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Lana Del Rey · S5 E4
Coachella — Woodstock in My Mind
Nuclear anxiety, festival culture, and the first time Lana gets political
April 2017. Lana Del Rey is at Coachella watching Father John Misty perform when she checks her phone and sees that North Korea is pointing a missile at the United States. She drives home and writes a song about it at a sequoia grove.
"Blue Velvet" (Lana Del Rey, 2012). A cover of Bobby Vinton's 1963 classic, filmed for an H&M campaign that most fans have never seen. From the beginning, Lana was fascinated by the tension between America's beautiful surface and whatever's rotting underneath. "Coachella" is what happens when she finally names the rot out loud.
“I'm not gonna lie, I had complex feelings about spending the weekend dancing whilst watching tensions w North Korea mount.”
— Lana Del Rey, Instagram, April 17, 2017
Dancing Through the Apocalypse
The song's origin story is absurdly specific. Lana is watching Father John Misty at Coachella with her best friend Emma Tillman, who happens to be Misty's wife, while checking her phone for updates on North Korean missile tests. The cognitive dissonance between festival bliss and potential nuclear war becomes the entire song. It's the first time Lana writes about something bigger than her own romantic universe.
Sources
Pitchfork
Variety
Vice
Rim of the World Highway, San Bernardino Mountains
On her drive home from Coachella, Lana stopped at a sequoia grove along the Rim of the World Highway and wrote "Coachella — Woodstock in My Mind" on the spot.
Blue Velvet, Lana Del Rey (2012)
Lana's cover of Bobby Vinton's 1963 hit trades the original's crooner warmth for something darker and more unsettling. The production adds layers of reverb that make the familiar melody feel slightly underwater, slightly wrong. Listen for how her vocal delivery is almost too sweet, creating the same tension David Lynch exploited when he used the song in his 1986 film about suburban horror. From the start, Lana understood that beauty and dread are two sides of the same coin.
Sources
NME
Pitchfork
TAP TO REVEAL: How did Lana describe the song's inspiration in her own words?
The World Gets In
Before this song, Lana's worldview was confined to personal mythology: Hollywood glamour, doomed romance, vintage Americana. "Coachella" cracks that open. She's still writing about beauty, but now the beauty is fragile because the actual world might end. The personal and the political collide for the first time in her music.
Sources
The Guardian
Rolling Stone
When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing, Lana Del Rey
From Lust for Life (2017). The companion piece to "Coachella." Where that song wrestles with the guilt of dancing during a crisis, this one makes the case for dancing as resistance. The title is the thesis for the entire second half of Lust for Life: the world is falling apart, and joy is a political act.
When the World Was at War We Kept Dancing, Lana Del Rey (2017)
"Is it the end of an era? Is it the end of America?" she asks outright, dropping the metaphors entirely. The lyrics are the most politically direct words Lana has ever written, and they still sound like a lullaby.
In what year did Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival first take place?
Lana has gone political, personal, and collaborative on a single album. But the closing track of Lust for Life brings a new problem: Radiohead's lawyers. Next: "Get Free," a song about liberation that triggers a plagiarism accusation, and the moment Lana fights back.
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