Sweet dreams of a simple life: The evolution of Lana Del Rey’s love songs
“Do you want children? Do you wanna marry me? Do you wanna run marathons in Long Beach by the sea?” Lana Del Rey asks in ‘Sweet’. It’s a simple and tender love song that dares to dream of a simple and tender life, one where love is marked by beautiful normality and the best display of the feeling is time spent together. “I’ve got things to do like nothing at all. I wanna do them with you,” she sings, asking the biggest yet most basic declaration of her entire discography, “Do you wanna do them with me?”
Since the very beginning, love has been a foundational piece of Lana Del Rey’s artistry. As she emerged as a grippingly theatrical figure, she gained attention for her moody sonics and cinematic aesthetics paired with lyrics that told characterful stories with poetry and pop culture references. Melodrama was a huge part of that. The Del Rey that people came to love was a kind of character or even a caricature of a Marilyn Monroe-type American dream girl. Her songs were stories of desire, danger on a mission for fame and dreams of glory, with her grand depictions of love being part of that.
Just look at her breakout single ‘Video Games’. “It’s you, it’s you, it’s all for you / Everything I do,” she sings, dedicating every piece of herself to her love as she declares, “Heaven is a place on earth with you.” Or listen to ‘Off To The Races’ as she sings, “I’m not afraid to say that I’d die without him.” For her first albums, love was a thing of total consumption. It was something to live and die for as she wrote tracks like ‘Ultraviolence’, ‘The Blackest Day’ and ‘Without You’ as soundtracks to her vision of intense, cinematic love.
The love in her early work is also inseparably tied to her own determination. She wrote tales of a kind of Bonnie and Clyde romance where two lovers beg, borrow and steal their way to the top. In the end, her ultimate vision of the future sees her being a star and him being rich as she sings in ‘Radio’, “Now my life is sweet like cinnamon / Like a fucking dream I’m living in / Baby, love me ’cause I’m playing on the radio”. In the beginning, Del Rey’s glorified visions of love are linked to her own striving for glory.
But things change when she gets that glory. By the time Norman Fucking Rockwell came out in 2019, Del Rey was at the top. She’s earned her position as one of the most influential musicians of the modern age, forever altering the sound of pop music as the impact her brand of literary lyricism and emotive vocal delivery has had on music is plain to see. However, as her albums have gone on, Del Rey’s persona in her music has shifted. The characters and their tales of grandeur have been dropped as the singer herself gained that grandeur. Her perspective shifted as she made her way to the dizzying heights she dreamed of, but she made it there alone rather than in this volatile, infatuated love she wrote of.
Del Rey ponders that shift out loud on ‘Blue Banisters’. She recounts a conversation she had with a friend, seemingly about her fears that perhaps the glory she’s found has kept her from love, singing, “She said, ‘Most men don’t want a woman with a legacy, it’s of age’ / She said, ‘You can’t be a muse and be happy, too / You can’t blacken the pages with Russian poetry and be happy’ / And that scared me.”
It’s a devastating revelation as Del Rey seems to worry that her success and fame and the life she’s built herself might be keeping her from some other love. It’s a fear that prevails in her music from that moment on as she begs on ‘Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd’ to know, when it comes to love, simply, “When’s it gonna be my turn?”
Talking about the track, Del Rey told Rolling Stone, “It’s giving fig tree.” Referencing Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar as she writes, “I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree.” In her analogy, each fig is a different future; “One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor”. It’s the idea that women, especially, can never have it all and that life demands choice, but choice, in its own way, brings inevitable grief. Del Rey reached for the fig of success but, in her later music, shares the fear that perhaps in doing so and in pouring so much of herself into these stories of grand love, the fig of simple and beautiful home life has withered and fallen away.
Maybe it’s just a matter of maturing and realising that dangerous love isn’t sustainable. Or, perhaps it’s only in the fear of losing that future that her desire to have a peaceful and everyday life became clear. But either way, the love of Lana Del Rey’s later music is different. It’s easy, light and decidedly normal. “And if this is the end, I want a boyfriend,” she sings on ‘Black Bathing Suit’, calling out for “Someone to eat ice cream with and watch television / Walk home from the mall with.” Reminiscent of the sweet domesticity of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s ‘Our House’, Del Rey’s ‘Let The Light In’ dreams of a homely scene as she sings, “Put the TV on and flowers in a vase, lie your head.”
Of all her most recent releases, love is simple; it’s meeting her boyfriend at the taco truck, dreaming of opening up to somebody or merely having a partner who loves her for who she is. The character has dropped away. There are no more Bonnie and Clyde-type missions for glory with ride-or-die infatuation where it’s love or death. Instead, it’s a dream of domesticity where Del Rey wants to do “nothing at all” and wants someone to do it with her.
