Lana Del Rey gave a imaginative and prescient of her stay efficiency future final night time (June 20) in Boston — the eve of her thirty ninth birthday — and it was evanescently beautiful. Her voice sounded assured and wealthy, her music choice was impeccable and her visitor listing was impressed (Quavo joined her to debut what sounds just like the music of many summers within the type of “Powerful”).
It was solely a glimpse, as Fenway Park attendees had been ordered to shelter inside due to heavy rain, wind and lightning. Devoted followers in largely white summer time clothes and largely purple cowboy boots, some with flowers braided of their hair, leaned towards the partitions of America’s oldest energetic ballpark, ready. It was like one thing in a Lana Del Rey music — darkly comedian, a little bit chaotic, one thing for which we’ll be immediately nostalgic. A present that was supposed to begin a little bit after 8 as a substitute kicked off at 10:30, and was completed barely 70 minutes later, a casualty of Boston’s noise legal guidelines.
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When Del Rey introduced {that a} single night time right here would function her lone American solo present of 2024, all of it made sense the way in which so a lot of her songs do the very first time you hear them. Maybe no different venue clicks so elegantly into her oeuvre: That is an artist who remixes and romanticizes Americana and America itself, taking parts of our shared historical past which linger so pleasantly that we don’t all the time even clock them as a part of our tradition: Harleys, Mustangs, boots. She loves Waffle House and seashores and motel swimming pools, a few of which she’s talked about in her songs and a few of which she doesn’t want to say — you simply know. She’s just like the purveyor of some nationwide vintage retailer, with light-up indicators for A&W and Pepsi Cola — knickknacks you didn’t even know you really liked till you see how she places them on show.
Del Ray has been related largely with New York and California, from her harlot-starlet-Queen of Coney Island section and switch as “your little Venice bitch” on 2019’s Norman Fucking Rockwell! to her deep dive into SoCal secret information with the title observe of her newest album, Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Below Ocean Blvd.
However the scene at Fenway conjured up all types of Lana Del Rey-isms: purple bricks, blue skies, a inexperienced monster. There have to be one thing she may mine in its Cape Cod breezes and darkish taverns and Catholic guilt and Puritan repression. Massachusetts is the place America started, and America has been her fascination from the bounce.
After all, a spot so famously, comedically hostile to outsiders simply had to haze her relentlessly with the warmth and downpour. Misguided pop critics did the identical when Del Rey debuted a dozen years in the past with Born To Die. She explained herself as a gangster Nancy Sinatra and adopted a legal-age Lolita persona, usually taking over in her songs the position of troubled younger girls wrapped up with unhealthy older males. We knew she was a singer performing songs, and the experience with which she crafted them signaled she was very a lot calling her personal pictures. The bemused, ironic distance to her materials served it properly and made it all of the extra bouncy and enjoyable, like a fast-moving movie noir.
In Boston, she projected one thing extra highly effective: complete sincerity. Her voice sounded nearly as good because it ever has, particularly on impressed runs by “Journey,” “Born To Die” and “Chemtrails Over the Nation Membership.” She saved her patter brief and candy, promising she would possibly quickly clarify how she ended up at Fenway, although she by no means did. It’s OK. We get it.
The costumes had been easy — “I’ve obtained my purple gown on tonight,” she sang on “Summertime Disappointment,” and she or he actually did — together with glittering silver boots. Her dozen backup dancers wore one other shade of purple. Water options adorned the stage, together with a fountain during which the dancers moved cathartically after the warmth and storm throughout opener “With out You.” They carried out “Fairly When You Cry” mendacity down with a digital camera floating overhead, a wave impact added hypnotically to the massive screens. And there have been light, magic live performance moments you couldn’t plan, similar to delicate, melancholic rain throughout the brand new album’s title music.
In the course of the completely attractive “Journey,” as she sang the road,“That’s the way in which my father made his life an artwork,” she gestured to the aspect of the stage towards her father, Rob Grant. His profession as an promoting government was one of many causes some considered her skeptically when she debuted — was she only a advertising and marketing ploy? All these years later, she’s confirmed she was far more. What’s extra American than that?
Just like the Beatles, Prince or Bruce Springsteen (who has called her, accurately, “probably the greatest songwriters within the nation”), Del Rey has leveraged early pop success to grow to be extra experimental, attention-grabbing and unusual. However even filling stadiums, she manages to exude an unfailing normalcy. Like an actual American, she embraces the wild mixture of American experiences as no large deal, which shone by in her selection of friends: feather-haired nation singer Mason Ramsey, whom she first heard singing at a Walmart (they sang his music “Blue Over You”); courtly singer/guitarist Stephen Sanchez (they sang his “Till I Discovered You”) and, lastly, Quavo.
Del Rey has all the time been influenced by hip-hop, with all that sampling and reimagining of the previous. She and Quavo gave it a full rollout final night time after sharing a clip the day earlier than, and it had that very particular high quality of feeling fully acquainted and recent on the similar time. They appeared good and sounded good collectively on lyrics similar to “Powerful like the headscarf on a pair of outdated leather-based boots / Just like the blue-collar, red-dirt perspective / Like a .38 made out of brass / Powerful just like the stuff in my grandpa’s glass / Life’s gonna do what it does / Certain as the nice Lord’s up above / Reduce like a diamond shining within the tough, powerful.” Del Rey appeared Quavo within the eyes earlier than singing a line that absolutely resonated with Quavo, who was current when his nephew and Migos bandmate Takeoff was shot to demise in 2022: “And it’s arduous in the event you ever lose somebody that you simply love.”
Native curfew legal guidelines be damned, she wrapped the present with “Video Video games” (“I’m simply gonna do it,” she mentioned). Then, she walked into the group to smile for footage with followers and promise she could be again someday quickly for a full two-hour extravaganza.
Probably the greatest issues about Lana Del Rey is all that cinematic revisiting, and sussing out each overt and hidden references to Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood and John Denver and Harry Nilsson (she’s name-checked the latter two in songs on Thursday.) Lots of the artists she loves are outdated even to me, and I’m getting outdated. They had been contemporaries of the grandparents of her flower-haired greatest followers, and I’m wondering in the event that they know or care who they’re. However together with her craft, sense of historical past, air of normality and positive, even some canny advertising and marketing, Del Rey could be the proper individual to hold the torch and propel the previous into tomorrow.
She’s as American as ballparks, ready out rain delays and Migos floor-rattlers. And he or she could also be the very best hope to introduce the subsequent Individuals to their nation — its songs, its Waffle Homes, its Walmarts.
To see our working listing of the highest 100 best rock stars of all time, click here.
