I’m resentful at: Elizabeth Woolridge Grant, aka Lana Del Rey

The Cause: She’s written a perfect album about love and lust and codependency and recovery, one that creates an illusion of intimacy with the listener; even though I know it’s an act, it feels like it’s about me. And I know it’s not, and that I’ll never meet her, which is probably for the best, given that I’m happily married with two fantastic kids, but that in turn creates a wistful feeling of melancholy about the impossibilities of life. She sold this album under an imperfect piece of cover art—one that feeds the “I’m reaching out to you” vibe but also has a somewhat garish color scheme, and references Roy Lichtenstein rather than the titular Norman Rockwell—so it took me a while to realize that it was, in fact, the best album released in the last year or so. She’s almost eight years younger than me, but she’s already released a universally acclaimed and widely available masterpiece.

Affects My: Self-esteem (fear), Security, Sexual relations

My part: I need to understand and accept the unequal nature of the artist/audience relationship; despite my ego’s protests to the contrary, the connection I have with Lana Del Rey is no more substantial than the one I have with, say, Billie Holliday. Or to reference yet another excellent female songwriter, I am so vain that I do, in fact, think these songs are about me. But rather than living in self-pity that they’re not, I need to be grateful that they exist, and accept that getting this album is literally the best possible outcome for all concerned, especially myself.

I’ve spent enough time in recovery from alcoholism and associated diseases that I’ve absorbed a bit of the verbiage that inevitably crops up in any group of like-minded people “organized” (a very very very loose concept in recovery) around a common purpose. So I recognize (in the words of Robert Stone) “the diction of addiction,” and can’t help spotting it in a host of art, and artist interviews. Del Rey’s spoken about quitting drinking and drugs at a relatively young age, and the lyrics here suggest she’s done that by going to some of the same types of rooms I have, and meeting the same types of people. (For one, “church-basement romances” seems like a clear nod at where many recovery meetings meet, and what many members end up trying once they’re there, for better or worse. [Either they’ve found true love—which I’ve seen—or they’re tripped up because the neurological pathways alcohol works on are also serviced by physical affection, such that desperate dry drunks will end up in flawed relationships to unconsciously feed those needs, rather than doing the hard work of recovery.] And “serving up God in a burnt coffee pot for the triad” feels like another recovery reference; making coffee for a meeting—inevitably out of some battered communally-owned pot, with group-purchased tube-containers of economy-size powdered creamer and sugar next to it—is a standard job for a newcomer who needs a weekly service commitment; “the triad” reads as a clear reference to the UNITY-SERVICE-RECOVERY triangle on a standard recovery coin. Although who knows? Maybe she’s a waitress for Chinese gangsters.)

At any rate, the same qualities which have stood me well in recovery (fearlessness, trust, openness, a willingness to take a deep look at the dark corners of one’s own psyche) have evidently served Lana as well; “Is it safe to just be who we are?” she asks in a touchingly vulnerable moment on “Love Song.” It’s a common conundrum for those of us who’ve quit drugs and alcohol: it’s relatively easy to find someone to get undressed with; it’s a lot harder to find someone to let down our guard with emotionally, who will in turn respond in a healthy manner. (“All the pills that you take—violet, blue, green, red—to keep me at arm’s length won’t work,” she sings on “Cinnamon Girl,” and on “California” she talks about buying an unhealthy lover “your favorite liquor from the top shelf.” So like many of us, she’s found that there’s no shortage of unhealthy alternatives.)

One hopes for Lana/Elizabeth’s sake that she’ll get to a better place, romantically. “Spilling my guts with the Bowery bums is the only love I’ve ever known,” she says on “Hope Is a Dangerous Thing…” and there were years when I would have been able to relate; the warm feeling of real recovery work (with a little artistic output on the side) for years felt more authentic and real than any romance; there’s something about cracked-linoleum church basements or dingy inner-city communal rehab rooms or jail decks reeking of body odor that can be downright magical. These songs are so consistently excellent that they get addictive; one wonders if a sober-but-somewhat-somber artist could produce them forever. But I don’t want her to keep doing the same thing over and over just to feed my unquenchable need. “Hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have,” she sings on the last track, and closes with a suggestion that, for as good as all of this is, things can get better still. Hope—that real and genuine optimism, the kind that runs the risk of leading us into disappointment, or just the realization that there’s more hard work to do—is dangerous indeed. “But I’ve got it,” she says, as quietly and insistently as a prayer. I’ve got it, indeed.

Brand	N/A
Rating	4.8 (2927 ratings)
Price	$39.56
Category	Alternative Rock

Norman Fucking Rockwell! Explicit Lyrics

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