Hear Me Out: ‘Ride’ is Lana Del Rey’s greatest song
After years of singing in New York’s underground bars, Elizabeth Woolridge Grant finally found success with the release of her 2012 album Born to Die. The singer-songwriter had spent years making music under various names, from Sparkle Jump Rope Queen to Lizzy Grant and May Jailer, eventually settling on Lana Del Rey.
With her new name and a slight change of image – ditching white blonde hair for a more mature brunette – Del Rey quickly attracted attention for her unconventional style that differed from other women in the pop industry. She was melancholic, inspired by vintage aesthetics and Old Hollywood, offering up a downbeat, baroque pop ballad as her first single. ‘Video Games’ was accompanied by a homemade music video featuring clips of the singer moodily lip-syncing into her webcam, archival clips of teenagers skateboarding and an actor stumbling from paparazzi.
It didn’t take long for Tumblr to popularise the aesthetically-driven star’s music, plastering blogs with images of Del Rey or quotes from her songs. Alternative pop and indie were rising fast – other artists like Marina and the Diamonds, Arctic Monkeys in their AM era and Sky Ferreira were just a few of the names that helped define this period alongside Del Rey.
It was the perfect time for Del Rey to conquer the scene, blending melodrama and cinematic strings with lyrics that contrasted glamour with images of trailer park life, age-gap relationships, suicide and street walking. Born to Die exposed the simultaneous allure and “dark side of the American dream”, as she puts it in ‘Without You’.
Since Born to Die, Del Rey has released seven more studio albums, several EPs and non-album singles, a short film and a spoken-word poetry album (also available as a book). She experimented with soft rock on Ultraviolence, capturing hazy days in LA and declaring herself a ‘Brooklyn Baby’. Exploring domestic violence and doomed relationships, the album was considerably darker in tone and theme than Born to Die, establishing a greater sense of refinement and growth within her work.
The key to Del Rey’s success is the fact that she keeps things moving. On 2015’s Honeymoon, she steered toward a more jazz-influenced sound, although she incorporated hip-hop beats as she did in Born to Die. Lust For Life was more upbeat, and Norman Fucking Rockwell! followed suit, although Del Rey opted for more folk-inspired soft rock instrumentation on the latter.
2021 saw Del Rey release two albums, Chemtrails Over The Country Club and Blue Banisters, taking a gentler, Americana approach. These two records brought Del Rey a considerable number of new fans – a younger generation ready to discover the joys of Del Rey’s extensive discography (she boasts several hundred unreleased tracks and demos that can be found online).
Most recently, Del Rey released Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, an odyssey through a variation of styles that seemed to allude to her previous works. For example, ‘Peppers’ featuring Tommy Genesis would be right at home on the collab-heavy Lust for Life, and ‘Taco Truck x VB’ reworked ‘Venice Bitch’ from Norman Fucking Rockwell!.
So, with hundreds of songs to her name, it becomes quite a challenge to pick her greatest work. There are countless contenders for the top prize and many questions that come with making the final decision. Should it be something new? Can the answer be an effort from her first album? An unreleased track?
To make things easier, we’ll disregard the mountain of unreleased pieces floating around YouTube and Soundcloud and focus on her released tracks. There are so many songs that feel like an encapsulation of Del Rey as a bold and uncompromising artist, but taking the top spot has to be ‘Ride’.
The song was released on her 2012 EP Paradise, which was made available alongside her debut album to form Born to Die: The Paradise Edition. The EP features the beautifully vulnerable ‘Yayo’, the provocative ‘Gods and Monsters’ and ‘Cola’, and even a cover of Bobby Vinton’s ‘Blue Velvet’. But it is ‘Ride’ that stands out most.
‘Ride’ opens with solemn vocal melodies, setting up for a four-and-a-half-minute odyssey that is simultaneously cinematic, dramatic, reflective and melancholic but also hopeful. She sings, “I’ve been out on that open road,” reflecting on her desire for escape or change, adding in the pre-chorus, “Don’t break me down/I’ve been travelling too long/ I’ve been tryin’ too hard.”
In these moments where Del Rey asks the listener not to abandon her or give up on her desires, she sounds genuinely desperate, the pain apparent in her voice. Yet, despite her struggles, expressing that she has a “war in my mind,” she keeps on. “I just ride,” she sings, as the percussion picks up pace and Del Rey allows her stunning vocals to take precedence.
As the song reaches its final third, the strings begin to swell as though they are ripe to burst with anticipation and expectation, mirroring Del Rey’s exhausted yet determined spirit. The bridge is easily the most emotive part of the track, building with intensity as Del Rey gives in to wild abandon and sings, “I’m tired of feeling like I’m fucking crazy/ I’m tired of driving ’til I see stars in my eyes.”
It’s a beautiful moment that feels like a culmination of Del Rey’s years of hardship and difficulty in trying to make it in the industry. By the time she released ‘Ride’, Del Rey had reached unprecedented levels of success despite still being in the infancy of her commercial career. A sense of simultaneous apprehension, relief and celebration can be heard in her voice as ‘Ride’ comes to an end – it’s easily one of the most cinematic pieces of music Del Rey has ever released.
