‘Fingertips’: the Lana Del Rey track she claimed “is not a good song”
Since her breakout in 2012, Lana Del Rey has been prolific. Especially in recent years, the musician has put out record after record, with each one seeming to get longer and more poetic than the last. But amidst all that artistic output, there are bound to be tracks that she loves a little less.
Del Rey has been open about her thoughts on one song on her most recent album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd. Sat on the second half of the album, ‘Fingertips’ is a sparse tour of the musician’s inner world. Fascinatingly formatted, the melody seems to wind almost spontaneously around her lyricism, giving the track an improvised feeling as she shares family anecdotes, along with her innermost thoughts and fears.
“I give myself two seconds to cry,” she repeats, punctuating each verse with more emotion and intimacy than the last. With no chorus and no real structure, ‘Fingertips’ is unlike any other Lana Del Rey song.
“‘Fingertips’ is not a good song or a big song, but it definitely explains everything,” the musician told Rolling Stone. Admitting she doesn’t see the track as a technically or musically perfect song, the album’s centre point serves an entirely different purpose.
“I felt like that was important because everyone was always like ‘explain yourself,’” she added. As an artist so routinely misunderstood, Del Rey is hit with critique time and time again as people seem to fail to understand her vision and evolution as an artist. Often branded as frivolous or even anti-feminist, it’s led Del Rey down a fascinating path as she seems to shrug off celebrity and social media in favour of a private and artistic life.
“And I was like, ‘Okay, let me do this really quickly, I’ll tell you everything I’m thinking in two minutes in a seven-minute song and just rip through it and edit it.’ That song kind of says it all,” she concludes. The track definitely does that as a nearly six-minute-long winding track takes listeners on a deeply vulnerable, private tour of her life.
“Will I have one of mine? / Can I handle it even if I do? / It’s said that my mind / Is not fit, or so they said, to carry a child / I guess I’ll be fine,” Del Rey sings at one point as possibly some of her most devastating lyrics to date. Tracing her strained relationship with her mother and her isolated childhood spent sent away to a boarding school, the song also grapples with grief, depression, loneliness and family.
While it might not be Del Rey’s catchiest track, ‘Fingertips’ was never going to be a hit and was never intended to be. While the musician herself might deem it “not a good song”, the track serves a clear and beautiful purpose. Giving her a platform to simply say what she needed without trying to make her deepest feelings fit in a radio-friendly package is a perfect example of the type of artist Del Rey has evolved into. Utterly uncompromising in her vision and rich in feeling, ‘Fingertips’ might not be “good”, but is beautiful instead.
