While discussing 'Honeymoon', Lana Del Rey's most epic work to date, the album was likened to a movie soundtrack by Radio 1’s Huw Stephens. It is Del Rey’s score to her own mystical life, the backing track for a silver screen siren for the modern age.
She is her own fantastical creation, presenting a fragile hypnotic beauty and a voice that sometimes feels too perfect to be real. This album’s tone is even more orchestral, more doomed and affecting than the one Del Rey was enveloped by on ‘Ultraviolence’.
On Salvatore, Del Rey sings about soft ice cream, working on her tan, summer rain, limousines and “dying by the hand of a foreign man, happily”. It is a lust-drenched lullaby about those first perfect moments experienced when falling hopelessly for someone who you will eventually surrender yourself entirely to.
24, by way of contrast, moves like a ‘20s gangster film, with proud affectations, spiralling xylophones and measured pacing punctuated by swells of percussion.
“If you lie down with dogs you’ll get thieves. Be careful of the company you keep,” Del Rey warns, offering up her own vulnerability with less obvious helplessness than she might have done during the ‘Born to Die’ era.
‘Honeymoon’ is Del Rey empowering herself, seizing the strength and forcefield that her fame now affords her. Gone are the incessant attacks. Hers may be a story inspired by an LA dream but several albums in, her message and talent are very real.
Music To Watch Boys By and Religion encapsulate her adoration of masculinity, while High By The Beach is a fallen lament, chasing escapism and, ultimately, freedom. The video points towards Del Rey resenting intrusions into her private life.
Then there's the poetry in her spoken word riff on TS Eliot's Burnt Norton: “Time present and time past, are both perhaps present in time future, and time future contained in time past. If all time is eternally present, all time is unredeemable.”
The thought follows on from Del Rey challenging her audience emotionally, spiritually and creatively earlier in the album with the poignant Terrence Loves You. She yearns: “I lost myself and I lost you too.” Her lyrics relate to her present more here than on some of the album’s more conceptual tracks. This anchors the artist to a reality her audience will find more accessible, allowing her relationship with them to become stronger and more tangible.
Del Rey, in a broad sense, seems more real on ‘Honeymoon’. Continuing to work with long-time collaborators Rick Nowels and Kieron Menzies on production, the music benefits from the evolution of that relationship into a fully-fledged collaboration. We learn more of her journey with each release.
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