Lana Del Rey - Blue Banisters - Single / Text Book - Single / Wildflower Wildfire - Single [Review]

Lana Del Rey will soon be releasing a brand new album following Chemtrails over the Country Club, titled Blue Banisters, and she surprise dropped three singles from the album all on the same day - the title track, "Text Book," and "Wildflower Wildfire." Before I begin discussing the songs themselves, I do want to discuss a couple of other issues regarding Lana Del Rey. Firstly, even though it's probably my least favorite Lana Del Rey album so far, I really hate how little promotion that Chemtrails has received. She barely gave that album any time to marinate at all before moving on to promoting the next project, making Chemtrails a blip in her discography. I overall, as I said, found Chemtrails to be a bit of a disappointment, so I am looking forward to what will hopefully be an improvement, but I just hope that Lana won't be making releasing multiple albums per year a habit because, like I said, I really think that albums need time to marinate and leave impacts. The second point that I want to make (one that I have seen a lot of other fans make as well) is that I am really hoping that the album cover is not the same cover as the single cover for the title track and that it's a lot better. I love Lana so much, but these covers are horrendous, especially the one for the title track. People who have been defending the covers have been saying things like, "People are really upset because Lana gave us a selfie as a cover?" The selfie is not the problem, however. The editing is the problem. The borders and the font on the covers are very cheap and tacky looking. They look like they were done by someone with little to no editing skills on a program like Paint or PicsArt. Defendants have also made the argument that the music is what's important, not the covers, and I agree to an extent, but visuals are definitely part of the experience. That was definitely the case, for example, with Norman Fucking Rockwell!. I adore that album cover, and it represents the story told through the music so well. Moving on to discussing the actual music, however...

 

"Blue Banisters" is the first of the three singles released from the upcoming album of the same title. The song is driven by piano, as has much of Lana's music for several albums now. It is mid-tempo, and Lana quickly fluctuates between a lower register that reminds me a little bit of songs like "Off to the Races" from Born to Die and a higher register which has ultimately been her signature sound vocally for quite some time now. The verses are sung primarily in the lower register, and they sound almost conversational in tone and rhythm, as if she is sharing a story with us. In the first verse, there is what I believe to be an obvious parallel to Lana's hit song "Video Games" from Born to Die. In "Video Games," Lana sings, "Open up a beer and you say, ‘get over here,'" and here in “Blue Banisters,” she sings, “Jenny handed me a beer, said, ‘How the hell did you get there?'" The parallel here - not only visually but in its rhyming scheme - is far too striking to me to be coincidence, and I definitely think that it's meant to be a deliberate juxtaposition. The focus of "Video Games" is love (as in romantic and sexual love), but the focus of "Blue Banisters" is instead on platonic love with female friends. As explained on Genius, Jenny is a close friend of Lana's and is one of the women featured on the standard Chemtrails over the Country Club album cover. The song, as is obvious from the title, references the color blue, as does a great deal of Lana's work. Several tracks even have the color in their titles - "Baby Blue Love," "Gramma (Blue Ribbon Sparkler Trailer Heaven)," "Blue Jeans," "Blue Velvet" (which is a cover, but it still counts), "Quiet Waiter Blue Forever," and now "Blue Banisters." Countless other songs also mention the color in their lyrics. It's definitely a recurring theme, and she sometimes uses it in a positive way ("paint me happy and blue") and sometimes uses it in a negative way ("you make me blue"). I think that the color likely makes a transition from happy to sad in this song. She, in the first chorus, sings, "Said he'd come back every May just to help me if I'd paint my banisters blue." The color here represents a promise, but later in the song, when she, in the second chorus, instead sings, "Now when weather turns to May, all my sisters come to paint my banisters green," we realize that the promise was not kept. It's a simple but beautiful song, and I love its reference to Joan Baez's classic song "Diamonds and Rust": "...the diamonds, the rust, and the rain..."

"Text Book" is so beautiful, and I absolutely love its catchy chorus which reminds me a bit of the chorus of "Change" from Lust for Life. Genius claims that the song is a continuation of the country-influenced sound featured on NFR! and Chemtrails, and I have to disagree with part of that stance because while I do definitely hear some country influence on Chemtrails, there is absolutely no country influence on NFR! at all. Back to the discussion at hand, however, Lana once again refers to the color blue on this track: "...and there you were," she reflects in the pre-chorus, "standin' blue with open arms." The song is very poetic in nature as it's a reflection on Lana's past, where she is today, and how much of her past she still carries with her. She acknowledges her Electra Complex which has permeated much of her music's themes throughout her career, even referring to her lover as "my old man" in "Off to the Races" and admitting that "I gots a taste for men who are older" in "Cola" from Paradise. She acknowledges that perhaps more directly and with more self-awareness than she ever has before in "Text Book" right in the first line: "I guess you could call it textbook. I was lookin' for the father I wanted back..." Although his theory wasn't exactly new as it was based in large part on the aforementioned Electra Complex, Freud posited the theory that some young girls find themselves attracted to their fathers at a young age and, later in life, are drawn toward men who remind them of their fathers. Sylvia Plath made the exact same admission in her classic poem "Daddy": "I made a model of you... And I said I do, I do." (Del Rey has previously alluded to Plath on her NFR! track "hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have - but i have it" as well as on her Violent Bent Backwards over the Grass track "Bare Feet on Linoleum"). As previously mentioned, Lana is reflecting on her struggles ("I didn't even like myself," she admits in the pre-chorus, "or love the life I had...") while also tying that together with where she is today and how she has been involved in important movements ("...There we were, screamin' 'Black Lives Matter' in the crowd..."), and I saw her come under some heavy fire on Twitter for supposedly romanticizing the BLM movement in that line, and I don't see how she is romanticizing it; she is simply reflecting on her journey and the steps along the way, having been involved in that movement being one of them, but something that I have noticed is that she frequently comes under heavy fire for no good reason. I mean, if you're going to critique tacky cover art, that's one thing, but to keep attacking her for everything that she says and does and doesn't say or do as if she can do no right, that's exhausting.

I love the title of "Wildflower Wildfire" not only because of its use of alliteration but also because it is definitely a bit of a tongue-twister. Just like the other two tracks released from Blue Banisters thus far, "Wildflower Wildire" is accompanied primarily by piano, and the piano flutters under Lana's whispery vocals in the verses. It's a pretty song, but I think of the three singles, it's the least unique and least inspired from a melodic standpoint, and it is definitely my least favorite of the three (with "Text Book" undoubtedly being my favorite). The lyrics, however, are pretty powerful and are definitely some of Lana's most abstract and poetic lyrics to date: "Baby, I, I, I, I've been runnin' on stardust alone for so long," she laments in the pre-chorus of the track. "I wouldn't know what hot fire was - hot fire, hot weather, hot coffee." I believe Lana to be presenting heat as something that can be comforting (hot coffee) but also uncomfortable (hot weather) and even destructive (hot fire). In fact, speaking of its destructive nature, I don't think that it's any coincidence that the title and lyrics of this song refer to wildfires because Lana has focused very heavily on the California wildfires throughout much of her art as of late - on tracks from Norman Fucking Rockwell!, Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass, and Chemtrails over the Country Club. (The Norman Fucking Rockwell! album cover even showcases a landscape on fire in the distant background.) Wildfires are, of course, dangerous and destructive. They are also a result of humanity and how we - as a species - tend to take care of the earth and our environment, and embracing humanity and who we are is definitely one of the themes present on this track. When Lana, as previously cited, refers to running on stardust, it is my belief that she is saying that she was only being who she could be - who she was at the time (as the belief is that life is made up of stardust from a supernova). She also refers to wanting to hold on to being good and for her heat to remain comforting and not destructive: "I'll do my best never to turn into something that burns, burns, burns" (her repetition a possible reference to Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire"), Lana also refers to some of the hardships in her life that have tempted her fire to become wildfire, such as a tumultuous relationship with her mother and hospital stays. It is a lyrically beautiful song but is, as I said, musically rather restrained, but based on what I have heard so far, I am intrigued and am looking forward to Blue Banisters, which is expected to drop on July 4th, 2021.