thank you so much @Mer for helping me fully grasp what @Surf Noir said. now i understand that we couldn't have "did you know that there's a tunnel under ocean boulevard?" without lana, but we also couldn't have it without jon batiste, judah smith, jack antonoff, drew erickson, tommy genesis, father john misty, RIOPY, or SYML which were all a result of lana bringing them all together, which couldn't have happened if lana didn't know them in the first place, so we couldn't have it without every moment that led up to lana meeting all of these people and building up friendships with them, but what if lana didn't meet these people? what if they never existed? we wouldn't have the album without lana's parents, and everybody else's parents or grandparents, or great-grandparents, or great-great-grandparents, or great-great-great-grandparents, if you go back far enough, everybody's parents will lead back to the same woman, the mitochondrial eve, the woman we're likely all descendants from, we are all technically related to lana and all of her collaborators and friends to some level, we are all extensions of lana and this entirely unique group of collaborators, our distant ancestors who are more likely to be distant ancestors of lana and her friends contributed by simply having children, every moment in human history may have led up to the creation of "did you know that there's a tunnel under ocean boulevard?", but strangely enough, if our very distant ancestor did something slightly different, for example, give birth two days before, or live in a different location, we may have had a differently album entirely, but because our ancestors, and because lana and her friends did exactly what they did, we actually couldn't have "pearl watch me on ring a bell psycho lifeguard"