The ninth studio album of Lana Del Rey ‘Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd’ delves deep into the existential questions as she grasps tighter to familial bonds.
Whittling the raw material of life into meaning, the ninth studio album by American singer-songwriter Lana Del Rey ‘Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd’ expresses how the artist perceives the world and her music – messy, yet beautiful, and full of loud interruptions and quiet ruminations. The album comprises 16 beautiful songs that show the singer contemplating the big questions of her life – family, home, and future. The album bears various themes, but the greatest emphasis is on her familial bonds and the vulnerability of womanhood, or as she herself puts it: “ modern-day woman with a weak constitution”.
The album begins with a mistake: in the first song, “The Grants” which bears her family name, the chorus mispronounces the word “mind”, and they are halted, corrected and the song restarts, but still, the error resounds. This tiny detail sums up Lana’s outlook on life as portrayed in the album, where she plays quite the documentarian who does not shy away from capturing the angles that aren’t just beautiful and bright. The motif of maternity comes up time and again, in songs like “The Grants” and “Sweet”, and in “Fingertips” she makes a blatant admission of her devastating self-doubt in this regard. She even questions her potential hypothetical partner regarding the depth of their commitment and puts forward questions that seem to impregnate the minds of all women who have been burdened with the set expectations of society, while at the same time expressing the dilemma of wanting a family of her own, as seen in ‘A&W’.
The intensity of internal struggle portrayed in the album comes in quotable verses that of timeless melodies, and the songs somewhat cross-refer each other. From romantic and sentimental tunes like ‘Margaret’ and ‘Paris, Texas’, to songs paying tribute to old musical geniuses, like in ‘Peppers’, she samples Tommy Genesis’ ‘Angelina’ to create a magical and sleek stream-of-consciousness number, the singer fearlessly explores new lyrical and sonic territories.
‘Taco Truck x VB’ comes as a fitting end to ‘Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd’, as she begins with a lilting calypso-tinged intro, and then melts into a darker realm of musicality in an album that pulls from the past present and future. Amidst the explicit volley of existential questions, the beauty and authenticity of Lana Del Rey’s music shine through and establishes her stand as one of the most intriguing writers of the present times.
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