Ethereal Sad Dream Pop and Wine (Every Lana Del Ray Album Ranked and its Corresponding Wine Pairing)
A vertical wine tasting means you taste the same wine by the same producer from different years. The main goal being to understand the evolution of the same wine over time. So I thought, why not apply that same logic to music and pair some wine with it while I am at it? A great artist to do this with is Lana Del Rey. I’m a big fan and my girl has been cranking out albums for over a decade now pretty consistently. You always know what kind of vibe you are getting into with her and generally what to expect, and that is the point. So I did a vertical listening of all 8 albums from most recent 2023-2012 and ranked them, let my thoughts take me where they wanted and what wine I was feeling in that scenario. I counted the EP Paradise as part of Born to Die since they were eventually combined into a full album that same year and left off the 2010 release Lana Del RAY because her transformation from Lizzy Grant to the full blown Lana persona wasn’t quite complete yet. There was also a recent EP from 2022 called Buddy’s Rendezvous but I didn’t include it because while it is billed as a Lana Del Rey EP, 5 out of 6 songs are just Father John Misty. It is a fucking great EP, but it just isn’t really a full blown LDR EP in my opinion.
No. 1
2012 – Born to Die /Paradise EP (23 songs) This was the start of it all so of course it is at the top. Each songs takes you to a different place with the same through line, like an RV trip throughout the U.S. each song is a state on that road trip. You leave with a group of some of your best friends, taking turns driving, and playing card games at the dingey 70s yellow dinner booth style table. You stop at actual road side dinners and laugh over French fries and coffee, skinny dip at hidden rock quarries, make the most absurd inside jokes, and frequently stop at beaches, look-out points, and take blurry polaroid pictures. Depending on where you are, sometimes it’s hot and sometimes it’s cold and on a perfectly clear and cool night in a random camp site by the fire, you open a bottle of Rosé from Bandol and all its fresh herbs, fresh strawberries, and grapefruit notes dance around the fire embers traveling to the stars.
Best Tracks from Born to Die: Dark Paradise/Born to Die/Million Dollar Man
Best Tracks from Paradise: Ride/American/Gods & Monsters
No. 2
2015 – Honeymoon (14 Songs) In case you have not been able to tell my now, when I listen to entire albums I think in terms of how it could be paired against a visual narrative or how it reminds me of certain movies. Maybe I should have been a music video director. Honeymoon, to me, is like a culmination of all those movies of people moving to L.A. to be a star and then slowly self-destructing (so no not La La Land). I’m thinking dark shit like Mulholland Drive (2001), Neon Demon (2016) and Starry Eyes (2014). It’s no secret that a lot of Lana’s influence is from old Hollywood and this album really conveys that; winding up and down the Hollywood hills looking for the party you don’t know how you were invited to. Once there the lights are dim, but the room is still illuminated by the soft light bouncing off all the sparkle and sequence on the dresses of the glamorous and the needy. Champagne everywhere… in buckets, half drank glasses on counter tops, full bottles open by the pool, in the hands of the wealthy, the desperate, the jaded, the apathetic, the beautiful, the haunted.
Best Tracks: Salvatore/Blackest Day
No. 3
2021 - Blue Bannisters (15 tracks) Really solid tracks throughout including Arcadia, Blue Bannisters, and Violets for Roses. The best of the recent releases. This whole album leaves the California beaches and takes us to the Mendocino National Forest and the Redwoods. The paths speckled with white, purple, and yellow wildflowers. Towering trees filling the air with smells of wet bark and history. Pensively looking out into a foggy forest canopy in the morning from your cabin porch, inside its fucking on a fleece blanket by the fire, ignoring the bacon fat congealing in the cast iron skillet from that morning’s breakfast, deciding what decrepit board game from the 1980s to play after a creamy mushroom forward pasta dinner and bottle of Anderson Valley Pinot Noir crackling with notes of forest floor, cherry, and clove.
Best Tracks: Arcadia/Violets for Roses
No. 4
2014 – Ultraviolence (14 songs) This album has one foot in California and one foot in New York and, and oozes blues guitar in unexpected places, or maybe I just notice the distinct nuances between songs more on this album because this was after the mega success of Born to Die. I won’t pretend like I know the music business but the sophomore slump is real because I have ears but Ultraviolence was ALMOST in that category, at least to me. However, some of my favorite LDR songs are on this one. Old Money, West Coast, Sad Girl, The Other Women, Shades of Cool, but also some of my least favorites are also on here, which is why this album has split personality problems, or rather split life problems and I find myself in a fever dreams of looking at a wrinkled hand in nobody else’s hand cutting back in forth between a young hand in another young hand, dancing at a music festival in the 1960s and cutting back and forth with dancing at a club in the 1940s to Glenn Miller. The dance ends with a dip and you back to your table laughing and take a large refreshing drink of your Mosel Riesling, the aromas of jasmine, lemon, green apple readying you for one more dance.
Best Track: West Coast/Old Money
No. 5
2019 – Norman Fucking Rockwell (14 tracks) There is an episode of Pete & Pete, Season One, Episode 4 called “What We Did on our Summer Vacation” of which I could probably write a dissertation on its themes of letting go. In the beginning of the episode, Pete and Pete look at a spread of photographs spread across Dad’s car and says “this is all that is left of our summer vacation 653 pictures developed at the Qwik Pik photo booth where my friend worked all summer.” The whole episode really captures those long hot waning days of summer, miserable from heat but still trying to hold on to freedom and possibility expected of the short season. It's whimsical, sad, hopeful, and I think of this episode when I listen to Norman Fucking Rockwell, and then I think if I had a house with a porch, I’d be in a hammock, swingling gently in the cool twilight breezes, languidly dipping corn chips in guacamole, and drinking some ice cold Vermentino di Sardegna. Letting the cool granitic and minerals notes cool my throat while the soft white flower, lime and green apple compliment the salt and acidity in the guac.
Best Track: The Greatest/Mariner’s Apartment Complex
No. 6
2017 – Lust for Life (16 tracks) – Most Lana albums are dripping pure summer but this one definitely feels like the transition from fall to winter. It has a darker vibe and a host of guest artists like the Weekend, A$AP Rocky, and Stevie Nicks. The drumming, the bass, and the beats on this album are like being lost in a foreign big city with the rain pouring down on your black leather jacket, soaking your hair. You are not sure where to go after your one night stand with the guy you just met at a museum or was it an art gallery? You hide under a doorway for temporary shelter and think about how crazy this trip has been when the door opens and inside is the familiar smell of baking pizza. You go inside, order two slices and a large glass of Barbera D’ Asti, its herbal and juicy with strawberry and cherry notes that duet with the marinara sauce on your slice.
Best Track: In My Feelings/Change
No. 7
2021 - Chemtrails over the Country Club (11 tracks) This album gives me True Romance/Wild at Heart vibes. It really doesn’t find its vibe until halfway through the album with the best tracks starting at Wild at Heart… it’s throwing a small suitcase into the back of a long ass vintage convertible and driving dreamily down never ending desert roads from Arizona to Texas with no real destination in mind, searching for gas stations and cheap motels for respite from the heat. Occasionally stopping at strange roadside attractions, playing pool at dive bars and climbing on roofs at night to stargaze and enjoy big cheeseburgers with a Barrosa Valley Shiraz straight out the bottle. It’s juicy black berry, black plum, cocoa, and black pepper notes washing down those comforting flavors of grilled meat and gooey American cheese.
Best Track: Dark But Just a Game/Yosemite
No. 8
2023 - Did you know that there is a tunnel under Ocean Blvd? (16 tracks) More meandering and poetic, the album is a classic dreamscape scenario of walking down a hallway and opening doors not knowing what version of imagery your brain is ready to throw at you. Sometimes you slam the door “no thank you” and others you poke your head in with Alice like curiosity. The vibe has a more small-town desperation feel like the Last Picture Show, but I’m rarely a fan of weird talking interludes that don’t really contribute to an album. Instead of taking you down a hallway of the uncertainties, it takes you down a mostly empty street in small town America. Most of the business are shuttered and you take your time peaking in each window to see what merchandise was sold, or what is left. You check each door, one is open to a shuttered restaurant; the only fancy one in town that all the parents went to on nights the high schoolers had football games or snuck off to drink cheap beer by a bon fire. You walk behind the bar, see a few bottles, and pull a Reserve Rioja, opening it gently and pour a glass as aromas of tobacco, dried cherry, dust, fig, and cocoa waft into the air. You sit quietly a table by the window and stare out the emptiness, and imagine what the street used to be like.
Best Tracks: Sweet/Fingertips
