Music Series

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Not Hunting For Meaning: On Seeing Jandek Live

by Guest Contributor on March 8, 2021

By Michael Sheehan

Not long after finding out about Jandek, I drove 300 roundtrip miles to see him perform on a Friday evening in April 2017 in Houston. It seems fitting that I had to go to such lengths to see Jandek perform; it serves the mythology. After all, Jandek spent three decades producing music shrouded in mystery, never (or almost never) giving interviews or revealing his identity, and never performing live. What made Jandek Jandek was, to a large extent, the reclusivity, the fact that listeners had to seek him out.

If you’re asking who or what Jandek is, it’s no surprise, despite the fact that he’s released more than 135 albums since 1978. Jandek is mostly a moniker for a single man—an alter ego for a slim redheaded Houstonian transplant named Sterling Richard Smith—though sometimes also it names the musical project, not the individual. If you were in the know in the 80s or 90s, what you had was an accidental 1989 interview in Spin and a mail-order catalog of albums (most featuring portrait photos of a redheaded man) that you could get in bulk by sending money to a PO Box in Houston. Maybe his music was played on your local college radio station. (I was devoted to the college radio station of my youth, WBER, but I checked and they did not recall ever playing him.) Maybe you caught passing references to him, like the offhand comment by Kurt Cobain in a 1993 interview where he pulled 1985’s Nine Thirty from his record collection and said “[Jandek’s] not pretentious but the people who listen to him are.”

The show was in Hamman Hall at Rice University on the anniversary of Prince’s death. I took my seat in the darkened auditorium where the curtained stage was drenched in purple light. There were not many people there but more than I’d expected. Dozens, let’s say. The houselights went down, and the audience went funereally silent. We stared for a minute or more at the empty, purple-lit stage. Then players emerged, still to utter silence: guitar, slide guitar, bass; these were Austin Sepulvado, Will Van Horn, and Mark Riddell, though nothing told me so that night. A woman (Sheila Smith) paused at the drumkit before coming to the two music-stands at stagefront to turn on tiny reading lights. She then returned to the drums—still silent—sat, and, after a bit of stillness, a lean figure dressed all in black appeared at the back of the stage and made the circuit they all had, but slower, walking along the glowing curtains, carrying a small bag or briefcase, hatless until he reached about midstage when he paused, donned the black fedora, and then set his bag down behind the drums, extracted his thick spiral-bound books of lyrics, and came to the front of the stage. He unclipped the book, set it on the stand, and gently set the clip down, fumbling with it slightly, as if perhaps nervous. The audience had not made a single sound during this whole approach. Then the two-hour set began. First an instrument started a pattern, then others joined, and finally Jandek—nearing and withdrawing from the microphone until the timing struck him—began. “I took a train,” he moaned, “to Colorado.”

I’d driven so far for this because reading about him, his reclusivity and the longstanding mystery of his identity, made me want to discover him, made me want to find and connect to this rare performer. I had also, at that time, finished a novel about a reclusive hairmetal singer who makes a dramatic and ill-fated return to live performance, a novel which I’d been sending out to be rejected by agents and editors. I don’t know how conscious the connection was–I’ve been writing about a reclusive musician for years and here’s this musician who has been reclusive for decades and only just recently started performing–but I think pretty conscious. But it was more than that, too: the combination (even contradiction) of a prolific output of albums and songs and lyrics with a strenuous effort to hide was compelling, in fact literally haunting: the presence of an absence. That his music was elusive, oneiric, uncategorizable, sometimes sounding a little like early Thurston Moore and at other times sounding like bad poetry over untuned instruments was, again, a powerful draw. That draw was the act of discovery, hunting for something, to find the meaning, intellectualize the lyrics and the music, to get close to the mystery, the ghost, and see what’s really there. But though the motivation was this finding, the experience of seeing Jandek was not of finding but of feeling, of losing myself rather than discovering the meaning.

Jandek’s onstage persona, as Marc Masters describes, is enigmatic and fit with the reclusive and mysterious figure only-guessed-at in the years before he made a surprise live appearance at a festival in Glasgow in 2004. Emaciated, dressed all in black, seeming at once rickety and ill and also wily and spry—he crouched and danced in slow, strange moves, out of sync with the music or suggesting a groove that was not otherwise evident. He intoned his lyrics, off-key, a moaning, haunting sort of wail, a near-spoken word that was evocative in its lyrics but also in the almost anguished quality of his voice and his delivery.

He would then cross the stage slowly, sometimes seeming to reconsider as he went or to listen and groove to what patterns were emerging behind him, crossing to a wooden chair at stage right which he slowly and with precise posture—what at first appeared like discomfort or difficulty—lowered himself into, after which the music tapered out within a few bars. It took me a couple repetitions of this to recognize the movement for the obvious communication it was: since every part of what was occurring onstage was an on-the-spot improvisation, Jandek’s sitting was his signal that lyrically that track had come to its finish. This improvisational quality makes the live performance feel much like the records in spirit, since many of them are freeform, experimental explorations of sound that are more like happenings than produced and planned tracks. Chaotic and amateurish, there are elements of structure and intention with his songs, even of album-level coherence and flow, but part of what you hear and feel when you listen to Jandek records is a sort of essaying of forms and emotions, rather than a performance in the true sense. Masters describes the live performance period of Jandek’s career, noting he “has put himself in a dizzying array of situations, often with collaborators he’d never performed with before or even met before the show…an impressive amount of shows have been complete wild cards, veering into styles, genres, and instrumental formats no one would normally associate with the Corwood representative.”

By shedding more traditional structures and approaches Jandek’s music seems to create something truly new, to reach and achieve emotions in wholly novel ways. Even though a given song might have a country feel to it or a blues phrasing, the overall song architecture hits you like nothing you’ve heard before—when it works. Admittedly, Jandek’s music is not easy to enjoy or even listen to, in many cases. There are many critical notes going back many years that suggest this atonality is not intentional—just a lack of mastery of the instruments, an ineptitude—or is intended but as a joke.

The point I want to make about the blues and Jandek’s context is that his music is strange but powerfully emotional, capable of resonant harmonies that haunt or transcend. But beyond or beside or within or through the flatly-intoned or howling strangeness, there are, at times, moments of deep sadness or sudden clarity but also sometimes moments of levity, moments of beauty, moments of, basically, frustration. Loneliness. The themes explored throughout Jandek’s lyrics are evoked in desperate, spare musical landscapes that have a fragmentary relationship to other, more familiar genres.

For example, at Hamman Hall, there was a point in the evening when Jandek switched places with Sheila Smith, who took the mic as he took the drums. He seemed a more capable drummer, albeit still an expressive rather than rhythmic one: he would quietly play until suddenly cracking the snare with a burst of presumed approval of Sheila’s lyric or delivery. But where Jandek stood mostly at the microphone feeling the music and finding the moments for his lyrics, Sheila crawled and posed and moved and danced in place. She wore an outfit that called to mind Alice in Wonderland. Somewhere in the middle of this, I closed my eyes, and stopped thinking and simply let the sound congeal behind my eyes. It was transporting. Though the purpose of seeing Jandek live–rather than simply buying the recordings he now releases of every live show–is to see him, I felt closing all my senses except the audile and letting the music do its work was the truest way to experience what was happening. And it was powerful. The ghosts of melodies arose and dissipated; the lyrics dug and stung; the large auditorium room we were in became an intimate space. Maybe this is what Kurt Cobain meant: to experience the music not intellectually but via an embodied cognition, something under or deeper than thought.

Still, seeing the Representative from Corwood (as he is sometimes called) at such close range struck me as something similar to Samuel Charters’ discovery of the only extant picture of Blind Willie Johnson, “Then there he was. I couldn’t breathe for a minute—I just sat staring at the screen.” This is undeniably part of the appeal. Perhaps unintentionally, Jandek created a sort of anti-celebrity in an era of massmedia. During the decades where lo-fi and no wave and grunge and indie-folk and alt-country bands rose to fame, his music remained accessible only via mail order. He retreated from reporters, avoided any publicity. This created among his fans a sort of echo of the mid-century search for the masters of the Texas blues, that desire to get as close to the source as possible. Hence Katie Vine’s 1999 article in Texas Monthly, “Jandek and Me,” in which she tracks him down, figures out his identity and finds him at home, then goes for a beer and captures the second-ever interview with him. He told her, at the time, “There’s nothing to get.”

But apart from that echo, I sat there and truly felt an experience that stepped outside of the commercial structure I’d come to know–come to long for acceptance in, with the novel I’d been sending out. This was a performer who had created and self-released music prolifically, denying a one-time eager world of any marketable identity. Prince, too, challenged ideas about identity, was a performer who could hybridize genres; I spent some time in the dark of Hamman Hall wondering if Jandek would cover Purple Rain–imagine it! In the thick ambient lighting, against the heavy drapery. But its impossibility I think highlights what Jandek did do. He didn’t cover, didn’t perform anything. He instead stood before a room of listeners, vulnerable, and open to the possibility of any given moment, including the possibility that he would struggle and never find the point where the elements fit together. But you could feel, could hear, that energy, that in-the-moment reaching.

After the last song–“From There” on the CD version, a nearly-twelve minute astral projection in which a haunting slide guitar braids and folds around the lyrics that are part dirge and part reflection on life and work and disappointment and longing; he speaks/sings/drawls, “So I’ll sing a song this evening / just to mean it all for you”–the stage procession was reversed, there was neither encore nor any call for one, though the crowd cheered wildly, and I walked out, across Rice’s campus, back to my car, and began the long drive north into the dark of East Texas, toward my home in the pines.

Michael Sheehan is an assistant professor of creative writing at SUNY Fredonia and formerly at Stephen F. Austin State University. He is also a former fellow of the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and a graduate of the University of Arizona’s MFA program and St. John’s College’s Graduate Institute in Liberal Arts. He has been an editor for DIAGRAM and was an Editor in Chief of Sonora Review, where he curated a tribute to the work of David Foster Wallace. His work is forthcoming or has appeared recently in Electric Literature, Agni, Mississippi Review, Conjunctions, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere.

BACKYARD JAZZ IN THE TIME OF COVID-19

by Guest Contributor on March 2, 2021

by Jennifer Shneiderman

It’s my neighbor Annette’s birthday and reservations at the tony Connie and Ted’s seafood restaurant are not an option. We like to get dressed up and sit on the patio. We order the seafood tower, thick filets of fish and hot, salty french fries. We like to linger until the waiter brings out lit candles. Their service is stellar and the blond brownie dessert divine. Tonight, however, I stand in line outside of Versailles, the Cuban restaurant on La Cienega, for orders of garlic chicken, rice and plantains. My waiting spot is indicated with a “Stay six feet apart” circle spray painted on the concrete. The orders are stacked up in containers and wrapped in plastic bags. I wear a mask and gloves and I rub my hands with sanitizer after the waiter runs my credit card. When I get home, I will clean my card with alcohol wipes.

I drive home and transfer several of the orders into baking dishes. The containers are thrown away and the dishes are heated until the sauce is bubbling, steam is rising and any virus is eradicated. My husband delivers the two remaining chicken orders, as well as a peach cobbler, to my neighbor’s house. She and her grandson will heat the food in their oven and serve themselves on their own dishes.

We don gloves and masks and head next door with our hot food, bottled water, plastic flatware and paper napkins. Plastic tables and chairs are spaced far apart. They will be sanitized shortly after we are gone.

At the end of our meal, my son brings his upright bass and his friend, Justin, arrives with a trumpet. He uses a trumpet mute to decrease the chance of transmission, and they choose the music accordingly. Jacob and Justin know the music and each other from a Colburn Conservatory jazz ensemble. They will play a short set at the far end of the yard. They start off with “All the Things You Are”, and then “Con Alma” and “Billie’s Bounce”. Neighbors start to gather on the sidewalk, trying to peek over the gate. The call of live music is strong and their eyes are large with yearning. The boys end with “A Night in Tunisia”. They pack up and go back to my house to eat their chicken on my porch.

We can’t take a chance of hugging good-bye. Annette stands by, leaning on her walker while her grandson lights a candle on the cobbler. We won’t share dessert, or food of any kind, with them. We will leave and clean the handles of the gate with Clorox wipes as we go. We are just glad to bring some joy in the form of a backyard jazz concert. It will have to do—until we can once again gather together for evenings at tight tables, bathed in colored lights and jazz.

Jennifer Shneiderman is a writer and a Licensed Clinical Social Worker living in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Indolent Book’s HIV Here and Now, The Rubbertop Review, Writers Resist, the Poetry in the Time of COVID-19, Vol 2, anthology, Variant Literature, Bright Flash Literary Review, Trouvaille Review, Montana Mouthful, the Daily Drunk, Sybil Journal, Unique Poetry, Anti-Heroin Chic, Terror House, Thirteen Myna Birds, Potato Soup Journal, Awakened Voices, GreenPrints, Prospectus, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily and The Perch. She was the recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2020 Laura Riding Jackson poetry competition.

Music Nonfiction

The Years of the Unified Heart

by Guest Contributor on September 16, 2020

You can add up the parts; you won’t have the sum

You can strike up the march, there is no drum

Every heart, every heart to love will come

But like a refugee

Ring the bells that still can ring

Forget your perfect offering

There is a crack, a crack in everything

That’s how the light gets in

— “Anthem,” Leonard Cohen

Tallboys of Steel Reserve, watercolors, and Leonard Cohen records mark 2016-17: years lost in the ether—post-grad and aimless; permeated by the existential dread of dawning upon twenty-something. I now see those days as some of the most capacious and blessed—hazy, dappled with light, full of growth and opportunity; full of so many cracks where the light has since filtered in. The dichotomies of that time made Cohen’s music all the more welcome.

Prior to Cohen’s passing in the fall of 2016, I was feeling splintered. I’d been out of college a year and a half, embarked on a messy trip of service abroad and returned early, begun stringing together part-time jobs to support my art. Trump’s election was permeable in everyday places, ambient but sinking in. One evening, I learned from my friend—a social worker for victims of sexual assault—that a man had walked up to a woman at the Target near my house, grabbed her between her legs, and said: “I get to do this now that Trump’s president.” Later that night, I told my best friends and bandmates, Joey and Trevor. We sat in a shocked silence for a while, and I remember being unable to withhold my tears. I stayed at their place, our trusted silence carving out some kind of belonging, somewhere I could rest.I sometimes get that evening confused with another from that autumn: I was with them in their house, again, and sitting in the same spot on the couch when we heard the news of Cohen’s passing. I can’t remember whose idea it was, but it felt like a communal one—we hopped into Joey’s truck, plugged in his iPod, and took turns passing it back and forth; picking favorite Cohen songs as he drove with no particular destination in mind. I think “Anthem” may have been the first pick. Somewhere during our drive, we came across a small country church with a lit sign that read something along the lines of: “If you died tonight, where would you go?” Again—a shocked silence accompanied by shared, knowing glances. We drove for what felt like hours, song after song. There was something monastic about our mutual silence, our shared grief going unanalyzed.

The morning after our drive, I printed out a picture of Cohen’s “order of the unified heart”—a symbol of two intersecting hearts (one upright, one downturned) that was printed on each of his books and represented the Jungian idea of anima/animus—that the masculine and the feminine are entwined in each of us and within our relationships. I got a tattoo on my ribcage a few hours later. I didn’t post a picture to social media, where people were sharing all sorts of elegies for Cohen. I empathized with and shared their sense of grief, but I didn’t know what I could possibly add to the conversation. There’s a unique sort of strand of survivor’s guilt I experienced, threaded into mourning the loss of someone I didn’t really know but loved well—an aching sort of reverence. It meant the tattoo was for me; a birthday gift to myself. A non-answer to the question we saw on the billboard that I’d been asked my whole life byway of my evangelical upbringing. At the time, I loved the conceptual richness of the sacred heart tattoo—the way it offered more intersections than the Christian cross.

When I notice it now, my tattoo means more than anima/animus—more than a symbol of multi-faceted love-—it means 2016: the year so many things were full of uncertainty and opportunity: the year Trump was elected, the year of our first shows as a band; the year of record-shopping in the dollar bin, the year I sold my guitar to make rent, the year of my first panic attack, the year I said I am not a Christian out loud, the year of letting the stray cat inside, the year we found her dead outside Joey’s window, the year of revolving-door records, Steel Reserve beer, and watercoloring on the floor.

O, see the darkness yielding

That tore the light apart

Come healing of the reason

Come healing of the heart

O, troubled dust concealing

An undivided love

The heart beneath is teaching

To the broken heart above

— “Come Healing,” Leonard Cohen

Not long before Cohen’s death, on that same couch at the boys’ house, the three of us had watched a documentary about Cohen’s time in a Buddhist monastery at Mt. Baldy in California. We were so taken with his ability to infuse the sacred with the profane, alchemize them into something wonderfully familiar and wholly magical. Plus, he was funny. We loved to giggle at lyrics from the title track of “The Future” (the album with “Anthem,” which came out in 1992 ahead of Cohen’s visit to Mt Baldy in 1994):

Give me crack and anal sex

Take the only tree that’s left

And stuff it up the hole

In your culture

We’d covered “Diamonds in the Mine” at one of our first shows as a band. Trevor had typewritten one of Cohen’s love poems as a gift for me when we’d first fallen in love, which I tacked up on my wall. When I turned 24 just days after Cohen’s death, Joey watercolored two book covers with images and lyrics of his; sort of Blakean, jewel-toned and regal. During that time and since, we’ve always freely exchanged Cohen’s poetry books and records in a rotating fashion. Whoever didn’t have one record or book could borrow it in exchange for another—they were one of the many revolving-door objects in our revolving-door friendship.

In 2017, the three of us moved into a house together and organized all of our records alphabetically on one big shelf. After they were all shelved we took a step back to admire our handiwork. We laughed at how expansive our Cohen collection was, sprawling out in the C’s like some kind of kingdom.

When I think of these treasured lost years, it’s Cohen’s music that accompanies them: a sonic context for all that growth and longing. It’s our tipsy, ambling covers of “Suzanne” at two in the morning with additional, improvised lyrics, our rice-and-beans dinners on the couch with Trevor’s copy of “Death of a Ladies Man” spinning round, a cheap candle flickering on the coffee table. It’s late nights at the since-demolished J&J’s Market & Cafe, where all of us had worked and dropped into like a second home, certain we’d find one another. It’s the bitterness of over-extracted coffee uncannily complimentary of an over-sweetened muffin, and “Closing Time” on the speakers when it was time to shuffle folks along. It’s going to La Hacienda on Nolensville Pike for a Saturday morning breakfast of huevos rancheros and hot, black coffee, then walking to Phonoluxe next door and looking through records. It’s finding a beautiful original pressing of New Skin for the Old Ceremony there, joyfully spending all my tips from a week of work on it, and putting it on the record player the instant that I got home.

New Skin was Cohen’s fourth album—the one where he left behind his previous producer, studio musicians, and the golden, cloying concept of ‘the Nashville sound’ and headed back to his more austere New York City folk scene roots. How coincidental to find this rare record in Nashville of all places, where I and my bandmates also sometimes felt simultaneously within and outside of the sometimes-mechanistic music scene.

The album cover was the original, before the artwork was banned and changed on later pressings. It is an image from the alchemical text Rosarium philosophorum, and was referenced in Jung’s work to symbolize the union of opposites—just like Cohen’s own unified heart symbol. I loved the Judeo-Christian references emanating from the record, recontextualizing these ancient symbols and words to mean something new, sometimes something radically different. It’s all condensed there, in the title: new for the old; a ceremonious reimagining I could feel fully welcome to. A communion table I could sit at comfortably.

And who by brave assent, who by accident

Who in solitude, who in this mirror

Who by his lady’s command, who by his own hand

Who in mortal chains, who in power

And who shall I say is calling?

—“Who By Fire,” Leonard Cohen

I don’t listen to Cohen’s records as frequently as I used to. They don’t sit well in a casual context, for me; they require my full attention. Devotion, even. They’re like friends that live in a distant place but correspond with diligence, easily picking up where we left off. Joey’s since moved out of the shared house where Trevor and I still live, but he has his key. We still share equipment and records, practice in the music room, and play more and more often each year, it seems. Our friendships have grown up along with us, as we’ve taken on jobs, commitments, and projects that don’t allow for the same kind of consistent, casual hang-outs we once shared. We’ve become more intentional, monastic, like Cohen at Mt. Baldy, maybe.

We’ve found our place in Nashville, which is not fixed to any one ‘scene,’ but rather with one another—with our wider community which grows and vines in ways we’d never expected.

We’re devoted to one another in everyday ways. I can’t think of a better songwriter, anyone more emblematic of the ephemeral and unspoken, the mundane glory of our true love, our blessed friendship, then Cohen—serenading those lost years when they were in no hurry to be found.

Lauren Turner is a writer and musician (Lou Turner) in Nashville, TN. She is the author of Shape Note Singing (forthcoming from Vegetarian Alcoholic Press in 2021). Her poetry, essays, and interviews have appeared in Image Journal, Cathexis Northwest Press, Chapter 16, and more. She serves as a blog editor for the freeform community radio station WXNA FM in Nashville, where she hosts her literary program, The Crack In Everything.

Music

“Born to Die” and “Off to the Races” Essays by Denise Jarrott

by Guest Contributor on May 13, 2020

Born to Die

I am 17 and I’m not ready for the rest of my life. This much life already feels like an accident, and the approach of my twenties a confusing, improbable indulgence.

I don’t know yet that I am not intelligent enough to survive on intelligence alone, and I am not pretty in the way they want me to be. It is 2004, and when the weather is tolerable, I develop a habit of driving out to the most deserted beach on the lake and walk back and forth, the wind blowing back my long black skirt. When it is cold, I sit in my car and I scream.

I am a girl who was born in Spirit Lake, which sounds romantic, but imagine a frozen lake in the middle of a field that stretches so far that the rest of the world seems impossible. Imagine the Ferris wheel and the orange yellow light of parking lots where teenage girls in halter tops and fringed faux suede belts laugh as they hop in the cabs of pickup trucks. This is the only place I know to be home, though it has not felt like home for a long time.

So, I became my own version of the sad girl. My strange clothing was gleaned from the free clothing room at church and the local Goodwill, my eyeliner smudged around my big, bored eyes, ensconced (or trapped) in my beloved American tourist wasteland. My sadness was in so many ways a performance, but a very real monster lurked beneath the surface. Beneath the opulent fantasy of my own teenage melancholy was something very real, a darkness even the sad girls couldn’t save me from. Something that wasn’t quite chemical and wasn’t quite imaginary. It would be many years before I could name it.

At seventeen, I wanted to feel the sort of love that swallows people whole. I wanted a love that made me feel like a saint drunk on Jesus, a love that will make me bleed for a reason other than feeling like a cornered animal. I wanted sweeping violins and crazed feminine pain and a glut of roses. I was ready for something that felt like a drug, someone to make me feel as infinite as the fields that surrounded me.

I am haunted most of all by the possibility I was (and still am) just bored. Could it be that it wasn’t a reverence for a seismic love, for self-destruction, or for another place that would save me and make me into a new person? It was an attractive prospect to be someone else, even if that person was living a distorted life. Maybe I just wanted an escape from that small town with the neon sno-cones and wholesome families rubbing shoulders with amoral twentysomething factory workers on weekend benders. That town that wanted so badly to be arrested in an endless summer.

It would seem paradoxical, even false, to say that what saved me that year and so many other years were other sad girls, some who had survived and some who had not. Sylvia Plath and her incisive dark humor. Her bitter truth emerged from beyond the grave through the voice of my best friend Ashley, rehearsing her performance piece for speech and drama, an excerpt from The Bell Jar.

Years later, it was Chan Marshall’s haunted vocals in Moon Pix were like a dense, heavy blanket in a friend’s dark apartment, songs that staved off death and welcomed it in the same breath. It makes no sense, no sense, no sense…playing on repeat in the dark of an unfamiliar apartment as I tried to sleep off jet lag.

Later, there was Lana Del Rey. She came to me like a crossroads demon snaking through an internet radio station as I walked to work from my apartment one evening. My pussy tastes like Pepsi Cola, she sang. I stopped in my tracks. My eyes are wide like cherry pies. Suddenly, the college town I’d grown to know as a cage to pace in became darker, wilder. Wherever she was, there was complicated men and ill-gotten diamonds and lost highways and the Pacific Ocean, roiling thousands of miles away.

I fervently consumed the Paradise EP, then Born To Die, and in consuming that sweetness, I tasted the familiar bitterness. I’d wished she had existed for me when I was seventeen, when I was living in that lake of spirits in the middle of endless cornfields. I wish I’d had her as a guardian angel to guide me though those early years, her voice in my ear as I sat in my car, telling me that “sometimes love is not enough and the road gets tough, I don’t know why.” I didn’t know why either. I still don’t.

“Born to Die” begins with Lana asking “Why? Who, me?”,as if she never asked to be here. There’s an appealing teenage nihilism to “Born to Die”—it’s a song that evokes star-crossed lovers getting high on the beach, at the edge of a field, in a convertible, in a pickup truck, on the boardwalk, in the woods. We never asked to be born, and though we whine as much when we were young, it is later, having survived our wild, wild lives, when we have children of our own who cry though the night and never let us rest, it is finally then when we realize that they are trying to find the language to ask “Why? Who, me? Why?”

Off to the Races

I am 30, and I don’t have anything to lose. I take off to New Orleans with a lover I choose to keep a secret, because it is happening in the twilight of my marriage and the end of grad school and I think to myself that this may be the last time I can ever do this. It is exciting to keep a secret, and maybe I am finally bored enough to try something truly stupid. Just to see if I can get away with being this reckless this late in the game.

I’m sunburned scarlet in a backyard saltwater pool of an old hotel, in a white swimsuit I will wear only this once, on this afternoon in New Orleans under lime trees and a shimmering of humidity. Everyone is smoking and drinking at the edge of the pool and it doesn’t seem like anyone here cares if their swimwear is flattering. Every now and then, the smell of marijuana wafts over the bodies in the pool.

It is a little bit primal, this city, heavy with the smell of rotting shellfish and sticky absinthe and impossible flowers. It doesn’t feel like America here, or any other place I’ve known. There is something older that haunts this place, this city of love and death and sickening history with street names like Desire, Bourbon, Piety. The man I brought with me, a man just as reckless as I am, watches me smoke cigarettes and trip over to the bar to ask for another margarita. A man takes me on a date with the bittersweet night. For three days, I am his baby and he would fight for me even if I never asked him to.

Lana’s voice rises and falls, rhymes “cognac” with “lilac“; rhymes “shameless” with “basement“. I can tell she is something of a poet, but more importantly, she is a singer (as all poets once were). There’s a deftness to her vocalizations, switching from sultry femme fatale and wide-eyed, bright young thing, as if two hyper-feminine demons are fighting over her soul. Or, more likely, these two versions of the same woman are what her adored “old man” requires her to perform, and she must switch between the two at his whim.

As a singer, she tries to please the audience in the same way she would please her lover, and it is utterly heartbreaking. That is why she is so tired. A starlet is both scarlet and harlot, waiting to be kissed in the garden of earthly delights, waiting to be loved for every inch of her tar black soul. She is both the persona and the person beneath, maiden and odalisque, woman dancing on the verge, on the edge of the Hollywood sign. She is tired because she has been so many other women and is so good at performing them that she has forgotten her identity.

This battle for control between Lana’s internal selves may be most brutal, most raw, in her infamous 2012 Saturday Night Live performance, which is admittedly difficult to watch. She sways in a white lace gown, her nerves buzzing and bare. The dark femme fatale voice is too deep, the delicate Lolita self too saccharine. Juliette Lewis tweeted that the performance “is like watching a 12-year-old in their bedroom when they’re pretending to sing and perform.” This vulnerability, coupled with Lana’s vocal stylings, is usually her strength, but in this case it was rough-edged, the line between the two personas too distinct. It is jagged, it is schizophrenic, it is the opposite of the polished performances required of a young woman.

No one is certain whether or not Lana Del Rey’s consistent aesthetic is simply an aesthetic, or if her life really does consist of roses blooming in time lapse in the dark heart of America, of fragile girls swaying through hotel rooms in red satin gowns and the wealthy, charismatic, dangerous daddies who are the still point of their faltering worlds. Perhaps it is not the point to speculate whether or not the art is derived from the artist’s life, especially if that artist is a woman and inevitably, the truth would be painted as either histrionic or duplicitous. In the beginning of her career, there was much speculation on whether or not Lana Del Rey was a overproduced persona, a Frankenstein’s monster created by her wealthy father. She was accused of being “fake”, but what would it mean for a performer to be “real”? Does the audience want realism?

Years after that fever dream of a few days in New Orleans, when I am living in New York, a different lover describes me as “confessional”, and by that point I have learned to expect such commentary from men, and I have learned that it is rarely, if ever, a compliment. If anything, it is a warning to protect myself, that I can’t be such a delicate prairie flower in the unforgiving city. As if experiences were finite things to give away, and once those stories are told enough times, they lose their power. Sometimes I hope as much.

Is Lana confessing? Am I actually confessing, or is committing my experiences to words just hiding “the truth” behind a scrim? Sometimes she sounds a little exhausted with the histrionics, as if she’s told the same tale a thousand times of the man who gained incredible wealth by less than honest means, the story of hotel pools and love on the run. A world so sparkling and opulent it can’t last forever. The old man is a “thief” and a criminal and his girl is “crazy”, which she apologizes for multiple times, “God, I’m so crazy, baby , I’m sorry that I’m misbehaving…” but this demurring is only another means of seduction, for she is also “Queen of Coney Island, raising hell all over town.” Her tossed off “sorry ‘bout it” apology is an acknowledgment that her being “crazy” is another way to keep her lover, and whomever enters her world, interested. She knows that it is not direct authenticity the audience wants, but spectacle. The audience wants to be seduced.

Removed from this narrative, Lana’s Saturday Night Live performance is essentially what we do when we listen to Lana Del Rey’s music: perform our own internal narrative. We are twelve years old and swaying in front of a mirror. We are thirty years old, sunburned and drunk in a strange city. We are twenty-five and the woman we are and the woman we want to become and the woman we fantasize about being are in a bloody battle that will probably never end. It’s heaven and hell, truth and lies, the starlet and the harlot. Sometimes those things cannot be contained, sometimes they just are what they are, a girl caught in a daydream of a life she’s only pretending to live.

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Denise Jarrott is the author of NYMPH (Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2018), and two chapbooks, Nine Elegies (Dancing Girl Press) and Herbarium (Sorority Mansion Press). Her poetry and essays have appeared recently in Luna Luna, Cover, The Boiler, Yes Poetry, Queen Mob’s, and elsewhere. She is currently at work on a series of essays in conversation with Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. She grew up in Iowa and lives in Brooklyn.