In November of 2017, Lana Del Rey participated in a tribute concert to Leonard Cohen in his hometown of Montreal. Called Tower of Song (in honor of one of his best-loved tracks), Del Rey took to the stage with Adam Cohen to perform the cover of “Chelsea Hotel No. 2” she released in 2013. A hint of things to come in her post-“Sad Girl,” post-fuckboy worshipping sound, Del Rey’s latest, “Mariners Apartment Complex,” harkens back even further than her neo-folk interpretation of Cohen (a genre also explored on Lust for Life‘s “Coachella-Woodstock in My Mind” with less success). Specifically to her days of struggling to find her fully formed identity as a “simple songwriter.”
That a previously unreleased demo called “Elvis”–performed under one of her many early pseudonyms, Sparkle Jump Rope Queen–was recently used for the soundtrack to The King, a documentary that uses Elvis’ spiral as an allegory for America, is an indication of just how much the chanteuse’s sound has come full circle in a mode that has become repurposable. While moodiness and ironically tongue-in-cheek lyrics have always been the norm in her work, Del Rey has taken a more optimistic stance of late while still maintaining her aura of realism.
And though not every unreleased song from the Lizzy Grant, May Jailer, Lana Del Ray, etc. era is a “gem” (there are a few offerings, like “Fordham Road,” that sound like a bad version of Jewel–bite your tongue on saying Jewel is a bad version of Jewel), it was a time in her then non-career as not Lana Del Rey that formed who she was as a singer–and it clearly hasn’t left her soul, even if Jack Antonoff has to be the one to bring it out in a more commercially produced way.
The only difference is, Del Rey’s subject matter–one-track mind, if you will–has shifted course, away from the all-consuming task of obsessing over a failed/lost love to something more abstract, spiritual even. “Mariners Apartment Complex,” thus addresses from the outset that she “ain’t no candle in the wind” anymore, some fragile little girl whose feelings can be hurt or will can be broken by the misconstruing of others (who so often take her “sadness out of context”).
Further emphasizing the idea of Del Rey being both a combination of nostalgic and shrewd enough to extract aspects of her past that have worked best for her specific brand–in addition to being genuinely meaningful to her–the video itself incorporates the usual motif of the sea. Opening with an overhead shot of swirling waves and a labia-like rock (Del Rey has gone très femme after being jilted too many times), her old constant, la mer, returns as a metaphor for being lost and found, calm with bouts of tumult. As she puts it of her identity, “Who I’ve been is with you on these beaches.” To be sure, there is no shortage of beach imagery, both in writing and visuals, to draw upon from Del Rey’s oeuvre (going all the way back to her low-budget photoshoot as a blonde at Coney Island circa ’08).
Apart from water and le beach as Del Rey’s go-tos for evoking freedom and rebirth (“Change”), there has always been the iconography of Jesus (she’s a Catholic school girl, after all). From “Diet Mountain Dew” to “Body Electric,” Del Rey has never been shy about not “tak[ing] Jesus off the dashboard.” Rather than showing her usual (somewhat naughty) reverence for the ultimate example of someone with daddy issues (we all know Christ just wanted to upstage God), Del Rey, perhaps inspired by the insane reaction of her fans to her mere nearness while on the LA to the Moon Tour, likens her own ability to guide and support to a certain Christ-like talent, singing, “Maybe I could save you from your sins/So, kiss the sky and whisper to Jesus/My, my, my, you found this, you need this/Take a deep breath, baby, let me in.” The way, the light, the truth is, after all, Lana Del Rey.
Continuing to address the slow but steady shift in her persona from depressive doll to political pinup as she does on “Get Free” (the song that caused her Radiohead lawsuit), she encapsulates her multilayered personality of innocence and jaded melancholy as, “Catch a wave and take in the sweetness/Think about it, the darkness, the deepness/All the things that make me who I am.” And here we have the phenomenon of the song addressed directly: her knack for knowing that the things that have worked best for her in the past can still be incorporated into her work in new ways as a result of how she’s changed while maintaining that aspect of herself that came up with the lyric, “‘Cause he knows I’m wasted, facing time again at Riker’s Island/And I won’t get out/Because I’m crazy, baby I need you to come here and save me.” In contrast, Del Rey now declares she’s the one capable of saving others, of helping them to navigate their way in times of sadness and uncertainty.
Less about a man and more, seemingly, about the many people whose minds Del Rey knows she has power and influence over, “Mariners Apartment Complex” insists, “You lose your way, just take my hand/You’re lost at sea, then I’ll command your boat to me again/Don’t look too far, right where you are, that’s where I am/I’m your man.” That “I’m your man” insistence not unlike something Lou Reed would say. But Reed is dead. And so are most of the male songwriters (again, Cohen) we could once count on for creating music of this bent. Luckily, we’ve got Del Rey to fill the void. Even if she’s not exactly the girl you remember from 2012-2015, the forlorn fatalist that can’t let go, maybe what’s sprung up in place of that is a woman, quite simply, who knows better (even if she doesn’t know better than to not chant “Are you ready for it?” at the end, ’cause it sounds a lot like a certain Taylor Swift song, veering away slightly from that sophisticated Cohen style she was going for).
