I am REALLY glad that Nectar, Cherry Blossom and Living Legend got their home on this album.... To release them was the right choice. (Sadly they're really underappreciated on spotify though...)
VFR is one of my absolute favourites on BB, as well as BBS, the title track and thunder. I don’t get what’s so offensive about it to some people? I get that it sounds a bit flat at first but the emotion comes out of it the more you let it grow. It definitely took a while to get to the top of my list but now it’s there I don’t see it going anywhere!!
My favourite part is definitely the ‘ah ah’ on the last chorus, the way it’s mixed into the background as if she’s screaming it from the other side of a door or something (or with a mask on)
1. Blue Banisters
2. If You Lie Down With Me
3. Black Bathing Suit
4. Violets For Roses
5. Dealer
6. Text Book
7. Arcadia
8. Cherry Blossom
9. Sweet Carolina
10. Thunder
11. Wildflower Wildfire
12. Nectar of the Gods
13. Living Legend
14. Beautiful
15. The Trio - Interlude
Hi !
I've got an art instagram account bc i'm a graphic designer. Most of my creations are about lana's songs bc she's my daily inspiration.
Don't hesitate to follow me : https://www.instagram.com/yourlunargirlart/
And give me your feedback about my work!
I kinda love all the mystique around her second/third albums… and each new « fact » seems to be pushing us even further from the truth
Was Tropico ever really a thing? I don’t know. It’s how I chose to name the « album »/ playlist of unreleased songs I love the most we got over the years. One thing is for sure: between BTD’s release and UV’s, two whole years went by and a lot has happened between the two (pretty much as eventful as LFL’s era). The more time passes between albums, higher the chances are that the concept of the future LP will change direction and name. Plus there were all the old songs / demos she had under her belt that she could choose from.
anyways, I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth/bottom line of this period. And unless she decides to release the B-sides to UV at some point, or unless they leak, the mystique of this era will go on.. and I guess it’s part of the fun of being a Lana Stan.
And how do you know they’re the original files? You wouldn’t be able to prove this? We don’t even have the songs in wavs - the tropico tracklist means nothing- those could have easily been songs shortlisted for the film- im not saying some of the songs couldn’t have been for a hypothetical “ tropico” album- but I highly doubt that was anything other than a tally of songs for early stages in this project and the film.
all in all it wasn’t like tropico was a big expansive era or anything fleshed out that we can prove so they’re all in truth UV scraps.
Literally BOZ: "Patrick's available stems of the tracks were seemingly so incomplete he decided to create new production and structure for the songs making complete new versions that were unlike what Lana and Rick originally curated."
dozens of posts on the album process thread directly contradicting this
BOZ "implying" and then later on simply stating as fact without any evidence other than his own admitted vibes that "Tropico" was a concept when Lana herself said she didn't have a concept for the music she was recording at the time until a month later is the contradiction.
No one's saying there's not UV outtakes. It's just that the majority of UV was done by Lana's standards when she announced it in December 2013. She simply rerecorded songs she had already written and made demos of in Nashville with Dan. Some of those likely didn't make the cut, but the implication that her and Dan made a bunch of songs (that he would have writing credits on) that were all different than what she was working on is demonstrably false.
yes you're right not everything BOZ says is correct...most of it isn't
it's not that I disagree Lana could do anything at any given point. It's just that if evidence exists to the contrary or if the only evidence is "vibes" of what insider "thinks" "must have" happened, it's just fanficiton! And we should label it as such
maybe this is 2 months late but who cares, this post by @BlackoutZone bothers me. He concedes it could be wrong (so don't attack), but let me tell you why none of what he said makes...any sense from a music making perspective. I'm going to be relying on actual facts we know from Lana/her team over the years, and on standard industry practice and practicalities. This post will be long, but worth it for the sake of truth.
to start, let's define some terms (these are all in the context of songs, not albums):
Producer - someone who, in some way, directs the actual sound recording of a song (composition of music, in these cases consisting of melodies, lyrics, and chords progressions)//recording project's creative and technical leader. They create or direct the creation of the tracks (stems) that make up a song (vocals, beats, instruments etc.)
Instrumentalist/session musician - someone commissioned by a PRODUCER of a song to play instruments (usually prewritten, sometimes improvised by the musician) for its sound recording
Mixing - the very complex, very difficult process of balancing every track in a song (vocals, backing vocals, digital and live instruments, special effects, etc.) Notably, Lana's frequently mentioned her mixing takes months because of how meticulous she is. Mixing is performed by engineers, in some cases (such as Lana's music) heavily assisted or directed by the producers or artists.
Engineer - here we have both recording engineers and sound engineers, which are different but often the same person, however - basically they're behind all the technical aspects of recording a song. That includes literally pressing record for a session, throwing together a mix for the artist to listen to outside of the studio, etc. Audio engineers work on the actual recording of the song, mixing engineers begin the process most traditionally known as mixing once the artist and producer's song of the vision is complete. (there's an element of mixing that's done by producers, but we're not talking about that).
OWNERSHIP: Legal concept. google Taylor Swift if you need a refresher. What's important to remember is that Lana has owned her master recordings since Born to Die. Established musical term partnerships (such as Lana and Rick or Lana and Jack) often begin the legal aspect's work on an album with a producer and master recording owner (in this case Lana, probably with advance funding in exchange for their licensing deal) entering into a contract for a joint venture. The owner of a master recording has all right to any reproductions of the song.
In a gist, this is typically how a song or group of songs begins. The owner of the recording (usually a label, in this case Lana with her label’s advance money) will contract a joint venture for the recording of a song or songs with a producer. Lana has her relationships established, so while I suspect none of them are taking the contracts to each other, everybody’s got to get paid so somewhere these signatures exist (to prevent say Rick suing Lana for a song’s ownership or something). The producer(s) (ie Lana and Rick/Jack/etc.) begin to create the song (Lana and her producers usually write them as well but that is a can of worms for another time) in its recording by either creating themselves or commissioning others (instrumentalists) to create tracks of music for the song. Ie Change - Lana and Rick created tracks (vocals and piano) pretty much themselves. Or a song from Born to Die (Lana wrote the songs, and worked with producers who created beats (Emile) and helped her record her vocals). Throughout this recording process the people actually pressing (+ new track), (record), (pause etc.) on the computer is a recording engineer, who may also function as a mastering engineer. For example, with White Dress Jack and Lana as producers and instrumentalists were messing around with piano and vocals, and thankfully Laura (engineer) was around to actually press the record button and ensure what they sang into the mic existed digitally.
Now that we have basic terminology down, let's run down who on Lana's team wears which of these hat(s).
Lana Del Rey: Producer (beginning with Pretty When You Cry and Guns and Roses, and nearly every released album track since then *notably excluding Fingertips), instrumentalist (horns on NFR is the only thing I can think of off the top of my head but there might be more)
Engineer* - Lana's known to be (annoyingly, in her own words) meticulous over the mixing process. She's been said to know decibel level differences in the way stems are mixed against each other. The * is because she didn't get an actual mixing credit until the songs with Barrie were used for Blue Banisters. (that's why they sound that way I suspect, not because they were ripped from YouTube - the amount of quality loss from downloading an Mp3 of a unmastered or even mastered song and then remastering it without the stems would make them sound very horrible in my AirPods). OWNER - Lana has owned all her masters since Born to Die, exclusively licensing the distribution rights to Interscope in the US, Universal everywhere else, and Polydor in the UK.
Jack Antonoff: Producer, Instrumentalist, Recording Engineer, Mixing Engineer
Rick Nowels: Producer, Instrumentalist
Laura Sisk: Recording Engineer, Mixing Engineer, Producer (kintsugi) and of course…
Patrick Warren: In all of Patrick's work Lana and Rick (beginning with Born to Die and spanning until Lust for Life), he has only ever served as an instrumentalist. There is one song Lana is on where Patrick served as a producer, and it's the time she featured on Cat Power's album. According to Rick Nowels himself: "Patrick Warren has done strings and keyboards on all the Lana records since ‘Summertime Sadness’. He is a big part of the ‘Lana sound’." This is a very important piece of information.
Okay, now we can begin to examine why @BlackoutZone ’s post made no sense. Let’s examine a Lana and Rick iconic album to see why it made no sense.
Honeymoon was made entirely in Lana and Rick’s circle. Kieron Menzies, Dean Reid, Patrick Warren - all Rick’s guys (similar to Laura working as an engineer on every Jack project). The whole album except for 2 songs was recorded at Rick’s studio. Patrick Warren is an INSTRUMENTALIST on every song except for Freak and Art Deco. That’s why we’re using this as an example.
Depending on which instrument provided on any given song by Patrick, it’s highly likely (or impossible not to have been) he either played a live instrument recorded into a mic (piano, strings, kantele), or created it digitally (synth effects on Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood).
Either way, there’s a very good chance these happened at The Green Building - this was precovid, Rick’s studio is filled with instruments and that would be the best way for the producers to get the desire result. There is however, considering Patrick Warren’s success in his own right, he provided tracks that came from his own studio of choice. It’s important to note that he has no writing credits for lyric, melody, or music on any of the songs - so anything he recorded was written by Lana or Rick (or Nina Simone writers etc.). Basically, he was recording music as dictated to him by the composers. He also doesn’t have a producer credit, so he was never ever expected to provide direction as to what sounds should be there, when they should be there, etc.
Here’s where @BlackoutZone's theory begins to fall apart. The idea that Patrick Warren, whose worked with Lana since 2012 would, in the midst of going back and forth out of the Green Building to record instruments for Lust for Life, would receive a random email (note: Lana’s publicly stated her team /can’t/ use email because of leakers) and then release Lana’s music is questionable at best, considering their extensive working history. What’s even more questionable is that Patrick Warren would 1) have all the stems of any given Lana song, 2) take the role of producer and himself ARRANGE a partially recorded song 3) throw together a rough mix (balancing eq, plugins, reverb, etc.) of the song and 4) then send it to Lana and her team? It’s laughable only because the sheer amount of 1) the amount of work required and 2) complete disregard of Lana and Rick’s recording process, which he had been a witness to, at this point, for the past 4 years.
Let’s take a look to see how mixing for Lana’s team in 2016 actually played out, according to Dean Reid:
"Lana likes to listen to things on her iPod on the beach, and she wants them to sound murky and mysterious. We’re very conscious of that. If we do something that doesn’t fit and that sticks out, we immediately get reactions from Lana or Rick. There is this thing about Lana that if we know she’ll be showing up in half an hour, we have an instinct about what she’s going to like and what not, and so it’s like: ‘Hurry up and make it sound good, so when she walks in the door she’ll be smiling.’ And if she’s not smiling we know how to pull it together really quickly. But she’s in the room for much of the process, and incredibly meticulous about vocal levels, for example. A lot of the vocal rides are dictated by her. She hears 0.2dB differences in volume,”
And according to Kieron Menzies: “She’s very involved during all stages. Obviously she’s central to the writing, but she also sits with us during a lot of the production and mixing.”
“We often do late-night rough mixes,” Menzies elaborates, “so Lana has something she can take home, and that we can play in our cars to check.”
If Lana, in 2016, the time these fakes allegedly occurred, was sitting in the room for months and months with 2 guys, how on earth would it be plausible for Patrick Warren, an instrumentalist with an extensive history of working with Lana and Rick, be fooled in the way that @BlackoutZone described? It makes no sense at all, and that’s before we look at the sheer impracticalities of it.
Mixing a song takes months, and the files are huge. Mixing and mastering are not “basic end steps” as @BlackoutZone described. They take weeks at minimum.
Example: Dean Reid "when we got the first mastered songs back, she was really dismayed by how they sounded, and it turned out to be the dithering down from 24- to 16-bit that was bothering her!"
To mix along the way, as Kieron and Dean do, you need to be a part of an ongoing recording process. All of the files are on Rick’s local network of computers (they have a twin setup), and Kieron and Dean have said they never even work on one song at the same time so they don’t step on each other’s toes. These files, by the way, are huge. The stems themselves create data, but the tracks containing stems are massive. For example, Lust for Life (the song) in its final version had 129 tracks of vocals, drums, effects, etc. It’s a five minute song with basic verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus structure and has 129 tracks. Massive.
So it’s questionable that Patrick, as an instrumentalist, has all of these tracks on his home computer just laying around. It’s even more questionable that Patrick is sitting around mixing files that start in Pro Tools, switching to Logic for some reason and then reconfiguring them back to be reimported? into Pro tools at The Green Building. It doesn’t make any sense. What most likely happened is one of two scenarios, accounting for @BlackoutZone (unverified yet question raising) claim about the metadata export info. I don’t really have an opinion on the likelihood of one over the other, as they could both be true at the same time.
Scenario A: During the recording of the song, Patrick worked from his own studio to record live or digital instruments, for some reason not at the Green Building. In order to record his section properly, he was sent rough mixes of certain parts of the song (whether it was just vocal and piano or more meaty versions) and then recorded his sections alongside them using Logic.
Scenario B: At some point during the recording of the songs Patrick was sent rough mixes in the forms of mp3 to take home and listen and hear how his instruments sounded to see if he wanted to rerecord, or because he was asked to rerecord them, OR after the songs were done, he was sent the rough mixes to hear his part, purely as common courtesy and a member of the team.
However, in both of these scenarios, it would be a logistical nightmare to send him the entire data file (massive), and there would be no need to do so, since he’s not a producer or engineer. Without the file and with only an exported copy, there’s no way he could arrange the songs into a “fake” mix Lana nor Rick approved of. Because he would only have a sound file. So the idea that Patrick himself was fooled into thinking Lana’s team was asking him for a rough mix is improbable because it is implausible.
The only part of @BlackoutZone's theory that could be potentially true is that Patrick was responsible for the songs getting out in someway (perhaps even deception), and/or the strings or some other instrument he provided were in a different section than Lana or Rick wanted. But there’s no actual evidence of that. I could make an entire separate thread about song composition that demonstrates the unlikely nature of this “fake songs” theory as well, but this post is long enough.
Perhaps Patrick was the source of the leaks (we may never truly know) - but it definitely wasn’t in the way that @BlackoutZone described, because that would be logistically impossible and also make no sense if you give it 3 seconds of thought into how music is made. This theory is debunked, the songs are not fake. One thing is clear however: @111 is certainly owed an apology.
*Lastly ownership: the idea that commissioned producers, instrumentalists, etc. would risk the legal consequences of reproducing songs using recordings they have no claim of ownership to is laughable. It’s just not worth it. There is a lot of money in master recording rights, and they’re usually owned by labels with armies of lawyers. Beware any such theories of producers or instrumentalists getting crafty with sound files they don’t own (or even likely have access to, as in this specific case).
This is a myth busting post. Unfortunately, many of these stemmed from one person in particular, hence the title. I fear the damage they've wreaked in the past 3 months starting with one post may ruin the legitimacy of Lanapedia posts forever but, oh well. Sidenote all of you need stop believing everything an "insider" writes /especially/ if it contradicts what you know Lana herself has said.
Myth: Your Girl/Fine China/Say Yes To Heaven demos leaked in 2016 were fake/unapproved by Lana or Rick/produced by Patrick Warren/etc.
Bust: Long version (here). TL/DR - from both a production standpoint and a songwriting standpoint this never made sense, and that fact is only reinforced with leaks from the other versions of the songs now coming out and being largely identical to what was released. Note: the arrangement is the same, most of the stems in each are the same and in the same place, the only changes are those of instrument choice and the stage the song was in (minor lyric changes etc.) Par for the course. Let Me Love You Like A Woman demo and final version drastically different from each other. Same for Lust for Life versions 1-10. All produced by Rick and Lana, none by Patrick Warren (who provided instrumentation, never production, writing, or arrangement). Longer version of this myth bust below!
Myth: “Melancholia” was an album title for UV.
Bust: This came to be established as fact due to Ultraviolence (the song)’s earliest form, a song called Melancholia, leaking. Lana herself stated: “I knew I wanted a record called Ultraviolence and that song in particular stood out to me, so eventually I reworked a song called Melancholia into Ultraviolence.” No evidence that Melancholia was ever an album title. Direct evidence that Lana wanted a record called UV so bad she was willing to rework the lyrics of an old song she liked to be a title track.
Myth: “Tropico” was an album concept.
Bust: This one never made any sense at all, sorry for your notebook pages. Despite the fact that no one knows anything about what Lana was writing on the page or how she organized it, we do have actual facts about Tropico. It was announced as a film as early as 2012 (before the notebook picture, which came in 2013). It was filmed in June of 2013. It was /always/ linked to songs from Paradise (announced as a film with the original Bel Air music video upload.) All the other claims about it were purely speculation (ie BlackOutZone likes attention and made it up.) Further, as late as June 2013 Lana wasn’t “interested in putting out another album”, even though she was writing music. Only in August did she say she was working on a new album, mentioning Black Beauty as being written for it, this album of course being Ultraviolence.
Myth: “Ultraviolence tracklist got changed after Dan Auerbach got involved.”
Bust: Dan merely rerecorded demos Lana had already made and was ready to release. Dan has no writing credits on any song from Ultraviolence except for Florida Kilos. Dan: “Her demos were so good, her songs were so strong that I wanted to get my musicians in who I love and get my sound that I get here with her songs and that’s it. I didn’t want to mess it up. She sang live with a seven-piece band. That’s the whole record – a seven-piece band with her singing live. It was crazy.” "After she played him some of the demos she was working on, he became a fan, lobbying to produce her.” Lana said she thought the record was done in December 2013, and announced it. Dan heard the album while they were at The Riviera in Queens (with Emile Haynie) and told her he thought she was almost where she wanted to be with the sound, but that his Nashville band could get her perfectly there.
See, BlackOutZone is the king of the “idk tho” He loves to present entirely speculative opinions
“so perhaps her original idea was to release the album in 2013 alongside the visuals”
“personally only treat JFK, I Don't Wanna Go, Starry Eyed as Paradise outtakes, but this all remains debatable.”
“it must have only been”
Which are then ran with by him and y’all as fact simply because recently he’s been able to leak tracklists (actual matters of fact).
Even during Blue Banisters he was walking the middle line by making claims that could be verified (but weren’t) and then retracting them (X song is gonna be on the album…jk she changed her mind).
Was BlackOutZone right on some tracklist related things and announcements of recent songs? Definitely, and I’m sure the label connection that traced him to be the source of all these leaks and told him to stop has cut off his access. Does BlackOutZone know literally anything about mixing, mastering, or the way songs got recorded or leaked in 2016, or what the hell Lana was up to in 2013? No, and it’s time for you all to stop pretending he does.
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