Here’s a unusual factor about Lana Del Rey’s catalogue. A track this grand, this cinematic, this completely pitched between seduction and give up, sits quietly on a deep minimize from 2015 whereas lesser tracks get the streaming bumps and the TikTok resurrections. Swan Music is one in every of her most underrated items of labor. It might even have made one hell of a James Bond theme.
Give it some thought. The orchestral swell. The sense of mortal stakes wearing night put on. The vocal doesn’t a lot belt as lure. You’ll be able to hear it in your head over the traditional gunbarrel sequence: a girl in silhouette, strolling away from an explosion in gradual movement, not trying again. Del Rey has at all times trafficked in that particular Espionage Noir register, however right here she doesn’t even want the spy plot. The espionage is inside. She is the agent, the goal, and the protected home abruptly.
However Bond by no means acquired this one. As an alternative it landed because the nearer to Honeymoon, a report that seems like a heatstroke dream scored by Angelo Badalamenti. And it circles one thing rarer than a regular curtain name: the luxurious of opting out. The peculiar glamour of selecting to be forgotten earlier than the world will get round to breaking you.
Put your white tennis sneakers on and observe me. Why work so arduous when you may simply be free? This isn’t a girl watching a lover drive away. It is a girl extending her hand and asking if you want to vanish together with her. The very first thing you’re feeling is reduction.
“It’s the antithesis of hopefulness,” Del Rey informed Gucci’s Alessandro Michele when requested which of her personal songs made her cry. She didn’t hesitate. Swan Music. “It’s about looking for magnificence in giving up.”
That phrase lands otherwise relying on the place you’re standing. From exterior the celebrity machine, it’d learn as defeatism wearing classic silk. From the place Del Rey was perched in 2015, recent off the corrosive scrutiny that adopted Born To Die and the noir sprawl of Ultraviolence, it sounds just like the sanest thought she ever had.
Born To Die traced the vertigo of ascent: a lady gripping the lapels of a person who may save her, or may simply be one other quick automotive headed for a wall. By Honeymoon, the calculus shifts. “You bought your cash now, you bought your legacy,” she sings within the opening verse, and the road drops with the flatness of somebody studying a stability sheet they now not care about. The world can change in a day in the event you go away. It stops sounding like a risk. It begins sounding like freedom.
The swan, in sure non secular corners, represents twin flames: two people dissolving into one to create a brand new life. Del Rey borrows the iconography however strips it of its mysticism. Does she really consider in that stuff? Arduous to say. The track doesn’t need transcendence anyway. It needs quiet. The string association, these ascending, nearly funereal chords, suggests a procession. However the place are they going? Nowhere that exhibits up on a map.
Or perhaps that’s overstating it. Perhaps they’re simply going to the coast. Someplace chilly. The water the place the ice meets.
Dive in, dive deep and dive blue, my candy. Dashing up from the water the place the ice meets. This isn’t a vacation. It’s nearer to a dissolution. Her voice carries it like a silk veil dragged by shallow water: hypnotic, otherworldly, pulling you beneath earlier than you realise you’re moist. The ambiance is thick and drowsy, the type of melancholic haze the place time stops transferring in straight strains. You’ll be able to nearly see the salt on somebody’s pores and skin, the fog rolling off a northern sea, the white tennis sneakers sinking into moist sand. A siren doesn’t scream. A siren lures. That’s what she does right here.
The trick is that the give up by no means fairly seems like loss of life. It seems like the primary deep breath after a decade of holding it. The refrain drops with the finality of one thing already determined: “And I’ll by no means sing once more / And also you received’t work one other day.” It doesn’t land like a lament. It lands like phrases being agreed. There’s a romantic nihilism to it, a way that the one victory left is strolling away earlier than the world will get its likelihood to bury you.
In an interview that now reads like a confession she didn’t know she was making, Del Rey informed W Journal: “On the finish of each album, I say goodbye and thanks, very Previous Hollywood model, and but I can’t assist however simply proceed to write down.”
The performer who retains threatening to stroll away however retains discovering herself on the microphone. A peculiarly Lanaesque stress: the star who constructed her whole iconography round tragic glamour, round Plath with a cigarette holder and a greater publicist, discovering that the machine nonetheless needs her even when she has stopped wanting it.
Swan Music might be learn as a costume rehearsal for a retirement that by no means fairly arrives. A what-if recorded in actual time. The position on Honeymoon was deliberate sufficient that followers took it as an announcement. Was she executed? Had she sung her final correct authentic?
She was not. She has not. However the truth that she thought-about it, that she discovered the concept stunning sufficient to write down a five-minute string-drenched fantasy about it, tells you extra concerning the pressures of her specific fame than any tell-all ever might.
Most goodbye songs miss one thing fairly apparent. They assume the ache is within the leaving. Swan Music understands that generally essentially the most radical act isn’t combating. It’s stopping. There’s a type of energy in saying “I’ll by no means sing once more” whereas nonetheless, paradoxically, singing. A swan track about refusing to carry out, carried out exquisitely. A farewell that retains recurring.
“Put your white tennis sneakers on and observe me,” she repeats on the finish, 3 times, like a spell carrying itself out. Why you’re employed so arduous when you may simply be free? The query hangs there. No reply wanted.
It will likely be our swan track. Be our swan track. The repetition on the monitor’s shut, the phrase folding again into itself like a wave returning to sea, suggests not finality however suspension. A held notice. A breath that by no means fairly exhales.
She by no means did cease writing. However for 5 minutes and twenty-three seconds, she nearly convinces you, perhaps even herself, that she might. And that fantasy, so fully realised, could be value greater than the fact ever might be.
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