God is clouding the peripheral of her vision. She sees a country on the fast track to oblivion and wants to breathe in its air while she still can and maybe even capture something of its beauty before it’s gone.
This seems close to the heart of Lana’s interests right now: to observe the ways in which the world is wild and how she can take part in it while maintaining perspective.
#Not all who wander are lost lyrics lana del rey how to#
“They want to wild out somewhere! It’s like, we don’t know how to find the ways to be wild in our world …and at the same time, the world is so wild.” “For people who stormed the Capitol, it’s dissociated rage,” she said in January in an interview with BBC Radio 1 presenter Annie Mac. As usual, Lana Del Rey takes out her pen to decry the torments of celebrity and the star system, starting with White Dress which opens the album, regretting the good old days when she was a barmaid, unknown and listening to Sun Ra, Kings Of Leon and the White Stripes 'when they were white hot'. She’s clear-eyed about what she thinks the country is. A lot of people have spent the last few years trying to figure out what America even is given the turmoil brought on by Trumpism, but that question doesn’t seem to bother Lana much. More than one critic has deemed Lana to be among the best American songwriters of her generation, probably because she feels so distinctly of her generation and so distinctly American. “You talk to God like I do,” she murmurs on “Not All Who Wander Are Lost.” “I think you know the same secrets I do.”Ĭheck Out Taylor Swift’s New Song, ‘Carolina’ And God is hanging around the cracks here too, haunting this fading nation like a ghost that Lana (real name: Elizabeth Grant) remarks on to the people she loves. She explicitly evokes the likes of Joni Mitchell and Marilyn Monroe, but also Kings of Leon and the White Stripes. Instead of inciting panic, it’s made her introspective - smoking cigarettes, reflecting on the era she’s seeing come to a close and the ways her heart broke during it all. You get the sense that the America she lives in - the Great Plains, the South, the big cities and California, always California - is just a few years ahead of ours, the Doomsday Clock a few seconds closer to midnight, the decay just a little less deniable. She observes an empire in decline and what she sees is wild, grim and gorgeous. Over the last ten years, she has taken it upon herself to chronicle the twilight of white Americana.
Lana Del Rey looks out across America and sees a beautifully doomed dream, not dead yet but getting there.