Revisiting Blue Banisters One Year Later

If you are a bona fide Lana stan, you’ll remember just where you were when she dropped her eighth studio album Blue Banisters on October 22, 2021. It was a busy year for Del Rey, and equally as exciting for her fans, as she released two albums within a span of seven short months. It was overwhelming to try and intake the beauty encapsulated within Chemtrails Over the Country Club upon its release day and then process her announcement the following day that she would be releasing her next studio album. It all sounded almost too good to be true. One year later, Blue Banisters continues to prevail as Del Rey’s most introspective work to date, her magnum opus where her signature delicate vocals flutter over the course of fifteen tracks.

A combination of previously unreleased and newly penned tracks make up Blue Banisters, but it all seems naturally cohesive like pieces of a puzzle that were always meant to be together. Produced by Del Rey, herself, Zachary Dawes, Loren Humphrey, Mike Dean, Barrie-James O'Neill, Rick Nowels, among others, the album is an in-depth exploration of the singer’s life and past loves. It’s Lana Del Rey at her most authentic. She is not trying to be anyone else other than herself and that is what arguably makes this album so effective. Much like in Chemtrails, Del Rey muses about her past, but in a way that is less melancholy and more rosier. Even the album cover suggests that Blue Banisters is as down to earth as Lana is when she’s barefoot in her pale yellow sundress alongside Tex and Mex.

The decision to put “Text Book” as the opening track is quite literally a textbook Lana Del Rey move. It opens with an off-beat bass line and frank lyrics that make you stop whatever it is you’re doing and listen to what is unfolding. Then the chorus kicks in and smooths over any doubts the listener may have initially held about the direction of the song. Both the chorus and bridge emit the same tones as “Ride” and the listener gets the feeling that the singer is free from what previously held her down. This same effect of her syrupy smooth vocals also applies to the opening tracks of Chemtrails and Norman Fucking Rockwell! — an unmistakable ethereal ambiance that sets the mood for the rest of the album. In the same vein, the first lyrics uttered are heartstopping and unambiguous. “I guess you could call it textbook / I was looking for the father I wanted back,” Del Rey meekly sings to intro in the flood of emotions cocooned within the rest of the first track. The songstress also makes mention of the Black Lives Matter movement — a lyric that is definitive of the year that the world experienced. It’s a poetic inclusion by Del Rey that will forever harken back to those times several years from now, immortalizing the impact of the movement on our evolving society. Another image evoked in the song is the rocky relationship Del Rey shares with her father. She paints him as a complex person, admitting to their turbulent past. With the line “let’s rewrite history,” she gives a subtle nod to her innermost motives of using men to ultimately fill that void left within her heart. It’s a deeply retrospective yearning to alter the past and mend her paternal relationship — a glimpse of the waves of nostalgia to come.

The title track follows up with melancholia for a lost time, as Del Rey recounts a relationship with a man who made promises to her before eventually leaving. This track is endearing for so many reasons, perhaps the foremost being how she name-drops her closest friends. With lyrics that read as vivid storytelling, it’s this strong bond between female friends that guide Del Rey through her heartaches. Because of this, there’s a visceral conjured image of female empowerment — a sisterhood of sorts that serves as the backbone of much of her life. Moreover, following the aforementioned throughline of her relationship with the men in her life, she references that same void again. “There’s a hole that’s in my heart / All my women try to heal / They’re doin’ a good job / Convincin’ me that it’s not real,” she reflects over ethereal piano instrumentals. As the song evolves, the man in her life that promised to paint her banisters blue becomes replaced by her sisters who plot to adorn her banisters with shades of green and gray. To close out the song, Del Rey sings, “Every time it turns to May / All my sisters fly to me / To paint, paint.” It’s a sweet ending, leaving the listener with a sense of closure and reassurance in knowing that the good outweighs the bad and that healing comfort can always be found in those closest to you.

On Blue Banisters’ third track, “Arcadia,” Del Rey explores her love affair with the city of Los Angeles — her city. It’s no secret that her affinity for the city of angels runs deep within her veins. Just listen to Ultraviolence’s “West Coast,” Born To Die’s “American,” NFR!’s “California,” or her single “Looking For America.” All of these songs glisten with blatant poetic lyricism for the city that shaped Del Rey into the person she is today, but perhaps the greatest love letter of them all can be found in Violet Bent Backwards Over The Grass’s “LA Who Am I To Love You?” She muses in her poem, “It's just that I belong to no one, which means there's only one place for me,” again, making reference to her less-than-ideal relationships with her parents. “I'm an orphan / A little seashell that rests upon your native shores,” she continues in her confession. From the poem alone, it’s crystal clear that Del Rey’s soul is intertwined with the winding curves and sunburnt terrain of Los Angeles — the exact image she paints with “Arcadia.”

In the song, Del Rey maps out the gleaming city from the Sierra Madre to San Gabriel. It's a sentimental Americana-esque ode to the city she calls her eternal home. With the first, defining opening line of the song being, “My body is a map of LA,” Del Rey compares herself to the city. Her body is personified as Los Angeles, itself, the roads signifying her arteries, and Arcadia her heart. The songstress perceives the city as an idyllic escapism, where the beauty of the landscape can heal broken hearts caused by dishonest lovers — a comforting safe haven of sorts. Through her lens, Arcadia exudes simplicity, a place where she can recharge and connect with herself once again. It’s yet another motif that strings itself throughout Blue Banisters and Chemtrails — this idea of romanticizing the pure and simple. Although it’s not quite a song of her returning to her homeland, as she’s stated before that she’s not native to California, it’s nevertheless a heartfelt song that highlights just how profoundly the city has woven itself into her very being.

The album’s fourth track is an instrumental interlude that interpolates The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, breaking up the remaining tracks. “Black Bathing Suit” explores themes of doom and a continuation of her relationship with her family, laced in transparency. There’s a sense of realism, an evoked portrait of quaint mundaneness, in the track’s opening lyrics that reflect time spent in quarantine and yearning. Del Rey longs for another half, “someone to eat ice cream with and watch television or walk home from the mall with.” Much like grenadine, she suggests that her life has been sweet despite the state of doom the world was in during the pandemic. Again, she references her “karmic lineage” and how she’s “not friends with her mother,” yet still loves her dad. Regardless of the tumultuous relationships, she shares with her family, she asks her potential lover if he can accept her as she is, black bathing suit and all. In the last few powerful lines, Del Rey calls out the negative critics, disproving their significance in her life. It’s arguably her most vulnerable song on the entire album, and it’s evidence that this is Lana’s world — we’re all just living in it.

Written in 2013 by her then-boyfriend Barrie James O’Neill, Del Rey breathes new life into “If You Lie Down With Me.” Originally, the track was supposed to appear on 2014’s Ultraviolence but found its home on Blue Bannisters. On the whole, it’s an ode to a love that’s turned bittersweet. In the same terrain of reviving older songs, Del Rey interjects lyrics that are featured within songs of her early, unofficially released work. For instance, she alludes to her 2010 track “Smarty,” when she sings the lines “dance me all around the room” — a track from her debut album Lana Del Ray. Similarly, in “If You Lie Down With Me,” she calls back to her unreleased track “Queen of Disaster,” when she sings “spin me like a ballerina.” Perhaps the suggested imagery of these lyrics alone could have matched Ultraviolence’s throughline, but with the track’s dreamy ambiance, it fits more accordingly with Blue Bannisters’ overall sound.

Both “Beautiful” and “Violets For Roses” confront a lover that’s holding Del Rey back from her artistic endeavors. On the former track, she muses, “What if someone had asked Picasso not to be sad? / Never known who he was or the man he'd become / There would be no blue period.” In this stark comparison, Del Rey draws on the similarities between her and the famous painter — both artists harshly criticized for their work. Here, she implies her ability to turn sadness, or the motif of blue, into beauty — to romanticize the melancholy and transform it into a work of art. Expanding on the theme of being held back, “Violets For Roses” sees Del Rey expressing her contempt for suppression: “God knows the only mistake that a man can make / Is tryna make a woman change and trade her violets for roses.” Out of the sorrow that she endured in the relationship, the song’s narrator now sees life through a different lens. A happier, more optimistic, and artistically flourishing world. She notices a change in the air, a palpable shift now that the girls are in their summer dresses, not wearing masks, and bookstore doors opening. The scent of lily of the valley fragrants the air and a rebirth of sorts is just within reach on the horizon.

The album’s most streamed song on Spotify, “Dealer,” possesses a jazzy, lounge-reminiscent atmosphere. With Miles Kane lending his trademark velvety vocals and Del Rey giving a powerful, scream-worthy vocal performance, the two create a tantalizing and haunting sound. While Kane’s narrator details his spiraling descent into becoming detached from reality and rejecting any sort of outside help from his father or doctor, Del Rey’s narrator describes a tragic one-sided relationship. In the end, both narrators agree upon the fact that they no longer wish to associate with these people in their lives. The decision to include this track in Blue Bannisters almost changes the sonic trajectory of the album — there’s a certain mysticality and otherworldliness laced within the song — but it wasn’t a track originally intended for it in the first place. Likewise, the album’s next track, “Thunder,” was composed in 2017. Both tracks were meant to be on a Last Shadow Puppets album but the album was scrapped so the pair ultimately ended up on Blue Bannisters. These songs, alongside NFR’s “California,” are perhaps the only glimpse we get into the aforementioned scrapped work.

Two of the many recurring motifs throughout Blue Bannisters continue to be nature imagery and transparent kinship concepts — “Wildfire Wildflower” eloquently combines both. Del Rey’s narrator refers to herself as having a passively delicate disposition, one that is reminiscent of “a bed of wildflowers.” She alludes to her stardust addiction and how it transformed the habits and conditions under which she lived through. She brings in the elements in the chorus, referencing the raging California fires once again. There is a back-and-forth sense of hope resonating within the song that drives her to want to be as delicate as flowers, yet she knows that love has the potential to make her as destructive as fires. Running parallel to this sweetness is the bitter truth. Del Rey sings: “Here's the deal / My father never stepped in when his wife would rage at me / So I ended up awkward but sweet.” It’s worth noting, here, how she refers to her mother as being only her father’s wife. It reveals their distant relationship with one another. However, as the song comes to an emotional crescendo, Del Rey affirms that she won’t let herself submit to any metaphorical wildfires such as her mother, instead choosing to ignite the sky with her smiles in lieu of scorching flames.

Written in 2013, both “Nectar of the Gods” and “Cherry Blossom” were heavily circulating around the internet as unreleased songs and both were almost Ultraviolence tracks. As Del Rey fans would know, the former went through multiple titles, including “Wild On You” and “Color Blue.” A telling sign of its 2013 composition lay in the opening line when the narrator references a “cruel world” — a nod to 2013 Ultraviolence’s opening track. The acoustic “Nectar of the Gods” beautifully captures a duality between the narrator’s burning desires and losing them altogether. This back-and-forth is perfectly summed up in the song’s closing line “Once I found my way, but now I am lost.” On “Cherry Blossom,” Del Rey’s lullaby gleams with flowery imagery, innocence, and freedom. The singer associates pink cherry blossoms with bravery and willpower, while the lyrics conjure an image of serene reassurance found within the sunshine, the natural elements, and the narrator, herself. The track steers the album away from its darker and heavier themes, almost acting as a counterbalance enshrouded in purity.

Finally, “Living Legend” and “Sweet Carolina” wrap up Del Rey’s vocally vulnerable journey on Blue Banisters. Like the previously unreleased tracks featured on the album, “Living Legend” was written and recorded in 2013. She dedicates the track to “sweet baby” Jane Powers, her longtime friend and mentor. Perhaps the most stirring moment in the track is the instrumental break, in which Del Rey distorts her voice to imitate the sound of a saxophone. Not only does this show off her flexibility as a singer, but it provides the song with a fuller sound that captures the emotional weight of its tender message. And just as “Living Legend” was a love letter to a close friend, Del Rey closes out the album with “Sweet Carolina,” an ode to her sister and niece. The track was co-written by her sister Chuck Grant and their father. It’s an endearing finale that makes the album come full circle in its theme of kinship and highlights how Del Rey seems to trade in complicated romantic relationships for the love and support from her closest friends and family.

On Blue Banisters, it feels like Del Rey has finally come into her own. Long gone is the Born To Die era, where starlet motifs, old Hollywood romanticization, and Lolita-esque themes reigned in the lyrics. Now, Del Rey has fully embraced her genuine self with sincere lyrics that read as poetry, atmospheric music that lull the listener into a dream-like state, and vocals that are Del Rey at her most authentic. As a whole, the album is an Americana-tinged, down-to-earth, unfiltered look into Del Rey’s personal life. This is her attestation that, regardless of the negative critics and cataclysmic lovers, one can always find solace in those they consider family.