Shades of blue: Colour in the cinematic world of Lana Del Rey
“My baby lives in shades of blue,” sings Lana Del Rey in the opening line of ‘Shades of Cool’ from her 2014 album Ultraviolence. On the 2015 track, ‘Freak’, she begins the song with the words “Flames so hot that they turn blue”. The first line the singer delivers in ‘Blue Jeans’ is, you guessed it, “Blue jeans, white shirt”, while ‘Old Money’ starts with “Blue hydrangeas, cold cash, divine”.
In all of Del Rey’s released songs, 43 of them feature the word “blue” or “blues”, making it one of her most frequently used words from the lexicon.
But why is Del Rey so obsessed with the colour blue? The singer has endured for over a decade as one of the most popular stars of her generation, and apart from her undeniably well-crafted songs, it’s her ability to create evocative and expansive worlds with each album that has secured her success. Her use of imagery is rich and inescapable, with recurrent allusions to certain beach-forward places (Coney Island, LA, Florida), food and drinks (Pepsi, cinnamon, peaches, grenadine), and iconic figures (Elvis, Springsteen, Whitman) helping to illuminate her cinematic audio-visual world.
When it comes to name-dropping colours, it’s blue that stands out as her favourite, and it’s clear that the colour is always on Del Rey’s mind when she’s writing. It weaves a thread through her whole discography, appearing in five songs from Born to Die, and most recently, appearing in her three most recent singles, ‘Bluebird’, ‘Henry, Come On’, and ‘Tough’. However, her usage of the word ebbs and flows, with the singer often transforming its meaning. In fact, you can chart Del Rey’s evolution through her use of the word, which she has come to take ownership of as the years go by.
Starting with Born to Die, her major label debut (it would be nearly impossible to count how many times she has used “blue” in non-released songs), she sings about her lover’s “blue jeans” in the song of the same name. She tells the tale of an unsteady relationship with a man who is clearly no good, but that doesn’t stop her from feeling a sense of devotion, singing “I will love you till the end of time”. The lush orchestration that defines the album is inherently cinematic and opulent, yet she sings of complicated romantic entanglements, dependency, addiction, and the tragedies lurking among dreams and glamour.
She often associates blue with darkness and chaos, from the “Pabst Blue Ribbon on ice” she talks of drinking in ‘This Is What Makes Us Girls’ to “kissing in the blue dark” in ‘Video Games’. There is a sadness and longing to blue in her earlier work, as seen in Paradise’s ‘Yayo’ and her cover of ‘Blue Velvet’, in which she sings “And I still can see blue velvet through my tears”.
With Ultraviolence, this theme continues, with five songs referencing the colour or the music genre. For Del Rey, name-dropping jazz and blues is often shorthand for feeling melancholic, using it in the same way she uses the word to describe a dark night sky or feeling sad. ‘Shades of Cool’ is the most prominent track to feature the word on the album, with her lover encapsulating all of these versions of blue. “My baby lives in shades of blue/ Blue eyes and jazz and attitude”, she tells us, adding, “But I can’t help him, can’t make him better/ And I can’t do nothing about his strange weather”.
This sentiment is echoed in the bonus track ‘Black Beauty’, in which she laments her lover’s inability to see the beauty in the world. “Sun and ocean blue/ Their magnificence, it don’t make sense to you”. Here, blue is a good thing—it’s the colour of the sea—but he simply can’t recognise the wonder in front of him.
With Honeymoon, Del Rey crams in references to blue in seven different songs, and arguably, these tracks feature some of her most poignant uses of the word. “But I lost myself when I lost you/ But I still got jazz when I’ve got those blues”, she sings on the beautiful ‘Terrence Loves You’, while the powerful ‘The Blackest Day’ sees Del Rey openly admit with the lines “Carry me home, got my blue nail polish on/ It’s my favorite colour and my favourite tone of song”. Blue is an all-consuming feeling, associated with the depths of the ocean and the beauty of nature, an adornment, lost love, and the sound of blues music gently playing in the background as her lover walks away.
It’s a colour that Del Rey loves in its myriad forms, and her constant allusion to it suggests her innate connection to blue in all of its expansiveness and multitudinous glory. Despite its connotations to melancholy, this is a state of being that the singer can recognise as important, a balance that is an essential part of life. As she began to incorporate more hope into her lyricism, albums like Lust for Life, Norman Fucking Rockwell! and Blue Banisters predominantly see her take ownership of the colour. The word even appears just once on Chemtrails Over the Country Club.
Notable examples of Del Rey’s reclamation of the colour can be seen on tracks like ‘Get Free’, in which she sings “I wanna move/ Out of the black/ Into the blue” (seemingly a Neil Young reference) while ‘Venice Bitch’ sees her declare “Paint me happy in blue”. On ‘Blue Banisters’, she wants to colour her home with this symbol of calm and tranquillity, which reminds her of the ocean and its endless possibilities.
Del Rey reminds us of the importance of acknowledging your sadness and emerging from it in ‘Beautiful’, where her love of the colour comes into full focus. “What if someone had asked Picasso not to be sad?/ Never known who he was or the man he’d become/ There would be no Blue Period”, she sings. Perhaps Born To Die, Ultraviolence and Honeymoon were Del Rey’s ‘Blue Period’, and she knew she had to leave it eventually. Yet it’s a time that shaped her and taught her about life, and, as she claims, “I can turn blue into something beautiful”, which she admittedly has, or at least made clear its many dimensions.
To some, Del Rey’s constant use of blue might be overkill, but the way she allows the colour’s meaning to evolve with her is a subtle yet important reminder of the singer’s attention to detail. She constantly references past lyrics and symbols, allowing her own cinematic universe to form, and blue is the defining hue that illuminates her world.
