A White Picket Marriage of Sonic Ideals: Holly Macve and Lana Del Rey’s “Suburban House”

At a glance, Holly Macve might be easily mistaken for “Lizzy Grant.” That is to say, a blonde version of Lana Del Rey. The Irish chanteuse also has many of the same influences and inspirations as Del Rey, who also discovered Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen early on in life. Macve, however, seemed to end up adopting the country twang that Del Rey lately appears to want for herself (as made evident by things like collaborating with Nikki Lane, often wearing cowboy boots and her tour of shitkicker America for Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd). This country lilt of Macve might stem from being additionally influenced by Gillian Welch, known for her melange of Appalaichan, country and bluegrass stylings. 

Del Rey, too, has veered further in this direction in the albums that have come after 2017’s Lust For Life, itself a harbinger of some kind of musical shift (manifest in songs like “Coachella – Woodstock In My Mind” and “Beautiful People, Beautiful Problems”) that was bound to take Del Rey away from the baroque pop genre she had established herself with. Indeed, Norman Fucking Rockwell would come out two years later and signal the complete shift that was to take form on 2021’s Chemtrails Over the Country Club. Which, yes, featured some of her most country-sounding songs yet, including “Breaking Up Slowly” featuring Nikki Lane (who also gets name-checked on “Blue Banisters”). 

As for Macve, her own songs smack of the Del Rey persuasion, with titles like “Daddy’s Gone,” “Lonely Road” and “Beauty Queen.” The latter arrived earlier this year, and offers cover art and an accompanying font that looks entirely cut and pasted from the LDR oeuvre of aesthetics. Shot in black and white, the photo shows Macve, in her modest tiara, posing against the backdrop of a stage curtain. The letters spelling out the single and her name appear to be an almost exact replica of the Lust for Life font. And yes, it was Del Rey who once dressed up as a Carrie-inspired prom queen for a magazine photoshoot and sang lyrics like, “Done my hair up real big, beauty queen style.”

Later, Del Rey would trade her beleaguered beauty queen/Lolita persona for something more “adult.” This occurred mainly by talking about white picket fences and “getting older.” For example, on 2019’s “Venice Bitch,” Del Rey notes, “Back, back in the garden/We’re getting high now because we’re older.” Not sure how getting high relates to getting older unless, of course, it means one can’t do the same hard drugs they used to as a youth. Other suburban leitmotifs on Norman Fucking Rockwell show up during “How To Disappear,” on which Del Rey sings, “I’ve got a kid and two cats in the yard.” That final part of it being a clear nod to Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “Our House” via the lyrics, “Our house/Is a very, very, very fine house/With two cats in the yard.” This 1970 “ode to countercultural domestic bliss,” as it has been called, is right up Del Rey’s alley in terms of marrying the kind of oppressive “white picket” suburbia Richard Yates wrote about in Revolutionary Road and the hippie-dippy L.A. kind that Graham Nash described as a result of living with Joni Mitchell in Laurel Canyon. 

Because yes, on the one hand Del Rey is known for romanticizing suburban life, but on the other, she’s known for peppering it with the Lynchian tinges of imagery that indicate something sinister lies beneath that manicured facade. Macve is quick to establish this trope in the woeful opening verse: “It only takes one week to fall out of love/With a woman like me/For a man like you/It only takes one look to catch a stranger’s eye/And imagine a life, flashing colors while I’m blue.” The use of Del Rey’s favorite color to mention in song would ordinarily refer to something “happy” in a Lana number (e.g., “Out of the black/Into the blue,” “Paint me happy in blue”), but here it refers to becoming “lusterless” in the eyes of one’s domestic boo. Macve, like Del Rey, then subverts the idea of suburban living as an existence filled with happiness and contentment by lamenting, “I’ll sit back in my suburban house/While the nights close in and the leaves turn brown/I’m not waiting for what you think I am/I know love comes and goes, love comes and goes.” Although one might assume the coming and going of love isn’t as common in suburbia because of the enduring idea of a “healthy,” monogamous relationship, the reality is, it’s perhaps even easier to fall out of romantic, “can’t live without each other” love in that setting. As the vanilla, oatmeal existence wears someone with more avid sexual predilections down (why do you think the swingers trend of the 1970s had such a spike in suburbia?). 

Del Rey enters the conversation on the second verse, crooning, “It only takes one turn to see a clear open road/Pretty white mountaintops, so many places to call home/I’m only just behind, but I’m already out of view/You always said snow looked so perfect whеn it’s untouched and new.” Once more, the connotation relates to being a suburban housewife, of sorts. No longer attractive or “shiny” to the husband she managed to pull all those years ago (or even all those months ago). To enhance the melancholia of that bleak realization, frequent Del Rey collaborator Zach Dawes’ production on the track heightens the undeniable sadness to the piano-infused ballad. Indeed, Dawes was a piano player as a child before switching to bass so he could join a band—thus, he knows a little something about composing with the former instrument. 

By the end of the forlorn three-minute, forty-nine-second track, if one was having second thoughts about the single girl city life they chose in lieu of suburban living with a nuclear family and a two-car garage, Macve and Del Rey will surely have cured you of that. Unless, of course, you realize it’s okay to help start a new demographic in suburbia: the single woman. One content to sit out on her porch drinking white wine while her [insert large breed of dog here] sits faithfully beside her. A concept best conveyed by Macve and Del Rey when they sing together in the final verse: “I’ll sit back in my suburban house/No whitе picket fence is gonna save me now/I’m not waiting, I know you’ve made your mind/And love comes and goes, love comes and goes.” But a two-story home with a yard that you “own” (mortgage or not), well, that’s forever (though you still might want to install a bomb shelter in case).