Chemtrails over the Country Club
Just four months ago, walking down Knightsbridge Street practically every night—sometimes in the summer rain—I did my first full deep dive into Lana Del Rey’s music. I always knew of her name and her large fan base but never found the impetus to really understand her, to analyze her discography like I did Taylor Swift. I found “Young and Beautiful” from The Great Gatsby to be one of the most beautiful records I had ever heard. I had a strange attraction to her cover of “Once Upon A Dream” for the film Maleficent, but that’s where my knowledge ended. But her album Born to Die gave me this kind of scandalous, youthful burst of energy that just suited a five-week trip alone to London when I was longing to escape the mundanity of lockdown life.
As I came back to the Georgetown area for my sophomore studies, I made an effort to expand further into her discography, finally going through Norman Fucking Rockwell, Ultraviolence, Lust for Life, and, finally, Honeymoon. When I first got wind of the new Lana Del Rey album, I was still in my obsessive phase with Born to Die.
In the leadup to Chemtrails, I wanted more scandalous, nostalgic-for-Los-Angeles songs akin to “This is What Makes Us Girls,” “Cherry,” and, particularly, the kind of song I’d never have the guts to post on my Instagram story, “Fucked My Way to the Top.” Instead, I found something entirely different: a kind of satisfaction in settling down, a kind of contentment in the “giving up” of a volatile life. Maybe this should have been predicted when my favorite record off her last album, “The Greatest,” ended with the lyrics, “I guess that I’m burned out after all.”
In contrast to her other albums, Chemtrails Over the Country Club doesn’t discuss the fast-paced lifestyle of the music and entertainment industry. Instead, it’s a geographical relocation. Sure, she still gives the occasional shout-outs carried over from Norman Fucking Rockwell with mentions of Calabasas and Yosemite, but she opts for places the old Lana would consider irrelevant: Lincoln, Nebraska, Arkansas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma. Maybe that is why, when first listening to the album in the most intimate way I spend time with music—wearing dark blue wireless Beats while I stroll along residential streets in a near-spring time Washington, D.C.—it felt strangely familiar.
While listening to her other music romanticize Los Angeles with mentions of climbing up the “H of the Hollywood sign” and shout-outs to Long Beach, Venice, PCH drive—places I am from—they made me want to go back, to enter back into the scene where everything “happened.” And with my passion for the Performing Arts, this sentiment was exacerbated. I knew that the film and TV scene in Washington, D.C. was nothing in comparison to that which is in Southern California. However, in Chemtrails over the Country Club, I was told that wherever I am is fine and good enough.
The album starts off with “White Dress,” a soft, sensual, and dramatically slow sound, attempting to mimic the rest of the album. There is a simple patience that the album requires of its listeners while it simply epitomizes the state of being in no rush. The catchy “down at the men in music business conference” still finds its way into my head as she romanticizes a time before her fame, finding beauty in the unexpected and the seemingly average lifestyle of being a “waitress.”
The other gold records in her album are interspersed. While I wasn’t particularly drawn to either single, after a while getting bored of the repeated simple melodies in “Chemtrails Over the Country Club” and “Let Me Love You Like A Woman,” their lyrics do exemplify the tone of the album: “I’m ready to leave LA, and I want you to come.” The real shining moments in her album take place in “Wild At Heart.” The sound perfectly exemplifies the feeling of wanting to run away, the eternal life of a restless soul: “If you love me, you’ll love me ‘cause I’m wild, wild at heart.” The dreamy “Not All Who Wander Are Lost” alludes to settling down, not just in her lifestyle but in her romantic life: “The thing about men like you is that you got a lot to say, but will you stay?”
The collaborations on “For Free” and “Breaking Up Slowly” showcase the talented folk-like voices of lesser-known musicians, but an ending to the album is best suited in “Dance Till We Die,” the bridge of which sounds like a huge escape from her former “rolling like a rolling stone” lifestyle.
In contrast to my expectations, I was not able to add new songs to my “Bad Bitch” Spotify playlist. Instead, after a prior discography romanticizing an unsustainable going-and-coming lifestyle, Lana told me to feel a contentment in the staying.
By Sophia George
Indecisive hopeless romantic attempting to navigate the intersection of arts and politics.