Wasting no time in establishing that Chemtrails Over the Country Club is her “country-folk” album, and that she’s going to out-folk Taylor Swift’s folklore (also produced by Jack Antonoff) out of the folking water, Lana Del Rey dives deep into her past to draw inspiration for a stylized narrative that paints her as a working class heroine. Specifically, “I was a waitress working the night shift.” And even if Courtney Love was made to act out that role in the Gucci commercial starring Del Rey and Jared Leto, we can believe that the same girl who relished living in a trailer park in New Jersey also enjoyed the “camp” value of slumming it as an employee in a diner or even a chain restaurant in order to gain some life experience.
“White Dress” is by no means a “friendly” start to a record. In fact, it’s even more anti-radio airplay than a track like “Norman Fucking Rockwell,” the opener to the 2019 record of the same name. A lengthy five minutes and thirty-three seconds, “White Dress” is a lament. A look back at those salad days when all Lizzy Grant wanted was to be famous, never comprehending that it would have such unpleasant ramifications (like being called out for her bouts with failing to check her privilege and then lashing out at the media and internet, only to further stoke the flames).
Del Rey paints the picture, “When I was a waitress wearing a white dress/Look how I do this, look how I got this/I was a waitress working the night shift/You were my man, felt like I got this/Down at the Men in Music Business Conference/Down in Orlando, I was only nineteen.” Incidentally, that would be right at the same age as Del Rey’s unwitting protegée, Billie Eilish, who is perhaps better off having never known much of a life out of the spotlight, therefore failing to romanticize any such time prior to her fame (which she seems determined to ignore anyway by remaining forever in her childhood bedroom).
It is said, especially of late with just about every male being accused of sexual misconduct, that the best thing to do is kill your gods. Worship no one, and risk no disappointment. A demo of Del Rey’s from 2007 called “Disco,” assures, “I am my only god” (in addition to, “You know how I like that celebrity type”). If that was the case, then Chemtrails Over the Country Club is a record that seems to indicate she’s killed herself. Or at least, killed off any trace of the LDR we knew before 2017’s Lust For Life, when this “folk” transformation initially began to manifest (but with Rick Nowels still producing at the time, her Born to Die through Honeymoon phase couldn’t be dispensed with entirely).
Yet she maintains certain aspects of her tried and true formula, including name checking “vintage” bands, in this case, The White Stripes and Kings of Leon (damn, could this bia be more unabashed about her basicness?) as she sings, “Listеning to White Stripes when thеy were white hot/Listening to rock all day long” and “I wasn’t famous, just listening to Kings of Leon to the beat.” She’s also sure to bring up summer as usual and how it was “sizzling” (surprisingly, she doesn’t try to mention Sizzler instead). In these lyrical instances, we can see why this album was, once upon a time, going to be called White Hot Forever. And “White Dress” itself is, in so many regards, a continuation of the final track on Norman Fucking Rockwell, “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have – but i have it.”
To continue that “sweeping narrative” style, we have the title track to follow. While the video for “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” looks a lot like the opening scene to Clueless most of the time before it veers into some The Wizard of Oz meets Shakira’s “She Wolf” shit, the song is better than the visuals that accompany it (in an inverse dilemma to Swift’s “Look What You Made Me Do” video being better than the song). And perhaps the reason it has become so much easier to judge Del Rey harshly for her aesthetics is a result of her setting the bar so high at the outset of her career with videos like “Born to Die” and “National Anthem.” But in the full-tilt singer-songwriter incarnation à la Joan Baez, visuals have become more secondary to Del Rey (and even to Swift, as evidenced by “cardigan” and “willow”).
“Tulsa Jesus Freak” perfects the sort of storytelling Del Rey achieved with the “Ride” video (and the lore surrounding the “character” in it that rather echoed the tone of what Lady Gaga did with the similarly robust visual accompaniment for 2011’s “Marry the Night”). It also intermixes a “Video Games” sensibility with lines like, “Keep that bottle at your hand, my man/Find your way back to my bed again.” Except in this sense, there isn’t the evocative portrait of a boyish youth playing World of Warcraft so much as a deadbeat drunk that Del Rey could take or leave, even if she claims, “We’re white hot forever” (ah, there’s that defunct title again). Elsewhere, it’s as though she’s describing scenes from the pandemic and its according lockdown measures as she croons, “‘Cause down in Arkansas [pronounced “Ar-Kansas”] the stores are all closed/The kids in their hoodies, they dance super slow/We’re white hot forever and only God knows.” This “only God knows” must surely be a more than subtle nod to the Beach Boys’ line, “God only knows what I’d be without you.” Something Del Rey likely wonders about Jack Antonoff.
Another song released before all the upheaval that kicked off 2021 (both politically and in terms of Del Rey cringe-inducingly commenting on said politics by mentioning her album), “Let Me Love You Like A Woman” was the first taste we got of what the sound of this new record would be like. It was not the strongest single choice (particularly in comparison to “Chemtrails Over the Country Club”), but in retrospect, it did lend us an accurate preview of this record’s “vibe.” That is to say, “I’m just a blue collar, down-home girl singing my songs and commenting on the strange world around me.” A lack of originality and an overkill of pastiche (especially when it comes to ripping off Bruce Springsteen’s shtick) is most obvious on this “little love song.” And yet, Del Rey has never been shy about parading her predilection for “incorporating influences” in her work.
Accordingly, for a girl who once declared her appreciation for David Lynch’s visuals in a 2012 interview for a French talk show, it should be no shock that she now has an offering called “Wild At Heart.” Difficult not to think of the Lynch film of the same name starring Nicolas Cage and Laura Dern, Del Rey also made an allusion to this eventually being on the album when she posted an image of herself with a necklace featuring the same words back in the summer. It’s also in the aforementioned French interview that she says, “I can’t act”–an admission that plays into the line in “Wild At Heart,” “I’m not a star.” This declaration comes after a Princess Diana-centric visual of, “The cameras have flashes, they cause the car crashes.” The renunciation of fame as ultimately hollow and meaningless in this composition echoes the themes of “Bartender,” in which Del Rey’s sole desire to escape from the limelight is elucidated in the portrait, “I bought me a truck in the middle of the night/It will buy me a year if I play my cards right/Photo-free exits from baby’s bedside/‘Cause they don’t yet know what car I drive…” Here, instead, the sentiment is expressed as, “What would you do if I wouldn’t sing for them no more?/Like if you heard I was out in the bars drinkin’/Jack and Coke/Going crazy for anyone who would listen to my stories, babe/Time after time, I think about leaving.”
Just as Del Rey’s poetry collection, Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass, is a rumination on the bizarre twistedness of her fame, so, too, is “Dark But Just A Game.” And while the entire record explores a similar theme, this track above all the others is the most direct as she gives us the chilling chorus, “The bеst ones lost their minds/So I’m not gonna change/I’ll stay the same/No rose left on the vines/Don’t even want what’s mine/Much less the fame/It’s dark, but just a game It’s dark, but just a game.” Just as she used a past lover’s line against him in “Mariners Apartment Complex,” Del Rey is also happy to do the same with the opening to this number, as she notes, “‘It’s dark, but just a game’/That’s what he would say to me.” While another might have taken her sadness out of context (and Del Rey mentions not being a candle in the wind again on “Tulsa Jesus Freak”), this other ex seems to see that her melancholy is all too real, particularly because most of Del Rey’s idols are dead (she had no need to kill her gods in that sense)–the very ones who incited her to want to be famous. This includes Amy Winehouse, whose death in 2011 Del Rey expressly stated had an effect on her in a way that almost made her want to give up singing. After all, “The faces aren’t the same, but their stories all end tragically../And that’s the price of fame.”
For someone who has both lusted after and tried to shirk celebrity in a warring fashion, this song also perpetuates the haunting line from Honeymoon’s “God Knows I Tried,” during which Del Rey sings, “I’ve got nothing much to live for ever since I found my fame.” Then again, she wasn’t engaged then, and surely, a man will solve all her woes, right? “It’s dark, but just…” she concludes, leaving us to ponder on the double meaning of “just” in this final use of it.
In her usual method of “borrowing,” “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” takes its name from the J.R.R. Tolkien aphorism often found on the bumper stickers of cars (particularly in California). The most “country” of the offerings on Chemtrails, Del Rey seems to be taking the reverse route that Taylor did–and to bring their increasing “invisible thread” full-circle, Del Rey even says, “Look at what you made me do.” Yes, it’s Reputation all over again.
“Yosemite” commences in a fashion that immediately reminds one of, “All the ladies of the canyon/Wearing black to their house parties.” And being that Del Rey, no matter how far into the Midwest she travels, will always have a devotion to California, it’s only natural that there should be yet another song named in its honor. Apart from sonically reminding one of “Bartender,” there is also a definite Simon and Garfunkel sound here–which isn’t out of the ordinary considering she incorporated “Scarborough Fair/Canticle” as an outro to “Cherry” on 2018’s LA to the Moon Tour (occasionally pronouncing it “Scarsborough” because maybe, as a person from New York, she was also thinking of Scarsdale). Again talking about not being a candle in the wind (one supposes being on the cover of Rolling Stone with Elton John helped her further secure the lyric as her own), Del Rey’s overarching message on this love song is that “seasons may change/but we won’t change.” As fitting to a pair of everlasting lovers in 2017 (when this track was first recorded and then cut from Lust for Life) as it now is to pandemic life, Del Rey wistfully remarks, “Winter to spring/Spring back to fall/Isn’t it cool how nothing here changes at all?”
Choosing not to release the song when she first made it, Del Rey had said it was “just too happy” for the tone of Lust For Life. It seems a bit odd to include it, then, on a record that still remains largely morose. For Del Rey’s music has consistently been a sign o’ the times. But if she wanted to keep waiting for a “happy” enough album to put it on, she might have been waiting forever (not so “white hot” when one wants their creative output to be appreciated). So here, it’s only right for her to assert, “I do it for fun, I do it for free.” This also presages her Joni Mitchell cover, “For Free,” that will conclude the record.
As someone with an endless arsenal of unreleased material, “Yosemite” is a prime example of why it’s so “effortless” for Del Rey to churn out records on the regular (though the secret behind Swift’s power of prolificness remains to be explained). She’s sitting on a stockpile (“The Next Best American Record,” from Norman Fucking Rockwell, was also originally recorded during Lust For Life as “Architecture”). One that offers increasingly esoteric references, including, “I remember watching How Green Was My Valley”–do you though? She also feels obliged to once again kife Elton John’s phrase with, “Television static was quite overwhelming/Was it because of the cabin and the candles in the wind?” Lizzy, calm down with the candles–this ain’t no goddamn seance.
Going more unabashedly country than even “Yosemite,” “Breaking Up Slowly” relies heavily on country singer Nikki Lane for that twangy flair LDR hasn’t been able to go all the way with herself. And, as Del Rey stated, Lane was kind enough to “give” her the sorrowful cut for Chemtrails. With Lane doing the majority of the work, Del Rey joins in to harmonize on the chorus and also offers a verse from the perspective of tragic fellow country singer Tammy Wynette. In this reimagined version of events when Wynette’s ex-husband, George Jones, gets arrested for drunk driving, Del Rey warbles, “George got arrеsted out on the lawn/We might be breakin’ up after this song/Will he still love me long after I’m gone?/Or did he see it comin’ all along?” Although it’s the shortest ditty on the album, it’s one of the most affecting for it’s tragedian cachet–as any right proper country song achieves.
While “Dance Till We Die” would seem to indicate Del Rey has changed tack entirely to go a more Kesha circa 2012 route, it instead carries on the tone of dolefulness that has been established throughout. Until it shifts entirely to being the most hippie-dippy and hooey provision on the record. Name checking her 60s and 70s California queens, Joni, Joan and Stevie (let’s leave Cory Wells out of it), Del Rey appears to have conjured their essences in a way that makes you envision her in a flowing boho skirt and paisley peasant top, walking barefoot back into her ceramic studio after checking on her outdoor kiln. Alas, one supposes this was the only number that could lead into the finale of Chemtrails.
As previously performed live on tour (and October 13, 2019 at the Grammy Museum), “For Free” featuring Zella Day and Weyes Blood is a natural culmination of an album like this. And it’s clear that Del Rey has been angling to take over the void Joni Mitchell long ago left behind in this folksy singer-songwriter category. Something LDR has largely been able to do because it’s not exactly the “chicest” place to take at a moment in time such as this (and Swift only recently swooped in once more after “abandoning” pop). In fact, Del Rey would be better suited to returning to her hip hop proclivities as showcased up until Norman Fucking Rockwell. That would certainly make her fit in more seamlessly with the current musical landscape. But considering Del Rey has operated outside of time and space since the outset of Born to Die, Chemtrails Over the County Club is actually a rather expected progression in keeping with the idea that she never really has to adhere to any trend in order for her fans to come clamoring.
In this sense, she is both like her “rival” singer-songwriter, Swift, and not. Because Swift does capitulate to a zeitgeist while also contributing to it. What’s more, she already had the whole Joni Mitchell worship thing going on with Red’s “The Lucky One” (not to be confused with Del Rey’s “The Lucky Ones”–also released in our apocalyptic year of 2012), a song that details Swift’s own prophetic disillusionment with fame as she discusses Mitchell’s retreat from the spotlight for reasons that will only become crystal clear to Swift and Del Rey years later.
