Near the end of “Did You Know That There’s a Tunnel Under Ocean Blvd,” Lana Del Rey draws our attention to a specific moment in a Harry Nilsson song: “His voice breaks at 2:05,” she tells us of “Don’t Forget Me,” from the California songwriter’s 1974 album Pussy Cats. And indeed, if you give it a spin, you will hear exactly what she’s talking about—the frayed note, the raw emotion guiding him temporarily off the rails.
Compared to the carefully crafted pop choruses and attention-grabbing lyrics of her early work, these are the small, incidental moments that interest Lana now. Accordingly, “Ocean Blvd” is a slow, dreamy ballad filled with them: her deep inhale and exhale over the string sweeps in the intro, the layered, mumbled delivery at the end of the third verse, the way each chorus grows increasingly more grandiose and communal, leading to a slow-motion finale of guest vocalists as Lana disappears entirely from the frame.
Of course, over the past decade Lana has developed such a specific set of images and references that you couldn’t mistake her presence. In each chorus, she sings “Fuck me to death/Love me until I love myself,” a line that could just as easily have fit on Born to Die as it does now, on the title track to her ninth album. And speaking of that title, the tunnel she’s singing about—with “mosaic ceilings, painted tiles on the wall”—is less a geographic focal point than a window into the potential she sees in the most familiar scenes and well-traveled routes. There is magic in the everyday, she suggests. But first you have to listen closely.
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