Honeymoon - Post-Release Discussion Thread + Poll

[sweetie]

It's ANNOYING and a stain on a otherwise flawless album

 

This is so gross. IMAGINE thinking 24 is anything but flawless. It HAS to be ignorance or delusion on your behalf!

[Fingertips]

This is so gross. IMAGINE thinking 24 is anything but flawless. It HAS to be ignorance or delusion on your behalf!

Suddenly I'm blind and I can't read this post!

[Alexis Del Rey]

This is so gross. IMAGINE thinking 24 is anything but flawless. It HAS to be ignorance or delusion on your behalf!

24 has some of her best vocals! Idk why people are trashing that song 

[Miss Doing Nothing]

Could all of the songs on Honeymoon be directed to the Lizzy persona in a way? I was looking at the lyrics for Terrence loves you and it seemed to fit perfectly. There are a couple of songs (honeymoon, mtwbt, maybe religion, 24) that don't seem to fit as well but taking a loose interpretation of some of the songs, they seem to fit the mismatch between Lizzy/Lana that doesn't seem as prominent now. Ultraviolence is more of an exploration of the darker parts of the LDR persona that get romanticized in born to die, whereas Honeymoon feels more and more like an apology to Lizzy for leaving her behind, and a marrying of the two parts of her so she could move onto who we've seen since in LFL and NFR. I'm going to spoiler out the Lizzy-directed interpretations of each song because I'm aware this could be kind of boring lmao.

 

 

This is a lot longer than I expected- I was originally planning on just talking about Terrence lmao. I’ll put this in a blog post too because of how long it is. In writing it I realised that the way I view Lizzy/Lana could be misinterpreted. I want to make it clear that I know they are one person, and that this interpretation of the album could seem ridiculous. However, in this spoilered part, I just want to clarify what I mean.

 

Personally, I’m a very different person to who I was four years ago- and that’s just four years of a much smaller life than the one Lana lives. I can’t imagine how she views her past when so many people, not just me of course, view their past self with tenderness and sadness and a want to protect them.

 

And again, I can’t imagine what it would be like to have a different name to my past self. Lana became famous by becoming Lana del Rey, and while of course she was the same person, there’s probably a lot of emotions involved when there’s a whole life lived as Lizzy Grant. If the Lizzy-like wig in the Doin’ Time video and the references to her longer-than-BTD career in recent interviews are an indication, hopefully some people’s wishes can come true and AKA can be re-released. If that happens- and I hope it does- I think Honeymoon played a big part in forgiving her past and coming to terms with how it’s shaped her present.

 

Honeymoon:

To me the first verse could be Lizzy to Lana- there's no one for you but me, it's not fashionable to love me, etc. The second verse feels more Lana to Lizzy. She used to speak in earlier interviews about her past and the dangerous things she would do back before LDR existed. A part of me thinks that the Lizzy-to-Lana change might have in part been an attempt to get away from the past, the drinking, the drugs, but this album and in particular this song is her realizing that she's still Lizzy and that doesn't have to be a bad thing. The title and the chorus, honeymoon, could be referring to the (metaphorical obvs) marriage between Lizzy and Lana.

 

Music To Watch Boys To:

I don't have much to say about this one other than the second (?) verse: "...I know what only the girls know / Lies can buy eternity / I, I see you leaving / So I push record and watch you leave"

 

Again, I think in an early interview, the one when she wears the racecar jacket, she says she feels 'protective of her' (her as in Lana), and a lot of her earlier career brought accusations of Lana being fake and an industry plant. Obviously not making her career as Lizzy public knowledge isn't lying, but a lot of the Lana persona was more of a creation than a truth, and it was a creation that did launch her to fame (lies can buy eternity). The 'I see you leaving’ part could maybe be a more complex aspect of seeing it through Lizzy’s eyes, watching herself leave to move to LA and getting left behind in what would be a bittersweet moment. The ‘push record’ part- obviously they’re still the same person but I wonder if, in the early parts of being known as Lana del Rey and being invited to red carpet events, she felt like that part of her was fake but inspired the not-fake part of her (Lizzy) to write songs (and push record)…? Idk. 

 

Terrence Loves You: 

  This one is a goldmine, and feels the most like an apology to Lizzy. Like honeymoon, it makes the most sense to me if the first verse is from Lizzy to Lana- ‘I don’t matter to anyone but you’ll never grow old (because she found fame not as Lizzy, but as Lana, so that’s who will go down as a legend),’ ‘all of what’s hidden will never grow cold,’ all of what’s hidden possibly being the music made as Lizzy, and even the life lived as Lizzy. Despite attempts to obscure it, the Lizzy persona is still alive inside Lana- and this can be applied to the chorus, with Lizzy’s songs being the tunes that she gets trashed to. I don’t think I need to expand on the ‘I lost myself when I lost you’ part, or the bridge.

 

God Knows I Tried: 

This, along with HBTB is a kind of regret at reaching the fame that she wanted, and that she ‘destroyed’ Lizzy for. The verses are her current situation, the choruses are how she got to where she is now (doing what she did in the choruses as Lizzy)- living, dying (referenced in Jump), loving, lying, begging, crying, borrowing, losing, and trying. The final part- let there be light, light up my life- is maybe trying to make peace with the Lizzy-Lana situation and finding a kind of redemption through it.

 

High By The Beach: 

This is SO similar to God Knows I Tried, which I never realised until I wrote out the GKIT interpretation lmao. Her fame is the boy she’s talking to, and there’s a big Lizzy throwback in the bridge with lights, camera, acción. This song is Lizzy’s redemption and revenge, referenced in the outro- ‘peace by vengeance brings the end.’ Despite her love-hate relationship with her fame, it gives Lizzy the standing she never got as Lizzy. All the industry guys she says she slept with, and all the industry guys that screwed her over in one way or another(cough cough Mike cough cough)- the bridge is her fuck-you to them, the outro is another redemption for Lizzy-Lana, less light and peaceful than the one in GKIT as it’s through fire and destruction and revenge, but this could be self-forgiveness in recognizing that it was only through destroying Lizzy she would be able to reach heights to get her revenge on those guys through her success.

 

Freak: 

Okay so this is one of the songs that needs to be read much more loosely, so let’s write off the dancing and kissing between Lana and whoever she’s singing to. This is Lana inviting Lizzy back into her life after coming to an understanding in high by the beach and god knows I tried, telling her to ‘screw your anonymity’ (she’s not going to keep Lizzy under wraps anymore), come to California, ‘if you’ll stay, I’ll stay,’ an acknowledgement that she can only get better mentally and live with her fame healthily (i.e. ‘stay’) if she comes to terms with Lizzy not being as erasable as she tried to make her.

 

Art Deco: 

Just describing Lizzy lmao. Again, the last couple of lines change it from describing Lizzy by herself to including both of them.

 

Burnt Norton: 

The poem takes its name from a ruined house in England, and the general feeling of the poem is that the past is unchangeable, the future unknowable, that finding redemption through God is the only way to escape the bounds of time. I’m going to put a part from the end of the poem that makes me think of the Lizzy interpretation a lot in a spoiler:

Words, after speech, reach

Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,

Can words or music reach

The stillness, as a Chinese jar still

Moves perpetually in its stillness.

Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,

Not that only, but the co-existence,

Or say that the end precedes the beginning,

And the end and the beginning were always there

Before the beginning and after the end.

And all is always now. Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still. 

 

Religion: 

Again this needs to be read quite loosely as it’s easy to read it as addressed to a lover rather than herself. This follows nicely from Art Deco and Freak, the true marriage of Lizzy and Lana as one and forgiving herself for what she did to herself, and saying despite the money, drugs, parties, and clubs that separated them once, now they’ll stay together despite what’s going to come in the future.

 

Salvatore: 

I read this as following on from Religion. She’s ‘above her king,’ her king being the men that she’s sang about both as Lana and as Lizzy. Salvatore is mentioned in backfire, and now Lizzy-Lana gets the chance to leave behind the men that have screwed her over and be at peace with herself, eating soft ice cream, working on her tan, with all the lights sparkling for her.

 

Blackest day: 

I read this as Lana trying to live with her inner-conflict despite it having an impact on her relationship with her lover, ‘it’s not easy for me to talk about / A half-life lost in dreams.’ The song can read like the consequences of what happened when she didn’t deal with that inner conflict and the impact it had on her life. She explains that it’s not just a song or a phase in the outro to the listener, and the bridge reads like a mix between her lover telling her to put Lizzy out of her mind, and Lizzy refusing to leave (because she’s a part of Lana herself, and though the lover understands the conflict Lana has with Lizzy, he doesn’t get that Lizzy and Lana are the same person and Lizzy won’t just go away). The conflict that Lana is unable to explain eventually drives the lover away. Maybe, like in HBTB, the lover represents the fame that Lana gained by becoming Lana del Rey. Despite her career as Lizzy being out in the open, the wider public don’t understand the relationship Lana has with her past, and Lana doesn’t want to try and explain it, but it eventually leads to the decay of her love for fame.

 

24: 

This one’s a little difficult, but it can be read as Lana evaluating her past as Lizzy and the mistakes she made, but ultimately accepting and forgiving herself.

 

Swan Song: 

A lot has been written on the Lizzy-Lana interpretation of this. This is another HBTB-bridge, where Lizzy is invited back into Lana’s life and given everything she worked so hard for but didn’t get to experience as herself. This song is the true ending of the album, hence the title. We make fun of LfL, but it has an important role in her career. It’s the album and era where she really began to feel at peace with herself and with her fame, and I think coming to terms with her past through honeymoon played an important role in it.

 

Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood: 

(Yes I know this is a cover) this can feel like maybe Lizzy speaking to Lana, but also, if Swan Song is the formal manifesto of the album like Get Free is for LfL and Hope is for NFR, this could be her asking the public and the fans not to misunderstand the changes she makes between Honeymoon and LfL, and not to misunderstand Lizzy.

 

Stranger than a stranger

 

She didn’t yet know who she was?

[ArtDecoDelRey]

Happy 4th Birthday to Lana's best album

 

Honeymoon, we love you. mwah

[White Hot]

[Fusel]

happy birthday huntymoon, i'll never find the words to describe how much I love this album. from the lq snippets i listened to at night before its official release to experiencing the whole thing in hq. to this day i kind of regret not having waited to hear it in hq for the first time, a mistake i never repeated since then lol. it's my favorite album of hers. it's airy and weightless but has substance, it's dreamy yet so unsettling, sometimes even threatening. it's also the album that kept me company while moving out of my parents' house and leaving my hometown 

[Edelgard]

4 years??

I remember starting my study, listening to this album, making the commute everyday from my hometown to the uni

[picturebook]

This album is a mood and we don't deserve it bc of all the hate it got for no reason. 

[trailer park]

happy bday <3 a lot of amazing songs on this album, especially the title track which sounds so classy and elegant 

[Delete NOW]

.

[TheBoss]

4 fucking years

[PARADIXO]

I just posted a gorgeous tribute to Honeymoon

 

I would highly appreciate if y'all read it!

 

http://lanaboards.com/index.php?/topic/11014-honeymoon-turns-4-achieving-mental-health-through-time-travel/

[WildMustang]

What a masterpiece you are

Truly Lana's best album

If it was released in 2019 it would get 100 metascore period

[YUNGATA]

There's a lot I like about Honeymoon. ~sonically~ there's some very lush and interesting compositions, but it's such a front loaded album imo and really dips after Burnt Norton. Aside from Salvatore the second half only barely sounds like it's related to the first half.

[ArtDecoDelRey]

There's a lot I like about Honeymoon. ~sonically~ there's some very lush and interesting compositions, but it's such a front loaded album imo and really dips after Burnt Norton. Aside from Salvatore the second half only barely sounds like it's related to the first half.

honestly i feel like the second half of honeymoon holds up a LOT better than the second half of ultraviolence

[daphnedinkley]

looking back on the Honeymoon post-release thread a few months after release, it's shocking how much people didn't like the album 

 

the thing is, Honeymoon is obviously a mood album. NFR! very much isn't, so it has to be judged as a set of individual songs (that are compiled together in album form obv) as opposed to a big atmospheric piece, so i think any comparisons in quality between Honeymoon and NFR! are kind of redundant. it seems much fairer to judge its quality in comparison to BTD and UV.

 

 

UV reigns supreme still imo sorry 

 

[Crimson and Clover]

There's a lot I like about Honeymoon. ~sonically~ there's some very lush and interesting compositions, but it's such a front loaded album imo and really dips after Burnt Norton. Aside from Salvatore the second half only barely sounds like it's related to the first half.

I feel this. honestly I feel like I was bothered more by HM's production than NFR...most HM sounds like demos tbh 

[West Coast]

I feel this. honestly I feel like I was bothered more by HM's production than NFR...most HM sounds like demos tbh 

 

Honeymoon has legit the best production of all her albums. I don't hear any of the followings on Honeymoon: white noises, tinny/metallic/cheap piano notes, unequal voice recording AND mastering on any of its song, as well as flat and dry instrumentation. Which are all basically the very definition of the production of NFR. Honeymoon is literally her most spotless album production wise, near studio perfect sound. 

 

[Crimson and Clover]

Honeymoon has legit the best production of all her albums. I don't hear any of the followings on Honeymoon: white noises, tinny/metallic/cheap piano notes, unequal voice recording AND mastering on any of its song, as well as flat and dry instrumentation. Which are all basically the very definition of the production of NFR. Honeymoon is literally her most spotless album production wise, near studio perfect sound. 

 

I don't know but it's just my opinion...I remember the first time I listened to Religion I thought something was wrong with my earphones because the whole thing sounds muffled lol...I'm by no means an expert on production or anything.  I'm also not a huge fan of the reverb (which HM seems to be drowned in) - MAC was a breath of fresh air for me because we could finally listen to her voice clearly. Don't get me started on how I think HBTB and Freak are some of her worst songs in her catalog