Category: Reviews

Originally written in 2023

Lana Del Rey’s ninth studio album, ‘Did You know That There’s a Tunnel under Ocean Blvd” is messy, overindulgent, and heartbreakingly honest. The album is marked by Del Rey’s most vulnerable questions and rangy vocals. 

The album is ruminative and features Lana discussing “the very heart of things”. She sings about life, death and what comes after, among vulnerable questions about family, love and healing. “The Grants” (my favourite song), opens the album with backup vocals from Melodye Perry, Pattie Howard and Shikena Jones. The track starts on a gospel-like note and bears Lana’s family name in the title, highlighting the theme of family in this album. She sings about heaven and the transient nature of human life (“My pastor told me/ When you leave all you take/ Oh, is your memory,”). The opening track is a hymn about love and life, and gives a glimpse into the airy and unguarded nature that characterises this particular album. 

Through her writing, Lana makes this album the most personal one yet. The vocals have a voice-memo like quality to them, as if she is voicing all these thoughts to herself, rather than writing a studio album. Lana exposes her vulnerabilities in songs like “Fingertips”, “A&W” and “Kintsugi”, where she sings about womanhood and motherhood, family and dealing with loss. The album is not characterised by pop vocals or beats that sell. Instead, it feels like an operation of creative abandon, written just for her. 

In true Lana Del Rey fashion, there are multiple allusions tucked into the tracks of this album. From John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High” to Leonard Cohen’s well-known refrain (“That’s how the light gets in”) in “Kintsugi”, Lana deploys musical allusions artfully. And she is nothing if not a collagist as shown by her sampling of Tommy Genesis’ track “Angelina” in her song, “Peppers”, (she even name-drops the Red Hot Chili Peppers). The album is one of collaboration and features- with jazz singer Jon Batiste singing on “Candy Necklaces”, Lana’s lyrics added over a piano track by indie composer SYML in “Paris, Texas” and songs co-produced with Jack Antonoff.

What makes this album special for me is how her vocals, lyrics and each of the songs are constantly juxtaposing themselves and each other, making the work chimeric in nature. After the balladic lyrics of “Sweet” (“You can find me where no one will be/In the woods somewhere/In the knife in the heart of a valley”), we are greeted with the shapeshifting “A&W”, where Lana goes from soft and psychedelic vocals to screeching trip-hop beats in a heartbeat. 

“Ocean Blvd” scratches beneath the surface, with existentialism underlying the entire album (most notably expressed in “Judah Smith Interlude”, where Judah Smith, Lana’s pastor, delivers a sermon to a melancholic piano backing). Lana ventures into numerous creative classes within the one-hour-and-seventeen-minutes of this album. She revisits old albums and personas, cutting up and reintroducing tracks from older songs into this album, as if she is reimagining and resubmitting her legacy for the songbooks.

This album is about the woman behind Lana Del Rey- Elizabeth Grant- and all the people behind her. It is unhemmed and raw, disregarding perfection and reading like a long letter to oneself. The tragic, nihilistic themes of her previous works have been forgotten in this album- abandoned like the titular tunnel under Ocean Boulevard- and instead, Lana breaks open into earnest admissions wrapped in breathy vocals.  

Inspired by Suki Waterhouse’s ‘Coolest Place in the World‘

God Exists Between People Homie

Staring at walls in art galleries together,

Sharing an umbrella,

Walking side by side and laughing at old stories.

Mother and daughter walk hand in hand,

Two people, one park bench, no space between them,

Friends buying coffee for each other.

Half an orange for you and half for me,

Sunlight speckled backs and doing your hair for you,

Our camera rolls are polaroids of others’ smiles.

Underlining words in well-loved books for someone else to find,

Train windows and the glimpses they carry,

Sitting together, cross legged on the floor.

Playlists made in your name, one pair of earphones divided,

Fathers teaching us how to tie our shoelaces,

Running fast and stopping to catch our breath, collapsing on top of one another.

Children touching the sky on their swings,

Sitting on the porch and reading a newspaper,

Reading bedtime stories to tell someone they are safe.

Lying on the grass to feel the sun everywhere,

Through your toes and fingers and in your stomach,

Bicycle rides with memories of skinned knees, reduced to bruises.

Humans were bred to love, 

And love exists in these spaces,

God exists between people homie.

Fleetwood Mac- a name synonymous with a talented, but tragically troubled band, hit albums and even bigger singles. With a name as big as The Beatles and music that shaped the Baby Boomer generation during their formative years, Fleetwood Mac has had an indelible effect on music in the last fifty years. 

Through their rotating crew of vocalists and guitarists, they’ve come out with knockouts like ‘Dreams’, ‘Landslide’ and ‘The Chain’. To this day, these songs remain significant and continue as a mold for effortless, evergreen music. However, their career was anything but glamorous, punctuated by severed relationships and acute substance abuse. But amidst the personal turmoil of the band, their pièce de résistance, Rumours, was born. 

Within a month of its release, Rumours sold ten million copies, becoming the band’s most commercially successful record– and, today, has become one of the best-selling albums worldwide. It catapulted them into popularity and fame as a rock and blues band with country overtones. Singles including ‘Go Your Own Way’, ‘Don’t Stop’, ‘Dreams’ and ‘You Make Loving Fun’ became the soundtrack of the late 70s. Fleetwood Mac became a sensation, writing up disco music that introduced West Coast folk dressed as pop-rock, changing the music scene of the time. 

In many ways, Rumours was a reflection of its time. With a characteristically hippie spirit, the album focuses largely on love and loss, a theme far too prevalent for the members of the band. Mick Fleetwood had just discovered his wife had been cheating on him, Christine and John McVie’s divorce was impending and Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham’s relationship was punctuated by severe fights that were often demonstrated while recording was taking place. Moreover, the members’ substance abuse had escalated to a breaking point and the band’s demise was thus upsetting, but unavoidable. 

Ironically, Fleetwood Mac made their best music while at their worst. The album struck a chord and stayed with people through the optimism of ‘Don’t Stop’, earthy notes of ‘Gold Dust Woman’ and heartbreakingly sincere lyrics of ‘The Chain’. Ask anyone of the pre-millennial generation and they all have distinct memories of Fleetwood Mac as a cornerstone of music of their time. The band was able to carry genuine emotion through their lyrics and folksy tunes, hitting the pop sweet spot over and over. 

While we have an array of pop music at our fingertips today, the timeless nature of Fleetwood Mac and their sound is incomparable. Through cultural osmosis, their music has passed down through generations and still holds the same influence as it did in 1977. Their influence in modern indie music is impossible not to notice and it’s for this reason that Fleetwood Mac will always be a culturally significant aspect of music history.