Lana Del Rey’s Nostalgic Album, Chemtrails Over The Country Club, Not Quite The Hit We Expected.

On March 19th, I had the pleasure of listening to Lana Del Rey’s seventh studio album titled, Chemtrails Over The Country Club. Del Rey -real name Elizabeth Woolridge Grant- is an American singer-songwriter best known for her haunting, bellowing vocals and cinematic quality in her music. Chemtrails Over The Country Club is a full-length studio album consisting of eleven songs;  most being written and performed by Del Rey herself (with the writing help of Jack Antoff, Nikki Lane, and Rick Nowels); with the last song being a Joni Mitchells cover. Analysis of the album shows a mature side of Lana, with three well-composed and raw songs. However, the rest of the album proved to be lacklustre both lyrically and structurally.

Del Rey, Lana. Chemtrails Over The Country Club Album Cover. Instagram, 10 January 2021,https://www.instagram.com/p/CJ4W2J-h5pO/. Accessed 20 March 2021.

The tracklist for the album is as follows:

 White Dress, Chemtrails Over The Country Club, Tulsa Jesus Freak, Let Me Love You Like A Woman, Wild At Heart, Dark But Just A Game, Not All Who Wander Are Lost, Yosemite, Breaking Up Slowly, Dance Till We Die, and For Free.

The album seems to pick up where her last album Norman F*cking Rockwell! left off but with stripped-down instrumentation. It sounds less like an expensive studio session and more like a dreamy live performance. The simplicity of this record gives it the ability to transition between piano ballads to folk and country Americana vibes without having it be too jarring. Lyrically it is a slight change of pace as well. Instead of talking about wanting to be free and live in the moment, it feels nostalgic and retrospective. Del Rey also gets quite meta about the concept of fame. This makes sense as it is Lana Del Rey’s seventh album and she has been in the music scene for about fifteen years now. 

There are 3 tracks that I think encompass the whole theme of the album and are my personal favourites. The first track off the album, White Dress is essentially Lana reflecting on her past when she used to be a waitress in Long Island and was learning guitar, aspiring to be a singer. The song has a sombre piano leading the song melodically, with the accompaniment of drums that slowly creep in as the song builds to the climax. The lyrics do a great job of telling the story without being too mundane. Certain phrases like, “Down at the Men in Music Business Conference” can be analogous to the music industry as a whole and Lana trying to perform for the “Men in Music Business”. The strained whisper vocal style adds to this by showing she was shy and just trying to get her voice out there amongst all these big companies. 

Next, we have Chemtrails Over The Country Club. This track has this lulling, waltz quality to it and has a more typical Lana Del Rey vocal style to it. Once again, lead by piano chords, the song gives this open, swelling feeling. I believe this song is referring to simpler, fun times in Lana’s youth. The country club is a metaphor for that bliss and the chemtrails she refers to could be something ominous or foreboding hanging over those carefree days. The chemtrails could be analogous to age. As we get older, we begin to see the harsher reality of the world. It’s got this quality of Lana being older and wiser now looking back on those blissfully ignorant days. 

Lastly, there’s Dark But Just A Game with its chilling, angelic vocal leads and lowkey groovy beat in the verses, she reinvented this style of music perfectly to complement her as an artist. It is an interesting turning point stylistically in the album. The change from verse to chorus matches the lyrics as she explains what the problem with fame is during the verses. Then, in the chorus, she uses those observations and applies them to herself. The track shows Lana, now being famous herself, sees what the great artists have gone through and the people they have changed into. Many of her fans know that she looked up to Whitney Houston and Amy Whinehouse, both of which had tragic deaths. This scares Lana as she doesn’t want to change for the worst. The chorus of the song cements this with lyrics like “the best ones lost their minds….don’t even want what’s mine, much less the fame”. Showing that she would rather not have any fame than end up being somebody else who met a tragic end. 

As I said earlier, the rest of the album was kind of a blur. While there were terrific moments like in Dance Till We Die when Lana was howling over the saxophone riffs at the end, the majority felt half-baked as there was no real direction to most of the songs. When Lana made the stylistic choice to make an entirely stripped-down album, I think that there was more focus and attention put into the three main songs and the rest were just fillers in order to make it a full album. If she took out a couple of filler songs like, Yosemite and Not All Who Wander Are Lost, I think the album could have been more cohesive and powerful.

Lana Del Rey’s seventh studio album, Chemtrails Over The Country Club is an intimate look into her take on her fifteen years of music. The album feels like a cinematic auto-biography experience. As she has been doing music for over a decade and cemented her position as an artist, we can see her branching out and experimenting in this album. Sometimes it works and other times it’s a bit of a miss however one thing that is evident throughout this album is that Lana is being herself and trying new things. Overall I found the album to not be her best work but I like the themes it brings forward and the stylistic changes in the three aforementioned songs. It was decent but not quite what I expected.