It’s dark but just a game, so play it like a symphony

“You go to the Vanity Fair party to be photographed. You go to Madonna's place to party.” That’s the received wisdom on post-Oscars bashes and who is Lana to disagree? She’s finally, 12 years into her career, sufficiently flavour of the month to get an invite to the 2020 Oscar party at Maverick manager Guy Oseary’s Beverley Hills mansion. 

Last year it was Lady Gaga’s turn to kiss the ring, after she got the Oscar for her song in A Star is Born. Lana’s not nominated for anything this year (suspicions still linger over the mysterious whispering campaign that saw her snubbed for “Young and Beautiful” in 2014), but the invite is one more sign of the rapturous reception that’s greeted Norman Fucking Rockwell since its release in August 2019. She’s A-List, baby.

Or rather, they are. She and Jack Antonoff are a dream-team join-ticket, and together they make the long drive up Coldwater Canyon. Previous collaborators, from Justin Parker to Rick Nowels and Dan Auerbach, have had their moments with Lana, but it’s Antonoff, hitherto known for bringing indie-nerd craft to mainstream pop, who has really unlocked her muse, made her her bleakly brutal songs lush and verdant. Once upon a time William Mulholland, whose road they drive along, built the aqueduct that brought water 200 miles to the San Fernando Valley. With NFW! Antonoff has arguably achieved a similar creative irrigation. Lana had barely a written a line outside of a recording studio in five years; now she’s planning her first poetry book.

They’re driving now into deep LA, where Garbo and Warren Beatty once found their own retreats, not so far from the home that Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate rented in the dog days of the 1960s. It’s where Lana’s been headed ever since first fell under the blue-green spell of the Chateau Marmont and clipped the paparazzo footage of Paz De La Huerta back in 2011.

All the stars are out: there’s Greta Gerwig and Joaquin Phoenix, Laura Dern and Robert De Niro. But at some point in the night, things turn decidedly dark. In the hazy early hours, she witnesses something that disturbs even a seasoned connoisseur of Hollywood darkness like herself. Later she will allude to an incident, a never-meet-your-idols situation, that takes the sheen off celebrity once and for all. “That's the price of fame,” she sings later about the night. “Their stories all end tragically.”

They drive away from the party, away from LA, and it seems like for a couple of years she never slows down, releasing three albums and a poetry collection in the next two years.

Lockdown certainly doesn’t agree with her. In May 2020, a few days before the murder of George Floyd,   she issues a “Question for the culture”. “I'm fed up with female writers and alt singers saying that I glamorise abuse when in reality I'm just a glamorous person singing about the realities of what we are all now seeing”. She mentions Doja Cat, Ariana Grande, Camila Cabello, Cardi B, Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé as women who don’t seem to receive this judgement and instantly becomes the pouting face of white fragility.

Then in September she appears at an LA bookshop event for the launch of her poetry collection, Violet Bent Backwards over the Grass, wearing a purely decorative mesh facemask and becomes the poster girl for celebrity cluelessness. (She was still being mocked for the appearance two years later in Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion.)

She models another rhinestone facemask the same month in Interview magazine, which runs a mutual backslapping dialogue between Jack and Lana. (Lana: “You’re so funny, the way you always hit things spot-on.” Jack: “You’re really a citizen of the universe.”), In the course of the conversation, Lana says in passing “I’m not trying to say I’m a holy roller because I’m not, but I think people are looking up to the sky a bit more and being like, “Why? What’s the reason?”

In this context, a title like Chemtrails Over the Country Club feeds into the prevailing atmosphere of paranoia. Released in March 2021, it continues the Antonoff creative escapade, but ventures far from California, taking in pit stops in Yosemite, Arkansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Louisiana and Florida, like one of Humbert Humbert’s road trips with Dolores Haze. 

It’s followed just six months later by Blue Banisters, an even more hermetic collection of songs, released she says, just for the critics. “I didn't want anyone to listen to it. I just wanted it to be there in case anyone was ever curious for any information.” She pays for precisely one billboard to promote the album, placed in the Tulsa neighbourhood of the ex most of the songs seem to be addressed to.

The grandiose paranoia seemed to be intensifying. “What if someone had asked Picasso not to be sad?” she asked on “Beautiful”. "Never known who he was or the man he'd become. / There would be no blue period.” 

But there’s a new, confessional urgency to the writing. In fact with its forensic anatomy of heartbreak, and lines like “"You can't be a muse and be happy too” it’s arguably the inauguration of the Tortured Poets Department. The first song that Lana wrote with Jack Antonoff back in 2018 had been “Hope is dangerous thing…” where lines like “running around in my fucking nightgown 24/7 Sylvia Plath” had felt of a piece with the wry, woozy apocalypse of the rest of the album. But on “Wildflower Wildfire” she remembers the teenage hospitalizations that hurt her into song - “with lithium came poetry”. 

"Sometimes life makes you change just in time for the next chapter,"  she wrote on Instagram as she uploaded the first video.  "I'm writing my own story. And no one can tell it but me".