The Pop Corporation

Lana Del Rey has a new LP coming out called ‘Lasso’, which means she’s going country, and honestly, it’s a move that feels right doesn’t it? Long an admirer of the aesthetic of faded glamour, big hair and broken women, Hollywood and rhinestones, Lana’s version of country music is likely to be that good kinda country.

She told her audience that, along with songwriting cohort Jack Antonoff; “we’re going country. It’s happening. That’s why Jack has followed me to Muscle Shoals, Nashville, Mississippi, over the last four years.” Of course, she’s covered country songs before, notably John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, and has performed Tammy Wynette’s enduring masterpiece ‘Stand By Your Man’, and appeared on stage with Kacey Musgraves and Lukas Nelson (son of Willie).

With all this, we’re going to make a lot of assumptions, because second guessing what an artist might do is fun, even when you’re off the mark.

Fact is, we just automatically assume that Lana Del Rey is already a massive fan of the gothic country of say, Bobby Gentry and, when we heard Sammi Smith’s ‘Saunders Ferry Lane’, our minds wandered to what a Lana Del Rey reading of the song might sound like.

Lana Del Rey has talked about country music numerous times, and in an interview with Mojo that she’d recorded a full album of country covers. Now, we hope ‘Lasso’ isn’t that, because we’d like to hear some brand new songs that sound sweet, but are actually about the death of a lover or being on the run from the law.

We supposed that she won’t be doing a great deal of thigh slapping yeehaw! numbers, because that swooning and yearning stuff suits her so much more. Big hair, lots of eye make-up and coquette frills and pastels while singing about someone thinking about throwing themselves off a nearby water tower – that’s an album we’ve been aching for someone to make for years.

In ‘The Prettiest Girl In Country Music’, along with Nikki Lane, she sang:

How does it feel to be the prettiest girl in country music?
You got it all, you’re the belle of the ball
It would be a shame to lose it

A tale of the casting couch of the country world – now that’s the kind of morbid realism that modern country music has been sorely missing in the mainstream. With Lane, she wrote ‘Breaking Up Slowly’, a bruising tale of Tammi’s relationship with George Jones.

George got arrested out on the lawn
We might be breaking up after this song
Will he still love me long after I’m gone?
Or did he see it coming all along?

‘Cause breaking up slowly is a hard thing to do
I love you only, and it’s making me blue
So don’t send me flowers like you always do
It’s hard to be lonely…

It’s pretty obvious that Lana’s not going to be aiming for the stadium sized mainstream country radio with her new LP, and even if she gets a smash on her hands which bleeds into the DJ’s playlists, it’ll be on her own terms, rather than the faux down home on the farm in my pick-up truck schtick that the millionaires in Nashville trade in, week-by-week.

And it should be an interesting year for country. ‘Lasso’ looks like it’ll be out in September, and Kacey Musgraves is readying her next album too. We’ve covered a number of great new country and country-rock records that are out by smaller acts, as it seems after the posturing of Nashville over the past decade, we’re looking at a delightful pivoting toward something a little stranger, a little more glamorous, and a little more honest.

Importantly, there’s going to be a lot of women singing these songs too. We’ve had our fill of bourbon drinkin’, denim wearin’, dustbowl dudes, as fun as they are – it’s time for all that long, silent suffering of marginalise women to let all that hurt and hope out. A name like Lana Del Rey, along with Musgraves’ highly anticipated LP, could well open the floodgates.

This is a very natural fit for Lana Del Rey, and fits with the move to look at Southern Belles that we’ve seen recently, even in the likes of Sophia Coppola’s movie ‘Priscilla’, and women finding their voice through hyper-feminine lewks, while not being a shrinking violet.

The list of influences and artists that are making waves in modern country is much more extensive than what has been listed here, and we are almost certainly going to be writing about this in more detail in the coming months, but it feels like country music is moving away from one thing, and walking with purpose toward something else that’s more interesting, more stylish, and we can’t wait.

Kitty Wells would be thrilled.

As I sit here tonight, the jukebox’s playing
The tune about the wild side of life
As I listen to the words you are saying
It brings mem’ries when I was a trusting wife

It was’t God who made honky-tonk angels…