Hey there, been a minute, but I’m back. Expect weekly posts as I rev this thing up: audio, interviews, new music, subscriber-only stuff—my head is full of ideas and 2024 is the year I start pushing them out. Until then, it’ll be a little scattershot with this newsletter (and for now, free) but hopefully that’s OK. For this installment, I’ve got a short essay on my favorite record of the year, my top 10 albums of the year, and a few random notes.
Do You Think About Heaven?
In 2017, Lana Del Rey was pressed by journalist Mike Williams about casting a waning crescent moon hex on then president Donald Trump. Lana copped to the magical working matter of factly: “Look, I do a lot of shit.”
2017 was a strange, epoch-shifting year. In Promethea, his comic book series with artists J. H. Williams III and Mick Gray which ran from 1999-2005, author Alan Moore prognosticate, by way of Moore’s Law, that 2017 would be an apocalyptic year—a year of revelations and the advent of digital culture, in which undeniable truths made vividly apparent, and that henceforth, new models of consciousness would be needed to navigate the world. Looking back, I think he was right.
Lana is the perfect (or maybe the word is “necessary”) artist for this age. Because she has always done “a lot of shit.” In her early years, after shucking off the Lizzy Grant persona in favor of a new, raven-haired make believe starlet, her bleak and explicit pop songs incited moral panic and rockist digs from soon to be disgraced newsmen. But slowly, gradually, and with comic noir poise, she’s shown us she’s much more than all that. Sure, she dates cops and showers in call-outs, but she’s emerged as a rare songwriter capable of conveying—casually and naturally—the paradoxical truths of our present moment.
On her ninth album, the expansive and spiritually explorative Did You Know That There's a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, Del Rey takes that “doing a lot of shit” notion to the limit. I listened to it first on a flight coming from Paris and Dublin with my wife Becky Bartkowski, filled to the brim with travel excitement and deeply in love. I don’t love flying but I don’t hate it either. Being on an airplane is a lot of things, but if you work it right, a plane ride can serve as a kind of isolation chamber: the perfect setting for a 78-minute, 16 song album, listened to intently and with little distraction.
Lana’s silver screen melodramas and cinematic exaggerations have always been extra in an essential sense. On this record, she harnesses that energy, stitching together schoolyard call-and-response chants, surf-pop time travel, studio chatter, throbbing trap beats, gospel swells, Americana, voice memo audio collages, and sweeping orchestration. She drops pop references to John Denver and Little Anthony and the Imperials, highlights tender and revelatory humanity in the Nilsson catalog, and samples Tommy Genesis alongside radical new interpolations of existing songs from her discography.
The witchy vibes of the past have given way to a more overtly Christian perspective, one that runs much deeper than the baiting inclusion of a snippet of a sermon by celebrity mega-pastor Judah Smith, whose flock includes Justin Bieber and Hailey Baldwin, the aptly titled “Judah Smith Interlude.” It’s a strange bit of audio. Smith’s sermon is clear, but so are muffled comments and stifled laughs from Lana. Wry commentary? Ironic distance? I don’t know, but nonetheless, Smith’s address says something crucial about what I think she’s getting across with these songs: “I’m gonna tell you my truth: I’ve discovered my preaching is mostly about me.”
Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd is mostly about Lana, about the internal combustion of existing as a pop star. It’s alluring to consider Ocean Blvd as The Last Temptation of Lana, a record that finds God in ancestral memory and carnal abandon, prizing transcendence in multitudinous forms. She shapeshifts to suit her purposes in the moment: a SoCal alt-rocker, a gutting satirist, a woo woo poet, a keeper of forgotten Los Angeles history. These morphing guises don’t remove the album’s personal centrality; they illuminate it.
Because she is not anachronistic or hokey, Lana’s gospel makes space for the divine in the profane and confusing. Del Rey’s world is a zone where meaning is established via imperfection—cutting in and out, employing shifting tones, whose verite voice memos and extra-musical asides create ghostly trails that haunt the album like audio kintsugi.
Taken together, these dream state snapshots bring Del Rey’s worldview into soft focus, aptly summed up on golden-hued country ballad “Let The Light In,” featuring Father John Misty: “There's so much ridin'/On this life and how we write our love song.”
The tension at the root of Ocean Blvd is in who exactly does the writing. Our DNA sequence? God? Lizzy Grant? Lana Del Rey herself, the “damsel in distress inured to the fatalism of our time”, as Andrew Marzoni puts it in his great piece for The Baffler?
She’s too quintessentially shady to be altogether precise and specific, but if she does have a gospel to share, it’s one that hinges on the freedom to write that story in as many ways as is necessary. If wholeness exists, it’s in the individual fracture of it all, tied together by anyone who cares to assemble the pieces.
Top 10 Albums of 2023
Lana Del Rey, Did You Know There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (Apple Music | Spotify)
Widescreen, intimate, and culled from dream state consciousness.
The Belbury Poly, The Path (Apple Music | Spotify)
Funky electronic soundscapes, imaginal radiophonic soundtracks, fae folk and forgotten landworks, narrated by Justin Hopper acting as an occult Ken Nordine.
Arthur Russell, Picture of Bunny Rabbit (Apple Music | Spotify | Bandcamp)
A sister project to World of Echo, songs that create sacred sonic spaces for the listener and the artist himself.
Arooj Aftab, Vijay Iyer, Shahzad Ismaily, Love in Exile (Apple Music | Spotify)
A nexus between ambient bass throbs, Rhodes-powered jazz, and Indian classical music, conjured in the moment and seemingly in touch with a cosmic source.
The Malombo Jazz Makers, Down Lucky’s Way (Apple Music | Spotify | Bandcamp)
Recorded in South Africa in 1969 but only now available, this is healing music that floats like cool jazz and echoes with folk intensity.
The Clientele, I Am Not There Anymore (Apple Music | Spotify | Bandcamp)
Beats, spoken word, a brimful of retro pop joy. The Clientele’s best album since Strange Geometry?
Hayden Pedigo, The Best Times I Ever Ignored (Apple Music | Spotify | Bandcamp)
With gentle grace and oblique humor, Hayden Pedigo lets these wordless guitar epics wander into heartworn spaces. An iconoclast out of step with the mundanity of the modern world.
Califone, Villagers (Apple Music | Spotify | Bandcamp)
Assembled cut and paste style from various sessions and multiple collaborators, Califone continues to evolve. The Halloween decorations are never coming down.
Prairiewolf, Prairiewolf (Apple Music | Spotify | Bandcamp)
Cosmic country drifts into outer space, or exotica gone kosmische. Featuring Tyler Wilcox of
.Anohni and the Johnsons, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross (Apple Music | Spotify | Bandcamp)
Rooted in classic soul music and existential protest, another stunning album from Anohni.
Liner Notes I Wrote This Year:
Jesus People Music Vol. 2: The Reckoning (ORGMusic/Aquarium Drunkard)
Joyce Spence, Tied Down (Numero Group)
Recent Comings and Goings
Aquarium Drunkard Year in Review :: 2023
Reviewed Dave Matthews Band’s 1998 progressive folk classic Before These Crowded Streets and James Elkington’s Broadcast meets Bert Jansch LP Me Neither for Pitchfork
My Podcasts:
Aquarium Drunkard Transmissions
We recently wrapped up the eighth season of Transmissions, my weekly interview show for Aquarium Drunkard. Highlights include chats with Mac Demarco, James McNew of Yo La Tengo, Vashti Bunyan, the Lou Reed Archive, and many more.
My show with Sam Means. Recent discussions have included rock & roll conspiracy theories, banned music, The Beatles, and more. Best of all, we do it live so that you can join in and comment as we go along.
Recommended Reading:
The Outer Periphery (zine, Birchwood Palace Industries, 2023)
“A collection of over a dozen patent illustrations for functioning spacecraft, designed by amateurs, hobbyists, sci-fi enthusiasts, engineers, and cranks. Ranging from ‘somewhat plausible’ to ‘completely off the wall,’ these drawings beautifully capture the delirious optimism of the space age. In the years between Sputnik and Challenger, sitting in your garage drafting a design for, say, a rotating spacecraft that produced an electric dipole on four rotating spherical conducting domes perturbing a uniform spherical electric field seemed not just like an interesting hobby, but an obligation to the future of humankind.”
I haven't made time for Lana, but will.