![]() As she sings, “I lost myself when I lost you/And I still get trashed, darling, when I hear your tunes.” -R.S. She mourns her distant lover with a plea from Bowie’s “Space Oddity”: “Ground control to Major Tom!” (Terrence, Bowie’s influential big brother, died the year Lana was born.) You can hear this song was a labor of love for her. Diamond Dogs/Station to Station era, when he was the most cracked actor in town. As she said, “It’s jazzy.” It’s full of Hollywood mythology, but especially David Bowie in his 1970s L.A. “Terrence Loves You” is the gem Del Rey singled out as her personal favorite on Honeymoon. In its relaxing outro, we hear the sound of waves hitting the beach and seagulls squawking, providing an optimistic close to the LP. ![]() “It’s about people who don’t get to reach their full potential because they let controlling people stop them from being free,” she told NPR. “Get Free” encapsulates the energy of Del Rey’s 2017 album, Lust for Life: her commitment to change, to taking an optimistic approach to life, and to moving “out of the black and into the blue.” Performing the the song live, she has noted that she wrote “Get Free” with Amy Winehouse and Whitney Houston in mind. “It mentions wanting so much to be normal,” she said in 2020, “and realizing that when you have an overactive, eccentric mind, a record like Chemtrails is just what you’re going to get.” -A.M. It’s this sense of comforting regularity - as well as time she spent hanging with her friends and siblings - that made her choose “Chemtrails” as the title track for her seventh album. “It’s beautiful how this deep normality settles down over me,” she observes. She’s busy in swimming pools and sports cars, drinking coffee, doing laundry, washing her hair, and asking for your astrology sign. On “Chemtrails,” Del Rey hypnotizes us into imagining her version of modern American life. In the song’s second refrain, she makes herself the subject as she longs for change: “I hope that I come back one day/To tell you that I really changed, baby.” -T.M. “I’m flyin’ to the moon again, dreamin’ about heroin/How it gave you everything and took your life away,” she sings on the first chorus. The track, filled with references to Charles Manson and Mötley Crüe, and featuring a haunting chorus, is long-rumored to be about Del Rey’s ex-boyfriend Rob Dubuss, who died of a heroin overdose in late 2011. “Heroin” is Del Rey’s favorite song on Lust for Life, and perhaps her saddest on record. To honor the release of the singer’s ninth studio album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd, we’ve ranked her 50 best songs, from modern standards to deep cuts to an unreleased gem we can’t get out of our heads. But along with forging a deep personal connection with her core audience, Del Rey’s baroque, retro-pop style, intense intimacy, and unapologetically honest lyrics have changed the sound of pop music in the past decade. To her ultra-devoted fans, she is the patron saint of the misunderstood. Over the course of her career so far, she’s developed into a bona fide musical visionary, packing her increasingly ambitious albums with brilliant songs that are steeped in her unique vision of Americana while exploring dark, obscure aspects of relationships most singers don’t have the courage to even go near. Del Rey’s “gangster Nancy Sinatra” artistic approach was striking, and her music set her apart even further, a mix of torch ballads, trip-hop, and classic Sixties pop that stood in stark contrast to the glossy dance pop of the early 2010s. Lana Del Rey officially debuted in 2011 with her instant-classic single “Video Games,” and followed that with her groundbreaking 2012 album, Born to Die.
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