Few artists are as mythic and enigmatic as Lana Del Rey. She is a master of contradictions—sincere but elusive, tragic but playful. Blue Banisters might be her most honest deception. To some, it’s a lackluster downbeat from earlier work, but it could be the key to unlocking her entire discography, helping to separate the myth-making from the truth-telling. Her music has always been a mirror, both for herself and for her audience, but on Blue Banisters, she finally steps through it.
For an artist acquainted with being misunderstood for most of her career, the release of Blue Banisters in October 2021, just seven months after her previous effort, Chemtrails Over the Country Club (March 2021), seemed to throw off even her most ardent supporters. Why this album? Why now?
Chief among the complaints you might hear are that the album is: too slow; it lacks pop appeal; or that it is nothing more than a scattered collection of reworked old demos. Critically, the album received positive reviews but the fans seemed more indifferent—it remains one of her less discussed works.
Is Blue Banisters the Album-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named? Or, is this album one of Lana’s most intentional works? Not just another “sad girl” record, but could it be a love letter to herself and her artistry? Could it be bigger than what it purports to be on the surface?
Whether you’ve been a lifelong fan, a casual admirer of her hit songs, or never felt like you understood her cult status—the veil between the persona (Lana Del Rey) and the artist (Elizabeth Grant) is at its thinnest on Blue Banisters.
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Before diving into the record proper, I do think it’s worth noting the tumultuous journey that had led us to the moment of its release. Most of us know the general beats of her story—if you were of a certain age and “surfing the web” in 2011-2012 (on platforms like Tumblr), you saw this whole thing unravel right before your eyes.
It all started with the self-made music video for her hit song, Video Games—an amalgamation of found-footage Americana and MacBook Photo Booth lip-syncing, bathed in old Hollywood glamour. The aesthetic-driven Tumblr primed the moment for Lana Del Rey to catapult into stardom nearly overnight and the romanticization of her persona influenced an entire generation of girls (and gays).
The subsequent release of her major label debut, Born to Die, struck such a cultural chord that it is still placing in the Billboard Top 200 charts thirteen years later. If it continues to sell throughout most of 2025, it will become the longest charting album by a female artist since Billboard began the Top 200 chart in 1967.
But, on the flip side of this success, Lana has been the center of much ‘controversy’ and critique. For as many people remember those Tumblr days, just as many people remember her “iconic” SNL performance.
We might disagree on what made it iconic—to most it was a complete mess and the media endlessly tore her apart for it. For a moment, it looked like her career was over. While she didn’t get caught up in a lip-sync scandal a la Ashlee Simpson, her meek demeanor and stage fright produced an off-kilter performance that no one would forget.
She fought back—she linked up with Dan Auerbach of The Black Keys, went into the studio mad as hell, and the result was a psych rock pop album that rebuked all ideas of her persona to date. However, with lyrics such as, “he hit me and it felt like a kiss,” and song titles like, “Fucked My Way Up to the Top,” she quickly found herself at the center of a media firestorm once again.
Lana was accused of ‘glamorizing abuse,’ and being so preoccupied with her aesthetic-persona as to be completely inauthentic. Unfortunately, the media perception of her career proved too salacious to ignore and these ideas of her work have stuck to her to this day.
In my own experience, I was right there in the Tumblr trenches with the best of them, completely mesmerized and obsessed with Lana when she appeared on the scene. Over the years, however, the public ridicule of her artistic efforts took hold and I disengaged from her career. I impulsively dismissed the bulk of her work as insincere and trite until the day I decided to sit down and listen to Blue Banisters and give her one more shot.
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In her own words, Lana released Blue Banisters with the intention that no one would really listen to it—she “just wanted it to be there in case anyone was ever curious for any information.” There isn’t a radio-friendly single on the album and it lacks a grand cinematic aesthetic that carries much of her other work. But the lack of a glossy production doesn’t mean the album lacks emotional weight—if anything, it intensifies it.
This album is not in the business of selling a fantasy. The stripped-down nature of the work is designed to let the writing speak for itself. Most of the tracks here deal in memory, self-reflection, and re-writing her own story. Lana’s decision to sit with discomfort, to let these songs breathe and unfold slowly, reflects an artist who no longer feels the need to entertain.
Putting everything we (think we) know about Lana Del Rey aside, the mere fact that Blue Banisters was released so closely to her previous album that year should dissuade us from thinking it was solely a hodgepodge of unused material. Though this doesn’t stop many people from doing so, there is a long artistic tradition of holding work close to the chest until it feels right to share. Lana’s decision to repurpose old tracks isn’t a sign of laziness—it’s a sign of knowing when a song finally fits into the larger arc of her story. They didn’t belong in her discography before—they belong here, now, in a project that’s about rewriting the myths built around her.
The three opening tracks—“Text Book,” “Blue Banisters,” and “Arcadia”—act as a prologue to the album. These tracks serve as an introspective look at who’s she’s been (in love, in friendships, and in her career) with a solemnness that feels equally regretful and unapologetic. While admitting her ideations of men may have failed some relationships, and her depressive disposition may have ruined a few more, she leans into the beauty of the women in her life to help carry her through.
As for her career—and everything everyone has had to say about it—she puts it bluntly:
“They built me up three hundred feet tall just to tear me down; So I’m leaving with nothing but laughter and this town, Arcadia, finding my way to ya. I’m leavin’ them as I was, five foot eight, Western bound, plus the hate that they gave; By the way, thanks for that, on the way I’ll pray for ya, but you’ll need a miracle.”
And just when the album feels like it’s settling into a contemplative rhythm, Lana throws us off balance. After the quiet self-reckoning of these opening tracks, Lana steps into the spotlight—literally. The opening notes of “Interlude — The Trio” evoke the cinematic tension of an old Western showdown. It’s a duel—not just with the music industry and the public, but with herself.
In a Western, the duel is the climax—the moment of reckoning after the buildup of tension and betrayal. But here, we’ve only reached the fourth track of the album and Lana is dragging us into the dust with her. We’re neither at a reflective midpoint nor the cinematic climax that the sample of Ennio Morricone’s “The Trio,” from the 1966 film The Good, the Bad and the Ugly provides. So, why exactly are we thrown into this standoff?
Sergio Leone’s film is an attempt to deconstruct the myth-making that is at the center of Western films. We’re presented with characterizations of “good”, “bad”, and “ugly,” but each of these characters are nuanced in a way that blurs & upends their archetypes, resulting in moral ambiguity. There are no heroes or villains and the duel itself is not about who lives or dies. The duel is about identity. Blondie, played by Clint Eastwood, survives not because he’s the “good” character, but because he’s capable of adapting and defining himself on his own terms. By staging this confrontation so early in Blue Banisters, Lana is asking: Who is Lana Del Rey when all the myths fall away?
The precise sample of Ennio Morricone’s iconic track is also instructive—in the film, we arrive at this musical peak at the moment in which the three characters are standing in Sad Hill Cemetery and are slowly taking their positions in each corner of the desert ring. They are stepping backwards and carefully sizing each other up. For Lana, the intercutting of this track does not represent the act of the shootout itself, but the bringing together of each of her personas (those of her own myth-making, those of the public, and her own self-identity) for an emotional excavation.
And the sample doesn’t end with the crescendo of the horns over her signature trap-adjacent beats of Interlude—The Trio. She continues to pull from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly with the intro to the subsequent track, Black Bathing Suit. Moments before the shootout emerges in the film, while the characters have steadied their positions and are staring each other down, the music quiets and all we hear are crows and chimes as the desert wind blows.
Black Bathing Suit might be one of Lana’s most cynical tracks but it maintains a sense of cheekiness that keeps her from taking it too seriously. Following the tension of the Interlude, this track is the moment of direct confrontation—the gunshot. It’s as if she is using this song to say, “I know all the things you think of me and I’m here to take that down.” But when she sings, “your interest really made stacks out of it for me, so thanks for that,” there’s both irony and gratitude in her delivery. The playfulness suggests she isn’t consumed by the cynicism—she’s using it as a coping mechanism.
The public’s obsession with defining her—whether as a tragic ingenue, a toxic icon, or an inauthentic provocateur—has elevated her to stardom, but she remains detached from the projections. The only thing that fits her anymore is the black bathing suit—the carefully controlled persona that she slips into while the world watches.
While this track seems to convey the moment in which she draws her gun and shoots directly at the misconceptions of herself and her art, she spends the next handful of tracks laying out the true emotional undercurrents that give depth and meaning to her work. By the time we reach Wildflower Wildfire, it feels like she is extending an olive branch. When she sings, “Here’s the deal, ‘cause I know you wanna talk about it,” it feels like she’s sitting us down and leveling with us. Lana’s career has been punctuated by moments of public backlash, misinterpretation, and controversy—but here, she promises not to let those moments define her. “I’ll do my best never to turn into something that burns,” she sings. It’s not a concession—it’s an assurance that her art will remain grounded, even if the world misreads it.
This sentiment comes to a head in the track, Living Legend, where Lana seemingly accepts the weight of it all. “Sweet baby Jane don’t know a thing about my songs, but she knows I’m a monsoon.” People might not understand her, but they still feel her emotional power. This feels like a declaration; she doesn’t need to be understood to survive as an artist. She knows the myths will persist, but by this point, she’s made peace with the fact that the art will outlast its interpretation.
Blue Banisters is not about rejecting her public image; it’s about learning to live alongside it. She is reclaiming her own personas, which started from her own myth-making, became distorted by the public’s misinterpretations, and is now transformed back into her own image. By the end of the record Lana seems less interested in being understood and more focused on staying true to herself. The duel is over and it’s Lana that remains standing.
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If we pull focus for a moment, from Blue Banisters as a singular album, and situate it within the context of her body of work, we are able to glean even more understanding. Certainly when the album was released, it would’ve been a bit challenging to grapple with its significance compared to how we can look back at it today.
Blue Banisters represents the moment where Lana breaks from myth-making and embraces her most unfiltered artistic self. This pivotal moment becomes more illuminated when situated between the previous record, Chemtrails Over the Country Club, and the subsequent release, Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Bvld. If Chemtrails explored themes of escapism and identity as performance, we find Lana on Blue Banisters rejecting all illusions, preparing the ground for radical self-awareness, so that by the time we reach Ocean Blvd, we meet Lana fully reckoning with ideas of mortality and her artistic legacy.
Lana has always been a difficult figure for the public to pin down—too ironic to be sincere, too aestheticized to be real. Perhaps Blue Banisters is where Lana invites us to reconsider it all. It reframes her career not as a series of experiments, but as a carefully constructed emotional arc—a journey from the projection of fantasy toward emotional authenticity. The record’s quiet confidence signals that Lana no longer needs to resolve that tension for us. In doing so, she challenges us to sit with the discomfort of all the ambiguity—to accept that the art can be meaningful even if the artist remains unknowable. In a culture obsessed with authenticity, Lana’s decision to embrace ambiguity rather than resolve it feels radical.
After listening to Blue Banisters, you may find yourself returning to Lana’s earlier work and hearing it differently. The femme fatale in Born to Die, the nihilist in Ultraviolence, the wistful dreamer in Norman Fucking Rockwell!—they all exist here. The romantic escapist on Honeymoon, lost in the haze of cinematic fantasy, and the cautious optimist on Lust for Life, trying to heal a fractured world—they are here too. Lana isn’t shedding these identities—she’s reconciling them into something whole. Blue Banisters not only reclaims these personas but also challenges us to stop getting lost in trying to define Lana and start listening to her instead.
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