Lana Del Rey, like her increasing counterpart, Taylor Swift, simply can’t stop. Not just releasing songs, but releasing ones that continue to mirror the spirit of Joni Mitchell (whose iconic album, Blue, turns fifty this year). To prepare us all for what was apparently once Rock Candy Sweet but is now Blue Banisters (Blue, Blue Banisters, get it?), Del Rey has released a trio of songs from the forthcoming record, including “Blue Banisters,” “Text Book” and “Wildflower Wildfire.”
The title track is something we’ve already been given a glimpse of when Del Rey posted a clip back in late April that looked like some kind of knockoff of the “Ride” video. Filled with the emblems of Americana she’s played out ad nauseam by now (cowboy hats, dive bars, Harley Davidson, etc.), Del Rey somewhat antithetically captioned the video, “Sometimes life makes you change just in time for the next chapter.” But what has really changed for Del Rey? It’s the same old song with a different person to emulate (ahem, Mitchell). To that point, it was MARINA who recently rebuffed the idea of ever shooting a video for “Bubblegum Bitch” (which has gone viral on TikTok of late) despite its newfound popularity. She declared as a reason for not wanting to that you can’t go back into the past. But that seems to be what Del Rey does best, both in terms of plucking from the nostalgia pot and reflecting on the ways in which it’s all gone wrong (whether for her or her “character”).
Fond of rhyming the word “beer” in her songs, “Blue Banisters” opens with a snapshot of Del Rey’s current Midwestern-inspired life: “There’s a picture on the wall/Of me on a John Deere/Jenny handed me a beer.” The names of all her friends—the vanilla cast of characters we see often in her posts—are mentioned throughout, even newly “acquired” Nikki Lane, who was featured on Chemtrails Over the Country Club’s “Breaking Up Slowly.” The difficulties of “finding a man” for someone like Del Rey (even when it’s on Raya) are also addressed through Jenny, as Del Rey rehashes, “She was swimmin’ with Nikki Lane/She said, ‘Most men don’t want a woman with a legacy at our age’/She said, ‘You can’t be a muse/And be happy too.’” Maybe that last part is true, just ask Edie Sedgwick. But if Ariana can find Dalton, then surely there’s hope for all pop stars (even “off the beaten path” ones). Co-written and produced by Gabe Simon, the piano notes have a “Let Me Love You Like A Woman” feel, despite the fact that it completely goes against “jiving” with Del Rey prattling on in different keys about her banisters (sure to become a new euphemism for “pipes”).
Still, it’s more palatable than “Text Book.” Among the three, this is the song that might be the most uncomfortable lyrically, with Del Rey “crooning,” “And there we were, screamin’, ‘Black Lives Matter’ in a crowd.” The specificity of this mention goes against the grain of Del Rey’s more generic “activism” outings (mainly the ones on Lust for Life). She continues, “I wish I was with my father, he could see us in all our splendor.” Odd, but okay. The wandering musical backdrop doesn’t do much to help tie the song together thematically. On the one hand she’s talking protest, on the other, she’s comparing a lover to Daddy. Sure, “rebellion” (a.k.a. being at a protest) plays into that—looking for a man like your father, as well as for the sole purpose of defying him—but it’s not really the bizarre metaphor anyone wanted or asked for.
This is where the song’s title comes in, with Del Rey boldly opening, “I guess you could call it text book/I was looking for the father I wanted back.” Considering Del Rey’s whole shtick has long been about Daddy, it should come as no surprise that this track continues to explore those themes. And yet, it sort of is. Perhaps some listeners still keep expecting that she will have moved beyond this motif. The one that worked for her so well on a song like “Off to the Races,” but falls flat here. Even in “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have—but I have it,” the trope worked better when it was loosely incorporated, as she also mentions her father figure with, “Calling from beyond the grave, I just wanna say, ‘Hi, Dad.’” On “Text Book,” it instead somehow feels like a botched attempt to evoke the “Shades of Cool” video as she notes, “You’ve got a Thunderbird, my daddy had one too.” Oy vey.
The best of the trio is the Mike Dean-produced “Wildflower Wildfire.” Wielding nature as a conceit for her own “beauty and wildness,” Del Rey assures her would-be suitor, “What I can promise is I’ll lie down/Like a bed of wildflowers/And I’ll always make the sheets/Smell like gardenias wild at your feet.” Her time in California has continued to influence her lyrical content as she conjures imagery of the state’s varied topography in conjunction with its illustrious wildfires. A more unexpected component of the song arrives when she casually mentions, “My father never stepped in/When his wife would rage at me/So I ended up awkward but sweet.” It’s one of those instances of a small detail being at the heart of Del Rey’s “personal” songwriting style—in a manner that is much different from Swift’s (who tends to be less poetical).
One thing that remains consistent is her need to show off her allusion chops once more, referring to Pink Floyd and Sylvia Plath in a single line by remarking, “Comfortably numb, but with lithium came poetry.” Ah yes, the poetry did come, didn’t it? Even if it wasn’t always… T. S. Eliot shit (just entirely extrapolated from him). The “soothing lullaby” vibe of the Blue Banisters song trio thus hits its best stride on this particular single (perhaps with the help of Dean, whose hip hop background—with Lana’s [and Taylor’s] own nemesis, Kanye, no less—offers something delightfully divergent from the other material we’ve heard from Del Rey of late).
And so, whatever comes next on Blue Banisters, only one thing is certain based on this trifecta: prepare yourself for more Joni Mitchell fare (and Scarborough Fair). Which is fine, it’s just, you know, not the days of Ultraviolence, or even Honeymoon—when Del Rey was establishing a sound more decidedly…singular.
