The 10 Best Lana del Rey songs
With the release of Lust for Life, Lana has finally overcome any criticism and doubt on the authenticity of her persona and her artistry. With a body of work that has depicted the same thematic obsessions since day #1, but that has found new textures and subtexts on every take, we take a look at what are the essential tracks that has made Lizzy Grant a new icon of American storytelling.
10. Freak
(Honeymoon, 2015)
Even though Honeymoon, as a whole, feels like Lana's weakest album, Freak is the standout track. Her self-portrait as a beautiful weirdo is dark, sultry and tense. She demands her lover to follow her to sunny California where they could keep living their damaging passion.
Best lyrics:
Flames so hot that turn blue; palms reflecting in your eyes, like an endless summer.
9. Get Free
(Lust for Life, 2017)
The closing track of her newest record sees Lana with a new understanding of herself as an artist in a world (and more specifically, in a country) that is changing for the worse. It's a perfect way to sum up an album that looks at the outside and incorporates the present moment to her poetics of personal sadness, but from that dialectic she is able to reach a beautiful synthesis on her poetics as a form of personal and collective liberation.
Best lyrics:
This is my commitment, my modern manifesto, I'm doing it for all of us.
8. Cruel World
(Ultraviolence, 2014)
The opening track of her second album is the clashing contrast of the two predominant states of del Rey: the melancholic sadness, and the turbulent chaos. By freeing herself from the unstable lover in turn, she decides to go wild, oblivious to the vicious circle that she has fallen in. She might be a hopeless soul in a cruel world, but she lives with full intensity.
Best lyrics:
Get a little bit of Bourbon in ya, go a little bit suburban and go crazy.
7. Blue Jeans
(Born to Die, 2011)
It was the track that proved that Lana del Rey was not a one-hit-wonder. The tragic love story with a James Dean-esque man set the tone for the concept behind Born to Die: the inevitable connection between wild conflictive romances and death. Morbid Romanticism in the postmodern age of pop culture.
Best lyrics:
You were sorta punk rock, I grew up on hip hop, but you fit me better than my favorite sweater
6. Off to the Races
(Born to die, 2012)
No other track makes more justice to her self-proclamation as a "gangsta Nancy Sinatra". One of her most cinematic songs take us in a desert road trip from Los Angeles to Las Vegas, rich in Americana symbols and poetic resources that see her reciting Lolita's opening line over hip-hop beats.
Best lyrics:
I'm your little harlot, starlet, Queen of Coney Island, raising hell all over town.
5. Ride
(Paradise, 2012)
If Paradise might have seemed a strategy to keep draining dollars of the newest disposable pop diva, Ride alone proved those thoughts wrong. It's a reflective track that opens up the character and let us see the human being in her whole conflicted fragility. It's a cathartic song that goes orchestral to show the entire power that she is capable of.
Best lyrics:
Been trying hard not to get into trouble, but I've got a war in my mind.
4. West Coast
(Ultraviolence, 2014)
Even if Lizzy Grant was born in Los Angeles, her on-stage persona is a 100% California girl. Her fetish on the Hollywood life and with the intersections between fame and tragedy are all over this track that is not afraid of adventurous key changes. If there's a song equivalent to David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, it is this one,
Best lyrics:
Down on the West Coast, they love their movies, their golden gods and rock'n'roll groupies.
3. Summertime Sadness
(Born to Die, 2012)
A song of endless possibilities, is difficult that a ballad could reach that sort of crescendo without getting corny or melodramatic, but by embracing her nostalgia she manages to resonate hard and cross the boundaries of a love song. It's epic in a The Smiths tragic love way, so even with the bittersweet feeling that wraps it, it demanded one of the greatest club remixes of modern times by Cedric Gervais.
Best lyrics:
I'm feeling electric tonight, cruising down the coast goin' bout 99. Got my bad baby by my heavenly side; I know if I go I'll die happy tonight.
2. Love
(Lust for Life, 2017)
This is a song that could possibly speak for a whole generation, an hymn for Gen Y as Smells Like Teen Spirit is for Gen X. Love embodies the sentiment of a void generation that lives in the immediacy, one that lived through a digital revolution that changed every single aspect of their life: it's an exciting time to be alive, to be young and in love... but it's also a frightening time for all of that since the future for all of us, living in 140 characters and stories that vanishes in 24 hours is pure uncertainty.
Best lyrics:
It doesn't matter if I'm not enough for the future or the things to come cuz' I'm young and in love.
1. Video Games
(Born to Die, 2011)
Her introduction to the world is still her deepest mark. She just appeared in our lives, a tragic young woman that sung about imperfect and human love, between beer bottles, pool tables and video games. In between harp strings and tambourines, she was something different to anything we had listened before, a timeless presence able to start a mythology of herself as a flawed diva. Obscured by that same sudden fame, time gave Lana the triumph and 6 years after its release, Video Games stills shines as pristine and mystrerious as when we heard it for the first time.
Best lyrics:
They say that the world was built for two, only worth living if somebody is loving you; baby, now you do.
