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Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die (2012) is a memorable pop album for any number of reasons, but lyrically, it is most fundamentally marked by the ease with which the universal penetrates the particular. It’s not just that she’s lusting after a hunk in a white t-shirt and blue jeans. It’s that her love for him extends to the end of time. It’s not just that she’s dating a loser who plays video games. It’s that everything she does, she does for him. Heaven, jarringly, is delimited by his stunted desires. 

There’s plenty of music about temporal attraction, on the one hand, and about eternal love, on the other, but rarely are the two so seamlessly wedded. This quality explains the spiritual youthfulness of the album. In youth, every moment is potentially a window onto the transcendent. Lust flips into love, distraction into meaning, in a kind of category confusion that eventually becomes quite annoying the older you get. The dead weight of accumulated experience must eventually mute this tendency, and if it doesn’t, people become worried about you.

Still, it’s all too easy to simply be deadened as such once the bloom of youth fades. The particular becomes merely the particular; it’s just sex, not love—of course you know better now. This is the essential tragedy of adulthood, and why it’s so easy to either nostalgically look back on one’s youth or else attempt to prolong it well past the point of appropriateness. There’s no recapturing youth… but that’s not to say the universal is lost to time.

My first kid was born in 2011, and it’s around that time that I dropped out of keeping up with culture. It’s not that I dropped out of culture altogether; it’s more that I became hopelessly untimely, shrugging ignorantly through heated debates of films that had just been released and then randomly bringing them up in conversation years later when I finally saw them, inevitably to a bored audience. This was something I was a bit embarrassed about at first, but which I eventually came to peace with, and even an appreciation for.

At the beginning of 2025, I would not have been able to identify a single Lana Del Rey song, let alone Lana Del Rey the person. In the spring I picked up the Chemtrails Over the Country Club CD at the library (along with Neil Young’s confusing collaboration with Jack White, A Letter Home), just because it was there and I recognized her name. This turned out to be one of those gifts that only the culturally hapless enjoy.

Had I discovered Lana Del Rey when everyone else did, around the release of Born to Die, I think I would remember her now as a pop star with a few pretty good songs. I most certainly would have lost interest with the performative edginess of Ultraviolence (2014) and the banal moodiness of Honeymoon (2015), and that would have been that. But instead I got to hear her at what I later discovered was a key inflection point in her career; a paradigm shift, even. 

While there is certainly continuity between Norman Fucking Rockwell (2019), the album that preceded Chemtrails (2021), and Chemtrails itself—“How to Disappear” on the former album sounds almost exactly like a lead-in to “Wild at Heart” on the latter—NFR is pretty clearly an ending. It’s a later pop star’s album—more mature, in one sense, than Born to Die, but still clinging to coy petulance. “Your little Venice bitch,” a repeating self-description on NFR, has all the edgy blitheness that one associates with the early Lana Del Rey, and one only has to imagine the putrid LA guy who would identify as possessing said bitch to grasp the self-description’s essentially vapid quality. 

Simone de Beauvoir once faulted women artists for giving in to the temptation of mediocrity: “She lacks the generous-mindedness to forget herself, and this deprives her of the possibility of going beyond herself.” One key way in which this manifests today is in claims to be “insane,” “crazy,” or a “mess” but in practice to be quite staid and boring. It’s a near impossible leap to stop saying you’re crazy and to go forth to manifest craziness, and most never get there. Instead, as with all unearned transcendence in youth, the tendency is simply to settle eventually into the conformity that was there all along.

From the opening track of Chemtrails, “White Dress,” it’s clear that no crowd-pleasing covers of Sublime will be forthcoming. “White Dress” is sung in a hissy falsetto that more or less precludes radio play. Breathiness was a side benefit of Del Rey’s vocals in the early part of her career; from Chemtrails on, it’s a feature, the air escaping her mouth becoming its own instrument. 

Del Rey, of course, has a remarkable voice, with an unusual range and clarity, but from the beginning of Chemtrails, she recognizes that this voice, in large part responsible for her popularity, must be stretched and strained, to the point of simply being weird, if she is to communicate rather than just sing. This is the song, and in turn the album, that separates the early Lana Del Rey from the later one. The early Del Rey is breathlessly seeking out new thrills to keep herself turned on, in the parting words of NFR; the later Del Rey wants you to feel every exhalation. We are now in time, and marked by it, in a way that no young person truly is.

Chemtrails’s main attraction, “Let Me Love You Like a Woman,” lacks the cool airs of previous Del Rey hits. And indeed, the universality that so effortlessly emerged from her previous songs is now in question, precarious. Infinity is still there, but only as an idea; it might not make it to the next town. 

The late psychoanalytic philosopher Jonathan Lear argued that mourning and melancholia are not just two differential diagnoses, as Freud would have it, but existential categories. Either we mourn, or we are melancholic. Melancholia has an essentially timeless quality. “Men are always this way” or “It’s never going to be any different with us” or “I’m always going to mess it up.” It’s a structure of the world that lends meaning, but in a self-limiting way. The possibility that this might be the moment when always or never fail is foreclosed. Mourning, by contrast, is a recognition of loss. The thing, person, or quality that was there for you, such a natural part of your way of inhabiting the world, is no longer there. 

Although we don’t typically think about it this way, youth is something that must eventually be mourned. Indeed, the deadened quality of adulthood that I mentioned earlier could be thought of as a kind of melancholia, a refusal to mourn the youth that we all must eventually pass out of. And the key question in mourning youth is to preserve universality without the manic confusion—to love, as one example, well past the point when love springs forth effortlessly from concrete encounters. This is also to love within, not in spite of, the complexity that adulthood demands.

On the title track of Blue Banisters (2021), Del Rey recalls meeting a man who promised, amongst other things, to help her paint the banisters in her house blue. It’s unclear where this idea comes from, but her charmed reaction suggests it’s his.

Said he'd come back every May
Just to help me if I'd paint
My banisters blue
Blue banisters, ooh

While it’s possible that she was with this man long enough for him to follow up on his promise, it seems more likely from the description that follows that the banisters were never actually painted his proposed color. The love that she nostalgically reflects back upon was “heat lightning,” a shining moment in her life that seemed as bright as it was fleeting. And now, in the present, her friends are over painting her banisters green and gray, which seems to inaugurate this remembrance of what color they could have been. “Blue Banisters” is thus a song about banisters that, in all likelihood, never were, are not, and will never be blue.

This could be an example of someone in mid-life wistfully reflecting on lost love, and there’s certainly some of that. But it’s more essentially a song of mourning rather than melancholia, and on account of one crucial detail: the banisters in question are not banisters that once could have been blue, were actually some other color, and are now being painted green and gray. Despite not being banisters that were, are, or will be painted blue, they are, truly and essentially, blue banisters.

The universality of youth is an easy one, and it’s evident to all; the universality of adulthood must be insisted upon, and likely very few people know it’s there. For that reason, as exciting as youth can be, its meaningfulness is only surface-deep. It goes as easily as it comes. In adulthood, by contrast, provided that we’re not clinging melancholically to youthful exuberance, it lasts. It goes beyond a feeling to a true intimation of infinity, but for that reason it can only be perceived from the outside as a wild contravention of reality.

That is, for instance, what a good marriage consists of: a psychosis shared by two people. From the outside, it’s just two, codependent, decaying bodies, but on the inside, every special moment has congealed to form an eternity to which no one else has access. Of course the banisters are not blue anymore, if they ever were, but you don’t understand: they are blue banisters.

Something similar could also be said of true political commitment: given the terrifying degradation of American society, to insist upon a better world in the womb of the present one strikes most people as insane. But dialectical possibility requires an insistence upon something that is not, which you don’t really remember ever having lived, and which you can only barely make out the future contours of. Of course the banisters are not blue, but you don’t understand: they are blue banisters.

The philosopher Alain Badiou once made a similar point about the connection of love and politics, and he framed it as an extension of mathematical set theory, a move for which he was ridiculed by philosophers and mathematicians alike. In form, it was an argument that love and politics are not the only fora within which universality can be pursued in adulthood.  

Blue Banisters is, for the moment, far and away Lana Del Rey’s best album, and it’s relatedly also the most sonically distinct. You get full exhalations in your ear on “Wildflower Wildfire.” You get an unexpected, raw amp simulator cry at the end of “Living Legend.” The insanity that was only stated on previous albums is now instantiated, and there are no misguided attempts to make it pop-worthy.

You also get some recontextualization of previous claims. She already told us she has “guns in the summertime” on the absurd “Florida Kilos” from Ultraviolence. There it’s part and parcel of an empty cool. On Blue Banisters, she’s again got guns in the summertime, but now it’s unclear why, and she’s strangely apologetic for that fact:

I got guns in the summertime and horses too
Guns in the summertime and horses too
I never meant to be bad or unwell
I was just living on the edge
Right between heaven and hell
And I'm tired of it

But most importantly you get a sublimation of that manic flight into eternity that is characteristic of her early albums into a concrete and fragile universality, one that is uniquely enjoyed by adults provided they can adequately mourn their youth. This transformation is far from complete, of course: no one ever really leaves their youth. But for Del Rey, it feels definitive. 

On the opening track of Did you know that there’s a tunnel Under Ocean Blvd (2023), the implicit claim of “Blue Banisters” is made explicit: my love for you extends to eternity not because of adolescent confusion but because I will take my share of you with me no matter what happens; because you are not just you, and I am not just me, and what we’ve created together extends beyond both of us. What matters in human life participates in this concrete universality, and it’s an artistic accomplishment of some note to have delimited the path to it in one’s body of work.

Benjamin Y. Fong keeps a Substack on labor & logistics at ontheseams.substack.com.