Remembering Lana Del Rey’s touching cover of Daniel Johnston
When David Bowie reflected on the art of the late, great Daniel Johnston, he proclaimed: “[He] reminds me of aspects that made me love art in the first place.” His output seems to come from a place where the audience is barely considered. It is as though Johnston was happy performing for an audience of his own imagination.
In his bedroom-bound ballads, you get the sense that these anthems have no measure of the mainstream or avant-garde, they simply come as they are, to coin the phrase of another of his biggest fans. This can be referred to as outsider art, and, in a way, ‘The Story of an Artist’ could almost serve as a mantra for the outsider music world: “Listen up, and I’ll tell a story/ About an artist growing old/ Some would try for fame and glory/ Others aren’t so bold/ Everyone and friends and family/ Saying, ‘Hey, get a job/ Why do you only do that only?/ Why are you so odd?’”
Without reaping great rewards, Johnston kept happily fielding the question ‘Why are you so odd’ and wrote a plethora of ditties that pronounced him as entirely normal. Over the years, artists, in particular, have identified with this steely determination to create—to “walk among the flowers” and appreciate “the sun” while others call “Hey, get a job.”
This was partly what attracted Lana Del Rey to him. She even eventually ended up producing the short film, Hi, How Are you Daniel Johnston? “It moved me. It was sad. It touched me,” she said of the project. “There were so many dimensions in one room, the past, the present at the time and then here he is right there watching himself, I mean I guess the one thing I hoped is that he understood that while he’s home alone doing his art still — he says he writes every day — that he knows that he really did make a difference in people’s lives. He made a difference in mine.”
With that in mind, Del Rey paid homage to her spiritual hero with a stunning cover of ‘Some Things Last a Long Time’. Johnston’s tender life is wrought out on a sonic of the track like no other. The poignant piece of music contains so much life that it can sometimes be too bracing to listen to. It punches like the Bowie line, “It was cold, and it rained so I felt like an actor, and I thought of Ma, and I wanted to get back there,” there is a lived-in sense of life to the words themselves.
Del Rey seizes upon the touching sentiment of the track. It is often said of covers that the artist ‘makes the song their own’, Del Rey doesn’t do that exactly, in fact, she does quite the opposite and somehow makes it Johnston’s—makes it even more autobiographical as though she is reading pages from his diary. It is his wall that you picture as she croons and his life you witness, now, in a voyeuristic sense. That is a feat that deserves a lot of credit.
