BJ - a trilogy about one guy?
(5:47)Q: I didn't realize until recently that Born To Die, and Video Games, and Blue Jeans, you said they were kind of a trilogy about this one dude and his effect on you and your relationship and what you thought. Is he, Adele-style, is he aware of that? Have you talked to him about that? Is he aware of the reaction it's getting?
L: What is Adele style?
Q: She's very vocal about this one person. It's about this person and we talk about it and now we can have a laugh about it, but the time there was so much emotion going on.
L: He doesn't know. His mother knows. We're in touch. But no.
Q: He hasn't pieced it together and gone hey!
L: Not really.
Most of Lana's fans have always been disgusting and irritating. The majority is comprised of 11-year-old girls making up fake information (ahem) or young adult white gays repeatedly attempting to stir shit up.
Lana is not a legend or something lol, it's not like her career has such a peak that everyone will remember her in 50 years, she needs to keep promoting her music to reach more public.
I feel like she's getting too close to the release date for it to do well, I know that's not her motive but having the pre order only three weeks away from the release date seems a bit odd
But do you really think that's the ONLY promo she's doing for the album? I don't even think the era has begun. We know it's 'alive and breathing', but there's nothing really to promo yet. Is she supposed to perform on a late night show when there's no single and no album to promote as of now? As I've said before, the snippets do not make us entitled to get new music right this second.
Also, I don't think the instagram is try-hard at all. I think it's just something fun she's doing on the side and honestly, I welcome the little bts posts and extra selfies as opposed to her usual absence. Who cares if she posts 100 selfies a day and 50 pictures of her staff? In the long run, it's not going to make the music come out any faster, so why don't people just chill out and enjoy the fact that she cares enough to even show us these things.
And I do care about Lana beyond the music. I think she's interesting and that's why I like interviews and instagram posts and, no, I don't think that makes me delusional at all. I wouldn't spend 5 of my paychecks and travel to see her if I only liked her for her music.
1. Question of taste, but they have nothing to do with the album so their presence on the HM page is pointless.2. If being a "diehard fan" means you are telling yourself you love someone you don't know, ok pls go. In the end we all are fans of her as an artist, just because some people go one step further and enter the mindless-teeny-groupie mode and make themselves believe they have feelings they can't actually have, that doesn't make them become better fans. Maybe more annoying ones, but that's it
3. Yeah, it's all we got and it's still not interesting at all. It's like talking about the cameramen of a movie instead of releasing a trailer.
I just watched all of your videos, and I really like them. Much better than the random vintage clips like you mentioned.
The way you used clips from multiple music videos of hers, like with the Ultraviolence vid, and the way the style of each era/album worked together just made me feel kinda nostalgic? I don't know if that makes any sense. Would love to see more, especially from UV since I feel deprived of music videos from that album in general.
I went into rehab when BTD was released and it was the first "fun" music I'd listened to in years, it made me realise I was only 17 and I should act my age and have fun. It sounds really simple but it was so important to me and it helped me overcome addiction stuff I was dealing with. Cause she was sober and still managed to be fun... People make jokes about Lana's music being dark and depressing but I have never thought that at all haha.
I'm just gonna post all my videos here for people to view :3
my mission with creating these videos is to do more than make a fan video but make something artful. something beyond random clips set to music like I've seen others do.
let me know what you think! Feel free to drop any creative criticism and let me know if there are any videos you would be interested in seeing from me :3
There's always a possibility MTWBT will be like Cola or Blue Jeans where the title is mentioned once or twice where it makes sense and that's it. If it's done like OTTR or Carmen then I wouldn't mind it being in the chorus either but if she's pulling a GNR with the chorus then no thanks.
Now that I think of it she does sometimes title songs with words that aren't in the chorus but are elsewhere so it's possible. Video Games, Gods and Monsters, and West Coast are a few examples that come to mind.
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