FEATURE:
Revisiting…
Lana Del Rey – Chemtrails Over the Country Club
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MY next excursion…
IN THIS PHOTO: Lana Del Rey and Jack Antonoff produced Chemtrails Over the Country Club (alongside Rick Nowels)/PHOTO CREDIT: Rebecca Sapp/Getty Images for The Recording Academy
into Revisiting… will be an album from the past five years that is underrated or overlooked. This time out, I was keen to highlight a terrific album from one of the world’s greatest artists. One of the finest songwriters of her generation, Lana Del Rey’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club came out on 19th March, 2021. After 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! scored her the biggest reviews of her career so far, the follow-up was equally brilliant yet different. The contrasting covers were quite striking. Chemtrails Over the Country Club is one of my favourite Del Rey albums. I wanted to get to a couple (of the many) positive reviews for it. Reaching two in the U.S. and one in the U.K., Chemtrails Over the Country Club was a massive commercial and critical success. For Lana Del Rey’s seventh studio album, she enlisted producer Jack Antonoff – whom she had worked with Norman Fucking Rockwell! The album mixes Country-Folk and Del Rey’s traditional Americana. Looking at her family and friendships, that is blended with tales of love, escape and, as you would expect, a healthy dose of nostalgia! All the brilliant and reliable Lana Del Rey hallmarks are there, but this was a definitely evolution and move forward. An artist who never stands still and brings something new to each album, I would urge everyone to check out this album. After her truncated set at Glastonbury last month – where she performed one of the best sets of the festival -, she is very much in my mind again. I will do a deeper dive into her albums and career soon enough.
I want to bring in a couple of different interviews. This article from News Week gave us an insight and preview of detailed discussion of Chemtrails Over the Country Club. It was an album that quite rightly garnered a lot of positivity, curiosity and discussion. This once-in-a-generation artist releasing another masterful and stunning album to the world:
“In the new edition of Music Week, Lana Del Rey and her team talk us through the making of her incredible new album Chemtrails Over The Country Club. Arriving hot on the heels of 2019’s acclaimed Norman Fucking Rockwell! and 2020’s Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass poetry book and spoken-word LP, it is one of the most highly-anticipated records of the year.
Part of the discussion, of course, includes reuniting with super-producer Jack Antonoff, with Lana detailing how one of Chemtrails’ finest moments, White Dress, came about as a surprise when she heard him “noodling” around on the piano.
“I just stepped up to the microphone and started ad-libbing an entire song, which was only somewhat modified with layered vocals,” she recalls. “That only happens once in a while, and it also started off as kind of a joke [with] me not really knowing what I was saying or singing about. It just brings me back to that good ol’ fashioned feeling of getting lucky and being able to express myself without really having a second thought about needing to edit it. That’s what the sentiment is about, being brought back to a time when things felt the purest.”
“Jack’s technical skill is off the charts musically, his chords are fantastic if you’re ever stuck for inspiration,” she continued. “On top of everything, he’s just genuinely hilarious which is really important. We have each other laughing a lot.”
Also in the feature, Lana Del Rey, Tap Music’s Ben Mawson and Ed Millett and Polydor co-president Tom March look back at her career to date.
“Coming off Norman Fucking Rockwell!, she’s in the best place she’s been in almost from the beginning of her career,” Polydor’s Tom March told Music Week. It is a position, Lana stresses, that has been hard won.
“I know for myself [at the beginning of my career] it took years of walking into the same [kind of] labels I’m signed to now to have a chance to be understood as a person telling a story rather than a trend,” said Lana. “I fought very hard for that and I’m so glad I did. People may get caught up now and then in the fact that I have a strong look or presentation, but at the end of the day what’s important to me is the fact that I’ve been able to tell my life’s stories, dreams and encounters for over a decade, and that in itself is a triumph.”
She has, assuredly, scored some huge hits such as Video Games (1,047,511 sales, according to OCC data) and Born To Die (612,930), likewise she has superstar collaborations with Miley Cyrus and Ariana Grande (Don’t Call Me Angel – 301,131) and The Weeknd (Lust For Life – 217,025). Her biggest single yet, meanwhile, is Cedric Gervais’ dance remix of Summertime Sadness (1,524,549).
Yet Lana’s career has largely been built on the richness of her catalogue, the power of her bodies of work.
“We don’t count on hits,” said Ben Mawson. “Whilst being a superstar, she’s not conforming to anything in terms of modern pop. She wasn’t even when she first came out. Video Games didn’t have any drums and it was a big global hit when, at the time, everything was – and still is – dominated by beats. She’s done her own sweet thing musically since the start and it connects.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to have a hit, it’s just that without meaning to, my journey has ended up playing out more like a long-term game,” Lana told Music Week, before outlining the things that have worked for her. “Long-playing records and lots of them! [With] spoken records in-between, and lots of other little interesting projects. I think an artist can have their finger on the pulse of culture without having big hits, but it might end up being something that isn’t metabolised in the form it was meant to be until a later time. At least that’s how I feel like it is for me mostly”.
A little bit of a detour, for Interview Magazine, Lana Del Rey and co-producer Jack Antonoff were in conversation with one another. I would recommend that everyone check it out. I have selected a particular chunk of it that I find especially interesting. I would also advise anyone who has not heard Chemtrails Over the Country Club to go and check it out now:
“ANTONOFF: On that last tour, you really put an emphasis on building a community. Artists are so isolated. People don’t realize that most of us don’t know each other. I love that you call people and say, “Hey, I’m going to be in your town. Do you want to come sing with me or have coffee?”
DEL REY: You’re so funny, the way you always hit things spot-on.
ANTONOFF: Don’t you feel that way? Like there’s an imaginary club, but it’s not real and you almost feel sad because you wish it was?
DEL REY: That’s especially true when you’re an alternative artist, and you’re not collabbing or making nightclub appearances. You’re either in your room or you’re with your producer. The best thing I ever did was tour the Midwest. I got to know Weyes Blood and Hamilton Leithauser. Devendra Banhart was texting me. I found my heart and I was super happy there. I’m driving back from there now and I didn’t want to leave.
ANTONOFF: Do you feel like you’re ever going to leave L.A.?
DEL REY: I guess I can’t because I have all the animals and I have my family. I don’t know if I’ll do this drive again in a hot minute. The fact that you can be in Kansas in two hours by plane is amazing.
PHOTO CREDIT: Chuck Grant
ANTONOFF: With Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, I feel like you’re mourning a piece of L.A., sometimes literally, sometimes in feeling and tone. Then, coupled with Chemtrails, it’s like you’re starting to talk about all these new places and slowly planting little flags and creating little emotional homes in other parts of America. Obviously I’m here for it, but it does make me wonder if we’re going to be making records in Tucson or Tulsa next year.
DEL REY: It’s funny, the record was Midwestern-sounding before I even went to the Midwest. What’s interesting about having a true muse—and it sounds kind of ridiculous—is that you’re at the whim of it. When I’m singing about Arkansas, even I’m wondering why. The one way I would describe the Midwest, Oklahoma in particular, is that it’s not cooked or oversaturated, and there’s still space to catch that white lightning.
ANTONOFF: That’s why I love Jersey so much. It gives you space to get bored out of your mind, and if you let yourself get bored, you might just think of something great.
DEL REY: One hundred percent.
ANTONOFF: Before I met you, I thought you’d be the opposite of what you are. I’m trying to think of the best way to describe it.
DEL REY: You were probably surprised that I actually write. I guess that’s how I would describe it: I really write. Poems and music. Sometimes I miss the mark, but I know what I’m going for. That’s why I really like hip-hop.
PHOTO CREDIT: Chuck Grant
ANTONOFF: I remember you listening to some of the hardest stuff in the room. I think the best part of really feeling something that someone else does is that it inspires you not to mimic them, but to do you. With Chemtrails, do you feel like you’re revisiting the past?
DEL REY: Not so much where I’ve been, but more like where I’m going. It makes me anxious listening to it, because I know it’s going to be a hard road to get to where I want to be, to do what I want to do. A lot of that’s going to involve writing classes and being uncomfortable in new places with not many friends and raising my dogs and my cats and my chickens alone. It’s going to be work. I hear Chemtrails and I think “work,” but I also think of my stunning girlfriends, who so much of the album is about, and my beautiful siblings. “Chemtrails” is the title track because it mentions them all and it mentions wanting so much to be normal and realizing that when you have an overactive, eccentric mind, a record like Chemtrails is just what you’re going to get.
ANTONOFF: So many people bring a confidence to the table that is actually destructive to the work.
DEL REY: And yet, that’s also often not true. I know some women who put on a real front. The one thing I have to learn from other people is how to be happy, and everyone has different ideas about how to do that and how to keep a lightness in the songs. The one thing that I know that I can do regardless of where I’m at in my process is make a beautiful melody. I don’t really care if you mush an amazing life story into an alternative record. If the melodies don’t stun me, I kind of don’t care. I think it’s interesting if you’re yelling and shouting and talking about where you’re going and what it’s been like, but to me that’s not a record. That’s a therapy session”.
I’ll finish up with a couple of reviews. Rolling Stone, who are big fans of Lana Del Rey’s music, were hugely positive when they sat down with 2021’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club. I think the impression from most reviews is that this is among Del Rey’s most important work. Since Chemtrails Over the Country Club, she has released two further spectacular albums: Blue Bannisters (2021) and Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd (2023). Although songs from Chemtrails Over the Country Club are played on the radio, it is not as explored as it should be:
“I’M READY TO leave L.A., and I want you to come,” Lana Del Rey sings on her latest album Chemtrails Over the Country Club. “Eighty miles north or south will do.” It’s an escapist fantasy the pop singer has entertained before: stealing away from the City of Angels in a pickup truck that no one recognizes. But thankfully – for us, at least – she never acts on her wishes. On Chemtrails, her most subdued and introspective album thus far, she soundtracks the death of the American dream right from the heart of Hollywood, just as she did on her previous effort, 2019’s electrifying Norman Fucking Rockwell! And while it may not have as many grandiose showpieces as its older sibling – no nine-minute “Venice Bitch” to be found here – Chemtrails is every bit as sharp and prescient of a cultural artifact from pop’s premier Cassandra. After all, when that fireball hurtles past Hawaii towards the West Coast, as Lana foresaw on NFR’s “The Greatest,” who’s going to be there to sing torch ballads over the silent, ashen remains of Los Angeles? Lana Del Rey, of course. Where else would she be?
Though Del Rey’s overall project has remained remarkably consistent throughout her career, her growing disillusionment with fame, and with this country’s prevailing iconography of wealth and success, has loomed large as the national mood has grown more dire. Sure, there was always danger lurking behind the Kennedy smiles and gray mansion luncheons featured on Born to Die and her other early works; it’s a trait that this album’s laughably conspiratorial title still carries. But back then, Lana took the Shangri-Las approach, recalling motorcycle crashes and illicit affairs on the beach with a winking, cooing innocence. Even her saddest songs got a dance remix. Not so much anymore. Her observations are somber now, her melancholy placed against a more substantial backdrop. Kids dance the Louisiana two-step in a forgotten bar; a prolonged breakup meets its bitter end; people get high and make out in a parking lot while “the whole world is crazy.” It’s an incredibly bleak yet weirdly comforting sentiment all at once – the notion that one’s personal dramas, the ups and downs of “normal” life, will continue to go on even as the rest of the world goes to shit.
The mundaneness feeds into Chemtrails’ depiction of American whiteness and white womanhood in particular, a long-running fascination in Del Rey’s work that has been called into question recently with her public controversies. In her infamous “Question for the Culture” open letter that she released last spring, her point that she was making space for “women who look and act like me … the kind of women who are slated mercilessly for being their authentic, delicate selves,” got lost in the backlash she received for appearing to pit herself against Doja Cat, Beyoncé, and other pop stars of color. Chemtrails makes her case more plainly: This is Del Rey’s most delicate-sounding album to date, supported by Jack Antonoff’s production taking the Seventies singer-songwriter sheen of NFR and stripping it to its most essential piano-and-guitar elements. (As with the previous album, longtime collaborator Rick Nowels steps in for one collaboration, the haunting folk track “Yosemite.”) Percussion takes the form of soft bongo drums, live drum cymbals, and barely pulsing synths that are nearly dissolved in the ether. These songs are quiet musings, the kind you’d play on a baby grand in an empty ballroom.
Del Rey’s voice, that distinctly mid-century drawl, often fades in and out of the album’s instrumentation. Her tone stays measured and careful: “I only mention it ‘cause.…” she murmurs, in two separate songs, like she’s just said something too revealing to an acquaintance. The showiest display of her vocals, by far, is on opener “White Dress,” where Del Rey upends autobiographical lyrics about her prefame life by singing in her highest possible register, a self-effacing parody of female fragility. “Down in Orlando, I was only 19/Down at the Men in Music business conference,” she squeaks, the words tumbling out. (It’s also a great example of Del Rey’s knack for wringing dry humor out of mythology — it’s unlikely that such a business conference, highlighting the distinct achievements of men in the music industry, would ever need to exist.)
By contrast, a strong current of idyllic female solidarity runs beneath Chemtrails’ ennui. “God, it feels good not to be alone,” Del Rey sighs on “Dance Till We Die,” her ladies-of-the-canyon-themed answer to Le Tigre’s “Hot Topic,” where she recounts dancing with Joan Baez and putting out a house fire with Courtney Love. She draws a line between herself and Tammy Wynette’s tragic subservience on “Breaking Up Slowly,” aided by cool-girl outlaw Nikki Lane, and once again pays her respects to Mother Joni with a faithful rendition of “For Free,” closing out the album with immaculate harmonies by Zella Day and Weyes Blood. For all of Del Rey’s ill-worded defensiveness surrounding how many women of color were depicted in her gaggle of debutante friends on the album’s cover, it only emphasized her earnest belief that such a scene could be both achievable and uncomplicated.
Del Rey’s dreams of places beyond the San Gabriel Mountains take her to more states than she’s traversed in all her other albums combined: Florida, Oklahoma, Nebraska, Arkansas (pronounced ar-KAN-sas), Louisiana, the strange land of Northern California. God and religion, too, play an outsized role, ranging from the divinity of Sun Ra to a Bible tattoo to the “Tulsa Jesus Freak” who served as the singer’s most recent muse. Del Rey has always relished in the repetition of proper nouns — designer brands, classic-rock songs, etc. — and it’d be easy to wave off these new additions as merely Del Rey’s way of acknowledging the most recent political climate. But it mirrors a personal evolution for Del Rey, too, as her outward persona of the past five years has gradually moved away from her initial, provocative “Lolita lost in the hood” aesthetic into a woman of more suburban experience, a person who gets routinely clowned by her fans for owning “live, laugh, love” decor and a painting of a sailboat above her fireplace.
Whether this mall-dress-wearing era for Lana is just another character or truly her “authentic, delicate self” will no doubt be up for debate, but it’s telling that the most craven desires on Chemtrails all center around stability; the woman who once observed, “Kanye West is blond and gone,” now fears the irreversible damage that fame can do to a person’s psyche more than anything else. “The best ones lost their minds/So I’m not gonna change/I’ll stay the same,” she promises on “Dark but Just a Game.” Speaking to a steadfast lover on “Yosemite,” she remarks, “Seasons may change/But we don’t change.” With a career-spanning ability to freeze-frame historic icons of culture with a single lyric or video, she’s now seeing if the magic trick can work on herself.
For a brief moment, it does. The soaring “Wild at Heart,” the highlight of the album and one of Del Rey’s most poetic efforts to date, is a study in making do with what you already have: the song recycles its most prominent elements from several tracks found on Norman Fucking Rockwell! On the verses, Del Rey floats on a melody borrowed from “Love Song” and “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing”; she makes smoking cigarettes “to understand the smog” sound positively romantic. Suddenly, the music swells up into a chorus section lifted straight from “How to Disappear” — the NFR track that feels most closely linked to Chemtrails in spirit. In that song, Del Rey envisioned herself growing old in the California sunshine with “a kid and two cats in the yard.” Here, we get its antithesis: Del Rey flees Calabasas in the dead of night, leaving L.A.’s fiery hellscape in her wake. As if editing a film montage, her mind flashes to the paparazzi car accident that killed Princess Diana. But in the next beat, she’s back to reassuring herself: “I’m not a star.” Here, if nowhere else, she’s free of being perceived”.
I am going to finish up with NME’s take on one of 2021’s best albums. I know Lana Del Rey has released an album very recently, but you do wonder where she will go next. She is someone I feel could be a screen icon too. Someone who has this incredible talent and hugely powerful and alluring aura. Her distinct and extraordinary voice and always-mesmeric songwriting is all over Chemtrails Over the Country Club:
“Almost 10 years ago, a beautiful song called ‘Video Games’ emerged online, introducing a mysterious new artist to the wider world. The track immediately captured people’s imaginations, with its vintage Hollywood sheen, poetic lyrics and its creator’s elegantly downcast drawl. Lana Del Rey had arrived, and she’s barely stopped spearheading the conversation since.
Throughout a decade as one of music’s top artists, Del Rey has kept a relatively low profile. Compared to other acts of her stature, paparazzi shots and tabloid headlines sensationalising her life are few and, as she told NME in 2019, she leads a life as regular as yours or mine, hosting game nights with her girlfriends and hanging out with her siblings.
Fame and Del Rey’s disregard for it is a recurring theme on her seventh album ‘Chemtrails Over The Country Club’. On opening track ‘White Dress’, she explores her longing for a time when she was yet to find success; she delivers it in a rasped whisper so urgent it sounds like she’s trying to transport herself back there. “I felt free because I was only 19,” she sings of days and nights spent waitressing and listening to jazz, Kings Of Leon and “White Stripes when they were white hot”.
Perhaps it’s a case of the grass always being greener – pre-fame Lana surely wouldn’t have imagined achieving all she has and wanting to be back bussing tables – but she closes the song rationalising her desire to go back: “Because it made me fee… like a god/ It kind of makes me feel like maybe I was better off.”
The sublime, dreamy float of the title track is similarly nostalgic, calling back to a time where “there’s nothing wrong, contemplating God / Under the chemtrails over the country club”. It’s gorgeous and idyllic, distilling a scene of quintessential Americana into its most poetic form. Del Rey even manages to make the most mundane of chores and activities sound magical: “Washing my hair, doing the laundry/ Late night TV, I want you only”.
Conversely, on the romantic waltz of ‘Wild At Heart’, she’s in the here-and-now, evoking a scene of being chased by the paps, fingers on the shutter. “The cameras have flashes / They cause the car crashes,” she sighs, with an important distinction to make lest anyone get things twisted: “But I’m not a star.” ‘Dark But Just A Game’, which shifts from brooding trip-hop atmospherics to brighter folk licks, was inspired by a party at Madonna’s manager’s house and finds Del Rey explaining she doesn’t “even want what’s mine / Much less the fame”.
Later, she shares a lesson she learned from watching those who came before her: “We keep changing all the time / The best ones lost their minds / So I’m not gonna change; I’ll stay the same.” Rather than whinges about the privilege of being rich and successful, these are sharp observations on buying into your own celebrity and the impact of society’s thirst to know everything about our idols.
The LA-based musician’s last album, 2019’s ‘Norman Fucking Rockwell!’, saw her hit a career-high with a record that instantly cemented its place as an all-time great. Yet with ‘Chemtrails…’ Del Rey follows it with ease, riding that record’s creative high but looking further back into her past to tie her whole story together in one place.
On first listen – and especially after the more organic sounds of ‘NFR!’ – ‘Tulsa Jesus Freak’ might come as a shock. Del Rey’s voice is fed through Auto-Tune and vocal processors, aping the production of the mumble rappers she declared her love for on her last album cycle. Incorporating elements of hip-hop into her timeless pop is nothing new for Lana – she’s been doing it since her ‘Born To Die’ era – but it’s exciting to hear her invention and refusal to be restricted.
There are plenty of Easter eggs littered throughout the record, connecting it to past releases. On the title track, she sings, “You’re in the wind, I’m in the water”, harking back to ‘Brooklyn Baby’’s “I think we’re the wind and sea”. She repeats ‘Mariners Apartment Complex’’s assertion that she “ain’t no candle in the wind” on the quiet fingerpicked folk of ‘Yosemite’ and ‘Tulsa Jesus Freak’, while ‘Wild At Heart’ brings back the character of Joe, who previously appeared on ‘NFR!’’s ‘How To Disappear’ and her spoken-word poem ‘Never To Heaven’.
As well as paying tribute to herself, on ‘Chemtrails…’ Del Rey carves out space for her heroes and current favourites. ‘Breaking Up Slowly’ finds her swapping verses with country singer Nikki Lane. “I don’t wanna live with a life of regret / I don’t wanna end up like Tammy Wynette,” Lane sings at one point, before Del Rey references the vintage star’s third husband George Jones: “George got arrested out on the lawn / We might be breaking up after the song.”
The album ends with a poignant cover of Joni Mitchell’s ‘For Free’, which features Arizona rising singer-songwriter Zella Day and Weyes Blood’s Natalie Mering. On the penultimate track ‘Dance Til We Die’, Lana sings, “I’m covering Joni and I’m dancing with Joan / Stevie is calling on the telephone.” It’s a reminder that, more than just being influenced by the likes of Joan Baez and Stevie Nicks, she’s now on a par with them. Lana Del Rey is at the peak of her game – just don’t expect her to come down anytime soon”.
If you have not listened to Chemtrails Over the Country Club in a while, spend a few moments re-exploring it. In terms of her very best albums, it must surely rank in most people’s top three. Though she has produced so many incredible albums, perhaps there will be stiff competition! I don’t think it is talked about and played as much as it deserves – hence the reason it is appearing in this feature. In Lana Del Rey, we have this modern icon who is influencing other artists. One wonders just what she would have delivered in her Glastonbury set had the power not been cut. I am pretty sure that she will be…
BACK there soon.