Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd

Parts of this album don’t sound like finished songs. The voice is still practicing, a sentence turns somewhere else halfway through, and after a very private memory a joke suddenly follows that leaves you baffled. Lana hasn’t tidied these things up to look especially presentable. After listening for a while, I felt that this untidiness suits what she wanted to write about this time.

The Grants begins with a fragment of backing vocals rehearsing. Voices come in, stop to adjust, and by the time the real singing starts, the ear has already gotten to know these few people. It is a good opening. The album is going to talk about family, parting and memory, and first letting the act of singing carry some traces of people being together is far more effective than explaining the theme with grand strings.

Grant is her surname. Putting this name in the first song also gives the narration that follows a different weight. What she wants to keep is pieces of her family, the memories that, once mentioned, can take a person back to a certain moment. The gospel harmonies slowly lift up the lead singer, sounding like the comfort of faith and also like very practical reluctance to let go. What a person can finally take with them: this question isn’t sung as anything mysterious here.

The title song turns this fear toward herself. By the sea there is a tunnel that has been sealed and forgotten, the beauty of the past is still inside, and people outside no longer pass by. This metaphor suits Lana especially well. She has always been good at describing beautiful things, but this time beauty itself can’t guarantee being remembered. The piano and strings spread the song wide, the voice slowly rises in the middle, and that request becomes more and more direct.

I like that there is a bit of unwillingness in this song. Hoping to be remembered, wanting to be loved, and wanting to keep having value after body and time have both changed: these wishes aren’t always elegant. She doesn’t cover for herself. The better the chorus sounds, the more you can hear her resistance to disappearing.

Sweet is easy to overlook among the first few songs, but it actually says ahead of time many of the album’s later questions. After two people like each other, can they really put their lives together, and are their ideas about family, children and the future close. She asks slowly and the melody is relaxed, but these questions are hard to deal with by saying one romantic line. By this album, love already has to face the concrete arrangements of life.

A&W then tears the patience open all at once. In the first half the acoustic guitar and piano are sparse, and Lana’s voice moves forward pressed close to the song. The narration has bodies in it, shame, and judgments others have forced onto her. She talks about whether she will be believed after being hurt, and her tone is not even especially agitated. This calm makes it harder to bear. The person speaking seems to already know that explaining may not help.

The most impressive thing about this song is that it doesn’t push the frankness of the first half into a beautiful big chorus. The music suddenly turns into low frequencies and looping vocals, and the second half becomes sticky, messy, and a bit deliberately silly. Those repeated names and short phrases seem to occupy the place where thinking would be. The person who was just seriously telling her story now lets the voice run, and no longer gives a coherent explanation.

I’m not very willing to simply read this turn as her finally gaining freedom. There is also numbness here, amusing herself, and a bit of vengeful pleasure. She knows how others want to see her, and she simply pushes that image further. The hurt before doesn’t disappear because the beat comes in. It stays under the noise that follows. Over seven minutes, the song lets two states hold at once.

Judah Smith Interlude follows here, and it really is uncomfortable to listen to. A long sermon interrupts the song, male voices discuss desire and morality, and the experiences Lana just described, which are hard to hear properly, are still in my ears. This ordering makes me think about who has the right to interpret a person’s life, and who can only keep defending their own.

I can understand the conflict this stretch of sound creates in the album, and I still find it too long. It takes up too much attention, and on a first listen especially it easily drives away the feeling that has just been built. Keeping this discomfort may be intentional, but intentional doesn’t mean I’m willing to listen to all of it every time.

The piano of Candy Necklace pulls the music back. The melody circles round and round, the voice rises and falls with it, and there is a feeling of already knowing the relationship isn’t quite right and still not being able to stop. Jon Batiste joining doesn’t turn it into a light duet between a man and a woman; his voice and the piano both take part in this entanglement. Jon Batiste Interlude then loosens up some, and the laughter, shouts and improvised reactions bring the people in the studio back.

When the album gets to Kintsugi and Fingertips, I find myself listening more attentively without meaning to. These two don’t have a conspicuous structural turn like A&W, but they carry almost the heaviest part of the whole album.

Kintsugi borrows the image of kintsugi. A vessel is repaired after it breaks, the marks remain on the surface, and even when mended it won’t go back to what it first was. A metaphor like this is easily written as a comforting line about trauma making people more beautiful, and fortunately Lana spends more time writing about the death of a loved one, her family’s reactions, and how she feels inside it. A crack first of all means loss, and the listener has no chance to jump easily to a nice conclusion.

The piano is played with a lot of space, the melody stretches out slowly, and when she sings about specific people there is a feeling in her voice of trying to stay calm. The images of light therefore have weight. A person has to first admit that they have really been changed before they can go on feeling things in life. Whether the change is worth it, she doesn’t decide for the listener.

Fingertips is closer to a piece of self-talk that keeps extending forward. The melody adjusts to the length of the sentences, and there is no regular chorus waiting to contain the feeling. She mentions family, lost relatives, her relationship with her mother, and also worries whether she can become a mother. Things aren’t arranged in order of time, and when one memory touches another, it just walks straight over.

This song is hard to take as background music. It doesn’t hold people with a particularly eye-catching hook, and you even need to actively follow the names and relationships. I like that it doesn’t turn the private narration into a story anyone can step into at once. Some details belong to her, and a stranger listening needs to keep a little distance. We don’t have to have exactly the same experience to understand why a person can’t stop when talking about a certain thing.

Putting these two together also changed my understanding of the family imaginings in Lana’s songs. She keeps talking about belonging, about a place where one can stay, and it isn’t only that she likes the picture of some traditional life. She knows hurt can happen at home too, and knows a person may never get the response they want most. Even so, she still imagines a different kind of family relationship. There are many misgivings in this wish.

Paris, Texas finally lets the air move. The piano phrase taken from SYML loops lightly, like a person walking, with thoughts changing direction along with it. The place names bring distance, but no guarantee that leaving will solve things. I like the very light way this song is sung, almost with no intention of persuading anyone, as if she is slowly realizing herself that some places can no longer be stayed in.

Grandfather Please Stand on the Shoulders of My Father While He’s Deep-Sea Fishing brings the names of family into a plea again. The song title is a bit clumsy in length, but after reading it you can feel a very specific relationship of leaning on someone. The music gradually unfolds, and while Lana talks about her own work, she asks even older relatives to look after her. She hopes to be understood correctly, and also admits she needs help.

Let the Light In is the most comfortable breath in the second half. The texture of the acoustic guitar and Father John Misty’s harmonies make the warmth between the two people feel very real. The relationship still has its ups and downs, but the song itself is in no hurry to argue. Margaret has a similar looseness, with the melody walking unhurried and the blessing carrying the casualness between people who know each other well. These two songs made me feel that the album, for all it has talked about death, hasn’t lost its interest in everyday pleasures.

The last three turn in another direction again. Fishtail uses vocal processing and beats to slowly reveal the distrust inside tenderness. Peppers simply becomes a bit absurd, with samples, fragmented sentences and ambiguous jokes all crowded in. After so much frankness before it, its flippancy actually lets people breathe out. A person who has talked seriously about death can of course still say some things that matter less.

Taco Truck x VB finally connects back to Venice Bitch, as if she has taken back part of herself from her old work. A familiar melody enters a darker, heavier beat, and the past isn’t sealed up as it was, and can keep being taken apart and remade. Ending this way suits an album that worries about forgetting. She is still using those memories, so they are still alive in new songs.

Ocean Blvd is long, I skip some of the interludes, and I don’t like every song equally. But I like that it is willing to leave the contradictions in. Lana can seriously consider family and death a few minutes earlier, and a few minutes later sing in a scattered, lustful, self-centered way. Only with these parts put together does she have the weight of a whole person. After listening, the tunnel metaphor actually matters less. I have already remembered many of the voices inside.