mg

JOSHUA TREE

An excerpt from my short story collection NOWHERE FAST, out now.

“so what i’m gonna do is i’m gonna get a moped and i’m gonna ride it around the desert. and i’ll have my shotgun for if i see a rattlesnake. you think i could shoot a rattlesnake from a moped?”

“sure, prolly.”

“i’ll shoot the fuck out of a rattlesnake. fuck a rattlesnake.”

“yea fuck em.”

“anyway, you can visit me if you want.”

“hmmmmm….. maybe.”

“hey can i call you? i can’t type so good. i got fat thumbs. plus i’m on ecstasy.”

Anna was in Los Angeles, where Ray lived, two weeks later on business. The business was a magazine interview with an R&B singer whose manager stopped returning Anna’s phone calls immediately upon her arrival. The business was a free vacation. “Guess where I’m at,” she texted Ray from the hotel. They’d been messaging each other for a month, friends of friends. Ray seemed psychotic, but that was no problem. 

“You should come over and help me pack. I’ve got some soju,” he replied. Ray was moving to Joshua Tree in two days to make sad synthesizer music in the desert. “Oh. One thing I have to tell you. My teeth are all fucked up. I don’t smile in pictures. Thought you should know.”

An inflatable duck the size of a Subaru was drifting across the pool next to Ray’s apartment building on Sunset. The Elliott Smith mural from the one album cover used to be around the corner, he told Anna in the lobby, but they recently turned it into a brunch restaurant. “Oh and I’ve got a present for you.” They took the elevator to his studio, which was carpeted and offered roughly nothing in the way of furniture. The teeth were as advertised, a double row of craggy gray shards that made his mouth look like abstract expressionism. She sat on a cardboard box while Ray poured little cups of soju and retrieved a bag of mushrooms from a drawer. They ate a handful of caps each. “This isn’t your present. Come on.”

She followed him to the back of the apartment building, where three of Ray’s neighbors were smoking around a fire pit. Mary was in her fifties and blessed with the virtue of persistence, as demonstrated by the portable respirator she carted around in her non-smoking hand. Jeff with the blonde ponytail and Dickies had recently come back from Afghanistan. “Jeff’s better at Jeopardy than anyone on earth,” said Ray. “Other than me.” “Thanks, man,” said Jeff. In the corner, a large bearded man was lost in the act of twisting up some sort of balloon animal. “This is Balloonski,” said Ray. “Don’t look yet!” said Balloonski, his hands swooping and squeaking like ridiculous birds. Anna turned the other way and smoked a cigarette. By the time she’d finished, the balloon was in the shape of a man playing the saxophone. “Surprise!” said Ray. She promised to keep it always. “Balloonski,” she said, “you’re going places. The world will know your balloons. You’re headed straight to the top, kid. Did you know I’m a journalist?”

They went back to Ray’s apartment and fucked on the carpet to Elliott Smith, the popcorn ceiling rippling like lava. “Yeah so I think I’m in love with you,” Ray said. “Let’s go to your hotel and see what’s in the mini bar.” Anna swaddled the balloon jazz man in her jacket, their beautiful baby boy. “Sup, chumps?” she found herself barking at the nice people drinking wine in the hotel lobby, for no special reason beside the fact that she was untouchable and would never die.

They got to work on the mini bar, starting with the Wild Turkeys, then the Bombay Sapphires, then the Titos. Ray poured the last couple bottles on the floor and hurled them at the wall. “It ain’t on our dime, baby!” he crowed. “This is on Corporate America’s tab!” She couldn’t be sure if the room charges were, in fact, on Corporate America’s tab, nor if she would continue to have a job when all was said and done, but she could admit the sentiment was rousing. Give the guy ten minutes and suddenly you’re voting him for alderman. Ray called up room service, sprawled on the bed like some sort of Ottoman aristocrat. “Good morning. My wife would like to order steak and eggs please.”

It was May when she arrived in Joshua Tree. Or it was April. In any case, Prince had died and the desert was colder than she had imagined. It was an hour drive from the Palm Springs airport in a cab softly playing the greatest hits of Third Eye Blind, the windmills off the highway waving palely in the dark like great irrelevant gods. She should check out that place, the cab driver offered as some nameless saloon slipped past, if she wanted to meet a nice Marine. That sounded good, Anna said. She could swear the mountains were flashing with faraway wet yellow eyes.

The headlights caught Ray in front of a little house made of corrugated sheet metal that looked to be held together with staples, doing what could generously be described as karate. There were no neighbors to be seen for half a mile. “Darling, we haven’t any food!” Ray greeted her. The closest store was a two hour walk along the side of the highway, and it was closed. “But Loretta left a handle of Seagram’s, so we’ll be straight.” Who this Loretta was supposed to be she hadn’t a clue, but she would take a drink. Inside Ray’s Siamese cat hunted moths around the place, which was surprisingly well appointed, decorated with woven Navajo rugs and rattan furniture and a beaded curtain that clacked when you went from the kitchen to the bedroom. They drank gin and water and Ray told her the stories of his collection of scars, this one from being smashed over the head with a beer bottle, this one from falling through a skylight. By the time the sun was coming up she was drunk enough to ask: “Who’s Loretta?”

“Oh. Loretta’s my roommate.”

“There’s only one room.”

“We trade off. Anyway she’s not here right now.”

“Well where is she?”

“Couldn’t really tell you.”

Ray went and got the gin, refilled both their glasses to the top, and put on a movie about a dog who gets terribly abused by all numbers of people. Within twenty minutes he was sobbing uncontrollably, not even trying to be quiet about it. That was her favorite thing about Ray, probably. He cried at all the dog movies.

In the daytime Ray would hunch shirtless over his keyboard, chainsmoking spliffs and endlessly writing the same wordless song. Anna lay on a towel in the baked dirt of the yard, mindlessly scrolling through apps on her phone and seeing white when she stood up. Sometimes she watched Ray work, dragging colorful little chunks of minutiae back and forth across his computer screen and fiddling with knobs doing who knows what, the room quiet but for the bass in his headphones. This kind of boredom she had always liked, the kind that reminded her of sinking into decrepit couches to watch boys shoot at Nazis or whatever with their Playstation controllers. The wonderful kind of dullness that ferried you safely from one hour to the next. In any case, she’d lost her job. What else was there to do. She had two weeks left in the desert.

They were out front watching for jackrabbits when a bandaid-colored Volvo scraped up on wings of dust. A lady got out. She looked to be in her mid-sixties, with long gray hair and a tired face, dressed in the linens of some kind of cult, maybe. And she’d brought luggage. “I stopped at the Walmart and got hamburgers and beer,” she said, hauling out shopping bags from the back seat. 

“Hi mom,” Ray said. 

Ray’s mother turned to Anna. “Who’s this? Are you going to help me with the groceries?”

“Sorry… Ray didn’t tell me, uh…”

“You may call me Loretta. Here.” She handed Anna a case of Miller Lite. Anna carried it inside, shoving the underwear she’d left on the floor in her backpack before coming back for the next one. She caught Ray’s eye as he grabbed a box of frozen beef patties. “It’s cool,” he said. “We’ll sleep in the living room.” He turned to Loretta. “The drive was okay?”

“Left Tucson at four this morning,” Loretta said. “I feel like hell. Where did I put my…..?” She rummaged around in the glove compartment, retrieved five or six pill bottles, and went inside. Ray followed.

The sky was going pink and orange as Loretta unpacked her things and Ray heated up the charcoal grill. Anna made slow figure eights around the yard, listening to lizards scuttle around in the rocks. There were a few things she knew about Ray’s mother. She knew Loretta had been married five times. She knew Loretta had been a teacher, and that she wasn’t one anymore. She knew Ray hadn’t seen his mother in ten years, or at least that’s what he’d said, that Loretta’s boyfriend wouldn’t let him set foot in their house.

Loretta appeared in the doorway, her white linens dyed peach with twilight. “Would you like to play a game of Clue?” she asked Anna. They went inside and Loretta set the game board out on the floor, shuffling up the billiard rooms and candlesticks and slipping three cards into the little case file envelope. “I’m always Mrs. Peacock,” Loretta said. “Hope that’s not a problem.” They drank beer and waited for Ray to come and be the third player, Loretta’s left eye twitching gently as the sun went down.

“Are you Ray’s girlfriend?” Loretta asked.

“Sort of,” said Anna. “I don’t know. Something like that.”

“For the record,” said Loretta, “you shouldn’t trust half of what he tells you.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I know Ray, that’s all. Known him all his life.” 

Ray walked inside with a tray of burgers. “You’re Professor Plum,” Loretta said, handing him the purple pawn. She turned her beer upside down, crumpled up the can and rolled the dice.

Loretta was holding Anna’s hair while she hugged the toilet, hurling. “Hey, we’ve all been there, hun,” Loretta said. “Mushrooms will do that sometimes.” Ray had brought his stash to the desert. It wasn’t sitting right. Anna choked out the rest, flushed, and staggered to her feet, sweating and mortified. “I should probably lie down for a minute,” she told Loretta, weaving her way to the living room. “Why don’t you take the bed tonight,” Loretta said, digging one hand in her giant purse. “I’ll send Ray in to join you. It’s no problem.” Anna slurred a thanks and goodnight and stumbled through the beaded curtain to the bedroom, wondering how long Ray’d been gone on his endless cigarette break. Or had he only stepped out five minutes ago? It was hard to be sure at the moment, considering that everywhere she looked, her surroundings kept turning to hamburger meat. She closed her eyes and tried to will away the kaleidoscope of tentacles churning inside her eyelids. When she woke up, Anna could hear Ray and Loretta’s voices softly from the other side of the curtain. The desert was dark still, a choir of crickets like distant static.

“I don’t have five hundred dollars, Ray. If I did, I’d give it to you. But I don’t.”

“Right. You’ve just got enough to make sure Gary can sit on his fat ass all day watching Matlock. But your only son can go fuck himself. Got it.”

“Let’s leave Gary out of it.”

“I would’ve liked to leave Gary out of it the day he broke my nose and kicked me out of the house, but I suppose we can’t have it all, can we.”

“Ray…… It’s complicated.”

“Yeah, being a mother sounds pretty fucking complicated. It’s not for everyone, I guess.”

Loretta was quiet for a minute.

“You know I don’t feel good about how everything played out. If I could do things differently…”

“I was thirteen years old living on the street because you chose fucking Gary over me, mom. I’ll say you could’ve done things differently. Jesus Christ.”

“That’s why I’m here every weekend, isn’t it? To see if we can’t be friends again?”

“You barely qualify as my mother, and you’re certainly not my friend. But I will take some fucking money, if Gary can manage to spare it from his Hot Pocket fund.” Anna heard shuffling and the crunch of cans being tossed in the trash. “And by the way, those pills are making you crazy. You shouldn’t be mixing all that shit at once. Your shrink ought to be in fucking prison. Anyway. Sleep well.” Anna lay very still with her eyes shut as Ray jangled through the beaded curtain and collapsed beside her in the dark, hitting the bed with a thud like he’d dropped from the sky.

In the morning Loretta was gone, and so was her car. On the kitchen counter were two notes, one labeled ANNA, the other MY SON RAY. Anna studied Ray’s face as he read, but it didn’t change, though he did slip a handful of twenties that had been tucked inside the letter into his pocket. Anna opened hers. In bold looping cursive it said, “Dear Anna, it was nice to meet you. He’ll take advantage of your weakness if you let him. Take care of yourself. Loretta.” Ray finished reading, folded the letter back up, and walked shirtless into the desert. He didn’t ask what her note said, and she didn’t either.

She remembered she had saved Loretta’s phone number a year later, after everything—after Ray had pawned most of her belongings and disappeared to Seoul with his secret girlfriend, that is, but before the whole Korean prison incident—and decided to ask. “What did you mean back in Joshua Tree, when you said he’d take advantage of my weakness?” she typed slowly. “How did you know?” She waited hours and hours until finally her phone buzzed. “I would never say that about my son,” read the text from Loretta. “What do you want from me?”

DAY AFTER DAY, LIFE AFTER LIFE

I’m compiling this out of habit and because most of the other ones are borrrrrringgggg, but honestly yall I spent the overwhelming majority of 2018 listening to The Cure’s Disintegration, Mazzy Star’s So Tonight That I Might See, and this Spotify playlist that compiled all the good Italians Do It Better songs. Also this song played on youtube at .75 speed. I don’t know man. 2018 was a weird one, like they all are.

Anyway. Here is the music I can remember liking from 2018, in no particular order.

Queen Key, “How Do I Tell This Bitch I Wanna Fuck Her Husband” (snippet)
Johann Johannsson, Mandy OST
Johnny Jewel, Themes For Television
Lana Del Rey, “Venice Bitch”
Sada Baby & Drego, “Bloxk Party”
Grapetooth, Grapetooth
Peggy Gou, “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane)”
Channel Tres, Channel Tres
Rosalia, El Mal Querer
G Herbo, “Who Run It (Remix)”
Valee ft. Jeremih, “Womp Womp”
Freddie Gibbs ft. 03 Greedo, “Death Row”
Let’s Eat Grandma, I’m All Ears
Cupcakke, “Garfield”
Rico Nasty, “Smack A Bitch”
Virtual Self, Virtual Self
Roddy Ricch, “Die Young”
SOPHIE, “Immaterial”

Galcher Lustwerk, 200% Galcher
Future, Beast Mode 2
Low, Double Negative
Pusha T, “The Story of Adidon”
Oneohtrix Point Never, Age Of
Joey Purp “Aw Sh*t”
DJ Taye, Still Trippin’
Azealia Banks, “Anna Wintour”
Mitski, Be The Cowboy
Finn, “Sometimes The Going Gets A Little Tough”
Khruangbin, Con Todo El Mundo
Negative Gemini, Bad Baby
Hilary Woods, Colt
DJ N*gga Fox, Cranio
Organ Tapes, Into One Name
тпсб, Sekundenschlaf
FBG Duck, “Slide”
Vessel, Queen of Golden Dogs
Countess Luann, “Money Can’t Buy You Class (James Kennedy Remix)”

And “King’s Dead,” Future’s verse only, looped to infinity.

WE’VE ALL GONE TO SLEEP

The night I met Barry I was on a date with his friend Georges. By date I mean we’d showed up together to the apartment where everyone was taking ecstasy that night. Georges’ mother, through no small irony, was the dean who had very sympathetically informed me I’d failed out of college weeks beforehand; I found it all hysterical in a “haha I feel nothing” kind of way. God’s very funny. 

But Barry lived there, and the three of us went in his room and ate the pills and sat on the carpet and I think I made everyone watch me “DJ” between two Youtube tabs. When the pills kicked in it became dogmatically clear that this date thing had been arranged all wrong and I knew Barry knew it too from like two seconds of eye contact. Georges disappeared down the block to get cigarettes or something and he may as well have fallen off the planet. I more or less moved in from there. We never really talked about it so much as I showed up and didn’t leave.

I hadn’t given a lot of thought to depression as a concept, or rather, it seemed so obvious it was beyond consideration, like when you zone in on the action of yourself chewing and it gets too weird. In retrospect that apartment was a think tank for finding new lows in depressive living. Who cared. My mom was dead and my family was fucked and my old friends were bitches and when I drove my car drunk nobody said “hey wait.” Barry was some kind of major where he had to do really hard math problems and use test tubes, which I found hilarious for whatever reason, but he stopped going to class. We’d started drinking White Russians in the afternoons which would segue nicely into Molsons and Popov in the evenings. For about two months we slept on a mattress without a sheet because the alternative required us putting a sheet on it.

I thought I had pretty good taste in music but it was shit compared to Barry’s. He taught me how to use torrents and invited me, after I’d begged him for weeks, to this super-secret forum he belonged to where nerds argued endlessly about, I don’t know, how Animal Collective sold out. He was into all the shit I was into but then also Julie Doiron and Sun O))) and Grouper and The Microphones. I had never heard any of that stuff before, but when I lay on the mattress, room all spinning, listening to “Heavy Water / I’d Rather Be Sleeping” playing from the desktop PC that sat on the floor, I thought that it might be alright to just very quietly die there.

When summer came around he drove his shitty silver car back to Connecticut, where he was from, with the little white bunny we bought at the mall in the backseat, and I drove back to Chicago. We weren’t boyfriend and girlfriend because I’d always felt too weird to even bring it up; still I wanted to drive off a bridge. I got a studio apartment in Lakeview and spent my days g-chatting him elaborate sad faces I’d copy-and-paste from JapaneseEmoticons.net, until eventually I got a boyfriend, a Canadian guy whom I tolerated, and our correspondence trailed into ellipsis. One day months later Barry called me and said he was driving to Chicago and I thought I might be sick because why did you take so long? I made him udon noodles when he got to my apartment and we ate them and when he tried to kiss me, I told him that I had a boyfriend now. He got up and drove somewhere I’m not sure and I never saw him again.

Two years ago I got a message from him in the middle of the night. “I’m remembering you from what seems like long ago and I hope u haven’t changed too much because you were perfect to me then.” It fucked me up so bad I forgot to respond. Two weeks later I got a message from Barry’s roommate in Oakland. Barry had gone to sleep at his ex-girlfriend’s and didn’t wake up. Something with pills. I put on my headphones and sat there for a long time listening to “I Felt Your Shape,” a song that used to make me want to cry when I first heard it in his room and that had now revealed itself to be a message from the future to the past, or a message from the past to the future, or something extremely fucking crucial to which I’d been oblivious, anyway. It was spring.

IT HAPPENED

well folks, a couple weeks back, I got to talk to the one and only Lana Del Rey for Billboard’s 2017 #1s issue. the version that appears in print is quite abbreviated, so I thought I would publish the full transcript for your viewing pleasure. (I left out the part at the end when I asked her for advice about getting over a toxic break-up; you’ll just have to use your imagination with that one.)

MG: How has this year been for you? You’ve had all these great career highs, but at the same time, at least personally, it’s hard not to feel a bit beaten down by the world…

LDR: Yea. Yea, I can see that. I try and take different approaches to how I see things every day. Because I guess if you just watched the news only, and didn’t have your own perspective, it would be hard to get through the day. But I really like the Leonard Coen quote: “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” I feel like this is the year where we’re seeing a lot of cracks—all the cracks that have been there forever. But the blessing in all of these things that have been coming out is that we get to shine a lot of light on the problems that have been in society for a long time, and hopefully fix them. So that’s something I like to hold on to, and it makes me feel excited, actually. Because it feels like it’s happening fast.

It’s funny because, leading up to Lust for Life, a lot of people were like: “Oh my god, Lana is smiling! This is going to be her happy album!” And definitely there’s a shift that seems significant, but I don’t know if “happy” is the word I would use. How do you feel about that?

I think maybe a good word to use would be more present—less from the outside looking in, and sort of a more integrated perspective lyrically. Like, it’s not just about love, or feeling disappointed, it’s also about being in LA, cause that’s where I live, and thinking about… You know, like a song “When the World Was At War We Kept Dancing,” and the lyric is, “Is it the end of an era? Is it the end of America?”, kind of like we were saying earlier. I was thinking about things that are broader than just my relationships, which was nice for me. Probably nice for the fans, too—a little bit of a reprieve.

Starting off with a blank slate, did you have some idea that these were things you wanted to express, that this was going to be a more integrated perspective, or was that just kind of where the songs took you?

Well, I think I started writing the record in the reverse order that the tracklisting is in now. So I started with the more… I don’t know how to describe them. I don’t wanna use the word “negative.” But we’ll say, I started writing the darker songs first. “Heroine,” “Get Free,” and then I kept “13 Beaches” at the front of the tracklisting. I had a lot of songs where I was trying to state my intentions of what I wanted; in “Get Free,” I wanted to move forward, I wanted to feel differently. “Heroine” I was thinking about some stuff that had happened in the past. And then “13 Beaches,” I was lamenting over the fact that it took me that many beaches to find a quiet one to just chill out at. So I had to get through all of my complaining [laughs]. And then once I got to be cathartic in that way, I thought: Alright, now I want to invite my friends in. I want The Weeknd to come in and be on a track, and [A$AP] Rocky’s so cool, I want him to be on a track. Obviously, the election was happening halfway through my writing process, and I was thinking about the election, and I wrote four songs that didn’t end up going on the record that were a little more politically oriented. I didn’t end up using those, but “When the World Was At War We Kept Dancing” and “God Bless America (And All The Beautiful Women In It),” we kept on the record. So i was sort of just letting the process happen to me as I was moving through the election—and also just working through my personal life, which has been… very balanced. That’s all the little things that culminated into the body of work.

It’s interesting because we seem to have reached this point of cultural urgency that extends even to pop music—not to say that your music is necessarily pop music, but some people would put you there. And sometimes that works quite well, and other times it’s like, ugh, swing and a miss! [Lana starts laughing] And when “Coachella / Woodstock In My Mind” came out, I think it caught people off-guard—like, wait, Lana Del Rey is getting woke? It could’ve gone so wrong, but you pulled it off completely!

[Laughs] I know what you mean. But everybody has a different level of emotional depth that they draw from, and you know, I didn’t always choose to draw from—you know, that’s not true, actually. I was always drawing from my deeper writing well the best that I could. But I was just in a different place. I know what you mean, though, it can go so badly. It can go so wrong. But I actually was never worried. I’m never really worried about whether I can pull off a sentiment, because I know if I’m even trying to write it, I’ll eventually finesse the language and the mood of it in a way that feels comfortable to me. Because I know if it sounds comfortable to me, it’s gonna be comfortable for the fans. It would never be something that like, reads in a weird way. I mean, I really trust my writing voice so much—even more than my decision-making voice.

You’re really good at knowing, like: Sometimes things need to be subtle, and sometimes symbolic, and then sometimes need to be really on-the-nose because that’s just what the situation calls for.

Yea, I think that’s true.

It’s also interesting that Lust for Life felt so suited to the madness of 2017, but it also was very soothing. It sort of absorbed the madness and metabolized it into something that was transportive, even as it reached out into the world. And that was nice, because it wasn’t just like, “Oh, we’re fucked man!”

I love the way you just described that—“metabolizing” something. My version of that word is “integrating” it, and processing it. Like, I take so much time for myself to think, and to meditate, and to talk to people I really trust about what they think, so I’ve got a lot of perspective that’s wound up into my own. And that really helps me to have a balanced view on everything. I mean, even though overall, it’s pretty dramatic. Even in L.A. right now, with the fires, and in Sonoma up north. And the earthquakes and everything—it’s a lot! But, I don’t know, I just have this really strong instinct that it’s all leading in a much-needed, different direction, that hopefully we’re all leaning into. It’s like a really hard turn to make, because we’ve got all these weird societal norms we’ve gotta break out of, and we’ve been stuck in them.

Yea, I guess it requires chaos to shake out of that.

Apparently! It’s pretty weird, but I feel like it’s not a coincidence. It feels a little bit like a movie.

I wondered about the process of getting inspired for you. Because some artists get inspired by going out in the world and feeding off energy, and then others are able to create by removing themselves from that noise and creating their own space where they feel comfortable. So I wondered where you sat on this spectrum.

Mm, that’s a good question. I think my most important thing has been just trusting what I want to do every day, even if it’s different. If I wake up and I have plans to do one thing, but I really feel like I’d rather drive six hours north to San Francisco to visit a friend for no reason, I just kind of don’t second-guess it and I go. Spontaneity, that’s a big thing for me. But that being said, still having a place I like to call home, even though I travel a lot. And for me, I don’t really like to write when I’m upset. I don’t really like sharing those thoughts until I’m all the way through them. So I don’t really feel inspired by heartbreak, and I don’t even necessarily feel inspired by something super exciting. I think I’m just inspired when I’m doing whatever feels right in the moment—when I’m really in the flow.

I’ve always been a little jealous of people who can make art out of depression or grief. Because for me, that’s when I’m non-functional.

I’m non-functional, too. That’s when I don’t really wanna do anything. I definitely don’t want to make an amazing song.

Yea, that’s when art as a priority kind of just falls away for me.

I don’t know how people do that. Those must be people who function really well in high crisis situations. Which I don’t.

Going back to “Get Free” for a second: I think it’s interesting you felt like you were getting out negative feelings on that song, because… well, that song always makes me cry, but not quite in a sad way. It’s more overwhelming, because when you sing “Finally, I’m crossing the threshold,” it feels like that moment of change where you don’t know yet what’s going to be on the other side of it, because it’s happening to you, and you’re in it. The album itself almost feels like a document of change—it’s not like at the end of the album, it’s like, “Well, this is the lesson learned…”

Which is how I thought it was gonna be! I thought it was gonna be that way.

Do you have any perspective now on, when you say you’re crossing this threshold, what was on the other side?

Okay, so “crossing the threshold” was actually a reference to this little concept, or diagram, that’s called “The Hero’s Journey.” This writer, Joseph Campbell, came up with this little model. And it’s all about this character who has a lot of trouble at the beginning of the story, and then somewhere in the middle of the story, crosses the threshold to sort of face the monster, or the challenger, and in the end hopefully emerges triumphant once he’s beaten the bad guy or whatever. And I had been talking about that with my engineer, and I thought: I don’t usually use metaphors, but I loved the line “crossing the threshold,” and I wanted to bring it into that song I’d already started writing. So I changed those first few lines, so that woven in would be the idea of the hero’s journey. Because I really liked the idea of changing your own past. I think that’s what I wanted to do. I didn’t really know if I had control over doing that for a long time, and yea, I didn’t know what would be on the other side of me making a couple of really strong personal decisions and statement. Even just using my own voice to talk about stuff, that was different from “Love.” And I didn’t really know how the whole thing would go. But I liked so much that it would be my authentic voice at the time, so I just decided that to write what I was feeling was important enough to cross that threshold in the music. It’s kind of hard for me to explain, because there’s so many different levels to it: like, I’m making literary allusions, but I’m also really trying to make changes in my own life. It’s hard to articulate it eloquently!

“Love” was what I wanted to ask you about next. First, just the title, because you know, you’ve got this reputation for mystery and melancholy and then suddenly it’s like, boom, LOVE! The most direct, unmysterious title. Was there some significance to you in the directness of that?

Yea. It didn’t start off as “Love.” It started as “Young & In Love,” but I didn’t really like that title, because that wasn’t even the point of the song. I could have gone back and edited the song as well, but I liked how the whole thing sounded, so I didn’t. Then I worked with Sean Lennon, and you know, that Lennon legacy is so tied into that one word. So I just thought, you know what? I just wanna go for it. The whole record is pointing its own little nose in that direction, between like, Stevie Nicks, and Sean Lennon, and “Lust For Life,” and “Love”… It felt like once I got through the chaos of making all these little personal statements that I had to almost delete from the music and then put back in, I was ready to say that what I’m getting at is, like so many singers in the past: it’s all about love! And obviously it’s about more than that. It is about more than that. But what you said about being on the nose sometimes—I liked that it was pretty literal, and it felt nice and comfortable to not necessarily have layers to all of the singles. That one and “Lust for Life” were similar in that they were kind of just about having fun. Even if you don’t have anywhere to go, well, so what, just get dressed up and go anyways.

Sometimes that line [“You get ready, you get all dressed up / To go nowhere in particular”] kinda made me sad, too, though!

I’ve heard that!

I sometimes heard it as, you know, you get dressed up and you don’t have anywhere to go, and you maybe made these plans that didn’t turn out.

All dressed up and nowhere to go. Which is funny, because when I was 20 and writing little folk songs, I had a lot of that line, “All dressed up with nowhere to go.” But sometimes my lines end up slipping on themselves, and I feel differently about them once I’ve got some perspective on them. But I think I was thinking… you know, you don’t need hundreds of friends to have something fun to do, you know? You can have fun by yourself. It was more about just feeling a lot of love whether you’re alone, or you’re with someone. You don’t have to have a party to go to. But I know everyone interpets it in their own way. I read one review that was like, “Well, this is depressing.” And I was like, “Fuck, really? Another depressing song?” [Laughs] You can’t get it there all the way sometimes, you can’t get the message exactly the way you want it. But I think because of the production and the melody, I can also feel the melancholia. And maybe, on some level, I was feeling like, “Fuck, I’ve got nowhere to go.” I don’t remember thinking that when I was writing it, but probably there’s a little of that in there. Who knows!

I wondered if you cared about… You know, this album has singles, and that’s more than could be said of Honeymoon to begin with… [Lana starts laughing] No, I totally don’t mean that in a negative way, I adore Honeymoon!

No, it’s just funny! It’s funny.

Do you think, like, okay, this song’s gonna be the single, and we’re gonna push it like so? Or is that just the shit that happens later?

That’s like, what John Janick says. He’ll say, “Oh I love this song, I want this to be the single.” And if I like it, well, then I’ll say okay. But not with a record like Honeymoon. With a record like Honeymoon, he’s like… Have fun! Because that’s just, you know, kind of like a vanity project. I mean, in a good way. Like, a project just for you. With this one— first of all, I love everybody at my label. But John and the guys I work with loved “Love,” and they loved “Lust For Life.” So those were really the only two singles that we thought about, and I’m kind of doing air quotes with “singles” alone in my room right now. What that means for us, at this point, is just that the song’s gonna get a video. So it’s kind of different for us than it is for other people. It usually means, like, there’s a feature on it or there’s gonna be a video, or maybe I’ll sing it on the radio if I do, like, a thing with KROQ. My label’s pretty good about not having too many expectations. I guess I felt like, if one song was going to go further than the other ones, I thought it was “Love,” and I think I was right about that. That’s the one people will remember if they’re just a casual listener—which is good, because I really like that song! Even if just one of the songs goes far, that’s kind of like an accomplishment, because there’s so much music out there. Even if one makes it to the radio, even if it’s indie or college radio or whatever.

Do you have expectations for your own records? When you finished writing the record, did you have any idea as to… what you thought it would do? Or if people would like it? Ugh, I don’t know how to phrase this question, do you know kind of what I’m saying?

Yea, I do. I did have expectations for the record. I wanted to see if it was going to be heard for what it was really saying, and overall, from what I read, it was interpreted correctly. Which is a good sign for me, because it means I’m not seeing things one way, and the culture is seeing things the other way. Which is bad—that means there’s some incongruence there. That means you need to check yourself, and I don’t wanna check myself. I wanna stay in the flow, keep writing. From what I read, I didn’t feel like anyone thought I was trying to make some mega-turn in the end, away from what I had done originally. It was just a slow advancement with a couple sparkly details in it. So that was good enough for me. And what’s cool is that I’m only just starting to tour next month. My records are very slow-burning for a long time, and sometimes… I remember with “Summertime Sadness,” that song didn’t even go on the radio until two years after the record came out. My songs always surprise me. Sometimes they find themselves in movies, or getting nominated for things, way after they’ve been out. So it’s pretty cool.

Yea, not to like, blow smoke up your ass, but with you in particular, it seems to take the culture as a whole a minute to catch up with you. And that’s true with each of your records, but with Lust for Life in particular, it feels like the moment that the culture has met you on your grounds.

Well, that’s a really cool way of looking at it. And when I think about it, maybe that’s because I’m ready, too. Maybe I needed a lot of time to just be me, all to myself, and just be weird. It’s easier when you’re in a mood to be more out there. And I don’t really know what makes that happen; maybe it’s just enough time making music. Who knows why timing works out the way it does? But I like that you said that, I think that’s cool. I really like this record; I think if this was the first record some people heard from me, I’d be really proud of that.