Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman…

There was a hallucinatory quality to the climax of the 2024 Grammys, like the footage might have originally been shot in reverse, then played forward, by David Lynch. The table at the front of the room is a neat tableau of the Jack Antonoff extended universe. On the one side, his wife, Margaret Qualley, fresh from playing a malfunctioning Frankenstein debutante in Poor Things. In the middle, in strapless white Schiaparelli, in the midst of her own professional coronation, is Taylor Swift. And off to the other side, heavy fringed and all in black, looking like Loretta Lynn attending the funeral of Vito Corleone or Maleficent during her Nashville period, looking in fact like she’d rather be in a boarded up tunnel under Ocean Boulevard than right here right now, is Lana Del Rey.

As Taylor claims her final prize, she grabs Lana’s wrist and drags her up onto the stage with her. It’s a gesture of solidarity - she wants to share the spotlight with her fellow artists (“She's a legacy artist, a legend in her prime right now” she enthuses). But with LDR’s evident reluctance, it feels crass and condescending, like the most popular girl at school needing others to publicly bask in her latest glory. 

It seems to cement the image of Lana Del Rey in pop music 2024. A haunting, sepulchral presence, lurking slightly outside the spotlight, still somehow haunting the mainstream. Her guest appearance on Midnights, on the song “Snow on the Beach”, didn’t live up to its billing, but felt like a final acknowledgement that she’d been a key presence in Taylor’s work since as far back as “Wildest Dreams”.

If Taylor was racking up the Grammys, breaking all the concert records, laying claim to the era, Lana was still roving on her own eccentric orbit, apparently more in tune with Harry Nillson in 1974, Wim Wenders 1984 and the Red Hot Chili Peppers 1994 than anything happening in modern music. The album released in March 2023 was originally to be called Did You Know That There’s A Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd Pearl Watch Me On Ring A Bell Psycho Lifeguard, as though laying down the gauntlet to Fiona Apple. 

The title was pruned back, but set the tone for an album that rambled like kudzu. Lana had developed a new way of working - “meditative automatic singing” - whereby she hummed, sang or recited into her iPhone and sent the resulting voice notes to Drew Erickson, the Father John Misty/Weyes Blood multi-instrumentalist who had become her musical amanuensis. Was it a new way of deep-sea fishing her subconscious, like her father out hunting sharks in the Pacific? Or was it simply the indulgence of an artist giving free rein to her whims? 

At its best, on “A&W” and “Fingertips” she braided the past and present, her family history and American archetypes to incredible effect. But the summoning of Harry Nilsson as the album’s presiding spirit (she refers to Harry’s voice cracking on “Don’t Forget Me”, midway through the title track) raised the suspicion that she was deep into her own lost weekend, becoming the kind of “legacy artist” that Taylor mentioned, losing contemporary relevance and becoming a quaint historical curio - Billie Eilish’s mom? Olivia Rodrigo’s aunt? - like that boarded up old art deco tunnel in Long Beach.

So the announcement that she was “going country” at the NMPA Songwriter Awards in January 2024 felt like a timely moment to re-engage with the zeitgeist. In fact, she explained, it was the whole music industry that was going country. She personally had been quietly engineering this vibe shift over many years, and this was why, she continued, Jack Antonoff “has followed me to Muscle Shoals, Nashville and Mississippi, over the last four years.”

It wasn’t just a humble brag. Way back in December 2018, before Norman Fucking Rockwell! had even been released, she performed two new songs - “Hey Blue Baby” and “I Must Be Stupid for Being So Happy” - with Jack at his Ally Coalition Talent Show in New York. Both songs namechecked Hank Williams, and both seemed like happy extensions of the Lana heartland into Nashville territory. “All my friends say my life’s like a bad country song,” she sang happily in her high sweet voice. “ I just smile, say ‘I know, but I like to sing along’”.

Suddenly you might see country as an underground stream in the LDR back catalogue, always coursing subterraneously through her music, even before she went to Nashville to record Ultraviolence with Dan Auerbach, but only now coming to the surface. It gathered strength through 2022, with a couple of guest spots with long-time accomplice Nikki Lane, performing another new song “The Prettiest Girl in Country Music”, and came to a head in the fall of 2023, with live covers of “Stand By Your Man” (it was only a matter of time, considering her Loretta worship), “Take Me Home, Country Roads” (the final straw for Courtney Love, who advised that Lana take a break for seven years or so) and finally in April 2024 her appearance onstage with Paul Cauthen at the Stagecoach country festival for a stately rendition of “Unchained Melody”.

It was country Lana style - a little bit rhinestone, a little bit outlaw, a little bit space cadet. And, as was revealed on “Tough”, her duet with with Quavo, released in July 2024, a little bit Atlanta, Georgia - where the nickel-wounds strings on a Gibson guitar twang to the beat of the 808s in the trunk. After the wild, rambling years of 2022-23, it all felt uncannily like a well-laid plan finally falling into place. Were we about to witness the prime of Lana Del Rey?