Out of the black and into the blue

"I don't think I'll write another record,” Lana told Vogue, shortly after Born to Die is released. “What would I say? I feel like everything I wanted to say, I've said already." 

TROPICO, the 27-minute film she releases as a coda to the album in December 2013, certainly feels like a a full stop. Incorporating the poetry of Whitman and Ginsberg, featuring an all-American trinity of John Wayne, Marilyn and Elvis, it stars Lana as the Virgin Mary, Eve and a benighted modern-day stripper. As the final fluttering notes of “Bel Air” fade out, amid amber waves of grain, Lana ascends in rapture, in the arms of her albino Jesus, into the wild blue heavens.

As a grand cosmic statement, the one realm she didn’t visit was Hell. But she’s getting there. 

She spends the spring of 2014 in Nashville recording with Dan Auerbach from the Black Keys, and it’s the closest she’s felt to freedom in a couple of years. She only intended to come down for a long weekend, but it turned into a three-week Tennessee adventure. She’s re-recorded her entire record and it sounds amazing - like some wide-open, wide-screen western with a soundtrack by Ennio Morricone. She’s already come up with the genre tag for the press bio - after Gangster Nancy Sinatra and Lolita Lost in the Hood, this is Narco Swing.

Interscope are not so happy. This is not what they were after. What they had in mind was a nice little sad-girl pop-rock record with Rick Nowels. Nowels has history with the label. He’s pretty much Interscope founder Jimmy Iovine’s favourite son. He took over when Jimmy split up with Stevie Nicks back in 1985 and managed to make her sound like Pat Benatar. He wrote “Heaven is a Place on Earth” and turned Belinda Carlisle from a pudding-faced punk rock chick into the darling of second-term Reagan America. He is, let’s not forget, the guy who has delivered Lana’s one bona fide American hit single (albeit with a bit of help from Cedric Gervaise on the remix) with “Summertime Sadness”. This is the guy you want guiding your career - not some two-bit Jack White wannabe from Akron.

Interscope bring in Paul Epworth for a sober second opinion. Epworth is Mr Midas in the business right now, the guy who turned Adele’s breakup into the biggest record of the 21st century. For the guys at Interscope he’s demonstrated just how huge the market is, after the death of Amy Winehouse, for old souls with huge woes. With the right guidance, they tell Lana, it’s a market that she could clean up in.

Fortunately Epworth is also a guy who started out recording barking mad post-punk mackems like the Futureheads, and he knows a great distinctive rock record when he hears it. He tells the label he wouldn’t change a thing. But that’s not end of the meddling. Nobody’s happy with the new title of the record. The Crystals might have got away with singing “He hit me and it felt like a kiss” in 1962 - even Amy Winehouse in 2010 - but in 2014?  And as for this video for the title track, with Father John Misty as some kind of Jim Jones cult leader, pouring out the Kool-Aid? Absolutely not.

She chooses to pick her fights. There’s early talk that Honeymoon might be a disco album, recorded with Giorgo Moroder, or a retro jazz exercise helmed by Mark Ronson. Instead the album that emerges in September 2015  is a sedate (the BPMs only break the 100 barrier on “High by the Beach”), back to basics affair, written and produced entirely with Rick Nowels, capped with a polite cover of Nina Simone’s “Please Don’t Let Me Be Understood”. It’s Lana on her best behaviour, sounding like she’s auditioning for the next Bond theme (though that honour bafflingly goes to Sam Smith for Spectre).

Two years later, but in a very different America, Lust for Life seems even more eager to please. Lana’s finally smiling on the cover, and the record features guest spots from everyone from The Weeknd and A$AP Rocky to Sean Ono Lennon. And on “Beautiful People with Beautiful Problems” there’s finally the Stevie Nicks cameo that brings the Rick Nowels story full circle. 

Maybe she’s forging her own coalition. In its own way Lust for Life is Lana’s state of the union address. Way back in 2012, in the hallucinatory video for “Ride”, she had made a first attempt to codify the LDR manifesto: “Live fast. Die young. Be wild. And have fun. I believe in the country America used to be. I believe in the person I want to become. I believe in the freedom of the open road.”

Five years later, her nostalgia for an old, wild America, where men were men and women knew their place, seems to be chiming with an awful lot of people. But now in the wake of Trump’s election she has a very different vision of making America great again. Shortly after the 2017 inauguration, she encourages her fans to join the online witch community’s hex on the White House (“ingredients can be found online”). On “God Bless America - and all the Beautiful Women in It” and “When the World was at War We Kept Dancing” she comes on like a wartime forces sweetheart, here to raise morale in the nation’s darkest hour.

She can hear change coming, she sings, blowin’ on the wind (though is it just be the sound of an approaching bomb?). “This is my commitment, my modern manifesto” she declares on the closing “Get Free”, an eerie number midway between Radiohead’s “Creep” and “The Shoop Shoop Song”, that manages to namedrop Amy Winehouse, Whitney Houston and Aleister Crowley. If the hex didn’t work, she’s summoning all her powers for her next transformation, her next magic spell.