by Julia Eng

Lana Del Rey released her seventh studio album, Blue Banisters, on October 22nd. Featuring stripped back instrumentals and the artist’s usual melancholic voice, the album explains “her story.” Blue Banisters follows Lana and her trio of close girlfriends as they help her heal the wounds from a man who “Said he'd come back every May / Just to help [her] if [she’d] paint / [Her] banisters blue.”

 In earlier albums, blue represented nothing more to Lana than one of the three American colors she could easily list to match her aesthetic. Blue Banisters contrasts this; Lana shows us maturity that isn’t present in her earlier work. Blue becomes more than the color of the sky as she gets high in Miami—blue is transformed into a state of mind.

Blue Banisters immediately brings me back to Joni Mitchell’s 1971 album, Blue. Instead of the Canadian folk singer’s usual odes to hippie culture, Mitchell presents Blue as a straightforward, gutting record. It discusses Mitchell’s entangled relationships with James Taylor and Graham Nash and the regret of putting her daughter up for adoption. “Blue is the purest emotional record I will ever make in my life” the artist said in an interview. Blue captures the lowest moments in Mitchell’s life and is widely considered her chef-d’œuvre. This is Joni Mitchell’s Blue Period; similar to Picasso, her best work is the result of her ability to channel her grief into her craft.

This is where we come back to Lana: the narrative she paints with her new album is one of healing through art, a notion shared by both her and Mitchell. In an effort to heal, she released the songs “Nectar of the Gods,” “Living Legend,” and “Cherry Blossom,” which she wrote with an ex-boyfriend. These releases, years after the songs were written, are an attempt to release herself from heartbreak. “I had a vision of making my life into a work of art,” said Lana in a 2012 interview. This sentiment remains unchanged; in “Beautiful,” she sings “Let me show you how sadness can turn into happiness / I can turn blue into something.”

Lana’s music is often criticized for the romanticisation of darker topics—in Blue Banisters, she defends her sorrow to critics, resulting in one of her saddest albums yet, and in reopening old wounds, attempts to mend them faster. She pleads to be allowed to have a Blue Period like Mitchell, in which she’s free to sing about her heavy emotions and the dangerous ecstasy of love. We see from both artists that “blue” is what one does with a certain sadness so great that, if left with an individual alone, is unmanageable. It is the displacement of emotion amongst those that will listen and a means of genesis. The cathartic act of making something blue is how the greatest artwork is created from one’s worst moments.

by Julia Eng

On January 10, I sat down on my bed with my laptop, preparing myself for the first episode of Euphoria’s second season. I was thoroughly enjoying catching up with my favorite characters until I heard the familiar whining of an electric guitar through my airpods. I was watching characters participate in a drug deal to the sound of “Right Down the Line” by Gerry Rafferty. It struck me as an odd choice. High stress situations call for high stress music. Fast strings, dramatic crescendos, and creeping drums add tension to a given scene, but this mindless, dazed love song that I’d been playing for years in my bedroom was making its major on-screen debut to the visuals of a drug dealer’s bodyguard strip-searching his business partners.

Maybe this is what contributes to the scene and the song’s appeal. There’s something about “Right Down the Line” and its laid back bass and hollow wooden clacking that is so anti “life or death” circumstance. They contradict one another in a way that piques our curiosity, but also helps calm the woes we have about what we’re witnessing. 

After the stress of the scene, you are rewarded with affirmations of love and devotion. And soon, you forget that your favorite characters were ever at risk at all. This, combined with its catchy opening hook, might be what caused it to shoot to the top of Shazam’s “Top 200 Chart” and to my “Top Tracks this Month” on Spotify.

Before its appearance on the show, “Right Down the Line” was a “kiss in the kitchen” song, the type that makes you want to purchase a mid-century modern house in Southern California, fry an egg on a Sunday morning, and take a barefoot walk through Brentwood Market. It was a song reserved for psychedelic fantasies of independence and love. But listeners have learned from Euphoria that “Right Down the Line” will be there as a safety net for circumstances that are less threatening than drug deals, but challenging ones nonetheless. It’s a song that times and composes panicked breathing into measures and puts some of those ridiculously oversized yellow-tinted Gucci sunglasses on your face. And all throughout, Gerry Rafferty sings softly to you, “You've been as constant as a Northern Star / The brightest light that shines / It’s been you, woman / Right down the line,” slowing everything down to a manageable speed.

Yes, it’s a song that alters our perception of the scenes depicted in Euphoria, but it also shifts our approach to everyday dilemmas. “Right Down the Line” doesn’t fix problems, give us morals, or offer any special inspiration. But it lets us rebound from shock, come to our senses, and sets us up to take baby steps in the right direction.