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.