Lana Del Rey's Magnum Opus: Cinnamon Girl

Have you ever had a track lift you straight off your chair and into another realm, no, just me? Cinnamon Girl, the seventh track off my favourite LDR record "Norman F*cking Rockwell" has hit me in the face every single listen since my freshman year of high school. Everytime that I'm invited in by her soft, promising voice I'm immediately on a beach in Venice crying my drugstore mascara off. The simple piano chords and faint drum backing that then dive into the all-encompassing horns and layered vocals pull you in like waves only to spit you right back out in the second verse. It seems that anything Jack Antonoff produces turns into liquid gold in my ears. The digestible bass paired with Lana's angelic vocals paints a very vivid picture of the intense relationship this song aims to portray. My personal interpretation, and mind you this could differ from person to person as music is subjective, is that Lana is attempting to break through the rough shell her partner has put around himself. It's the classic tale of the man, suffering silently, self-medicating through pills and fights. Lana longs for this man even with the distance he attempts to put between the two of them, she is fiery with the promise of safety and commitment. She lusts for this emotionally unavailable man possibly wanting to help him or fix his issues long term. "I can fix him!", trust me, if Lana can't fix a man, no one can. For this man Lana sings of, his addiction is pills, and this addiction manifests in violence towards her. Though not as explicit as the violence described in her 2014 album "Ultraviolence", she still implies that she is hurting both emotionally, mentally and physically in this relationship. Implicitly, this is a song about addiction, but not just pills, also the addiction to love. Lana is stuck in this push and pull between the pain and fighting & the lust and passion she feels for him. Love is a different kind of high, it can make you crazy, it can make you cry but it can also produce the most incredible art ever made. The ability to take your listener from their couch, their lecture hall, or their car to a melancholy beach sitting thigh to thigh with your sexy, screwed-up boyfriend as he pops pink pills staring at the nightfall is an ability very few have and even less perfect the way Lana does. Cinnamon Girl is a case study on love, lust and how we can become trapped in these cycles of abuse; whether that be abusing pills, abusing yourself or, in Lana's case, being in an abusive back-and-forth with a drug addict. Live, Love, Lana Del Rey. 

P.S. I will be linking a Spotify playlist of all the songs I review on my blog site!