Swing, Swing

Music videos, daydreaming drives and Lana Del Rey

Growing up, I wasn’t allowed to watch VH1 or MTV. My mother said it was all trash. My sister and I developed a routine of watching music videos when my mother wasn’t home, one of us keeping an ear out for the crunch of her car tires in the driveway. We had this little TV in the kitchen, and summer mornings were spent flicking between both channels from the cool granite top island while we made scrambled eggs, our mother at daily Mass. Waiting for our favorite bands.

But even if I didn’t like the song, I watched the video anyway. When a new song came out on the radio, I wondered what the music video would be like, how much they would show the lead singer, or if it would actually play out in accordance with the story in the song. I had a bit of an obsession, one that maybe started because they were forbidden but quickly turned genuine.

I was caught many times, of course. Mostly because I forgot to change the channel twice, so when my mother hit the flashback button on the remote, there it was, the raunchiest of all music videos playing at that exact moment. Of course, right?

“Kailey Elizabeth!”

Besides the harshness of my middle name being shouted, I don’t remember getting in that much trouble. Some disappointed looks, of course. Maybe a mini lecture on mortality. I was just one of those kids who lived with a number of boundaries. You know, the one who had to hand over the book or CD I wanted from Borders so my mother could inspect it before I purchased it. Certain movies and TV were unwelcome. (Have I mentioned before that I was homeschooled for a few grades?)

But my mother wasn’t looking at music videos the right way. She only saw the sexy ones and the potential damage they might cause to my young adult psyche. She didn’t understand how important they were to me, a music lover, a teenager with a diary. A young girl who didn’t realize that an obsession for storytelling was growing within her. And that’s what all my favorite videos were —stories.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what I loved as a teenager and how that has shaped me as the adult writer I am today. And I can’t help but remember the spellbound feeling of watching a video like “Swing, Swing” by the All-American Rejects for the first time. I’m biased, but bands in the early 2000s were everything. This one, in particular, had me in a chokehold at 13, since the moment I bought their self-titled album, with that orange disc inside, a faded picture of a makeshift go-cart on the front.

In the music video, the band is playing in and outside of a garage between clips of a punky teenage couple in a trailer park spending the day together. They have an old camera that they are filming each other with, narrowing in on even more small moments, like when the girl blows cigarette smoke into the lens or when the guy is trying to balance on a pile of old pipes. And yes, okay, I was in love with lead singer Tyson Ritter, and some of those baby blue-eyed looks to the camera left me lightheaded. (Or if my sister was watching with me, I’d just scream at the screen.) But there were so many things I took away from that video, that left an impression on my dreamy teen brain. Like when the guy gives the girl a band T-shirt, and she puts it on over (!!) the band tee she is already wearing. The way they fight when their car starts to smoke, and the girl walks away, giving the guy the finger. How he finds her again under the bleachers with her friends. How she gives him back the t-shirt, throwing it onto his lap, and then later, when it’s dark, we see the guy still holding the t-shirt, before throwing it towards the city lights, sparkling in the distance. In 3 minutes, we have seen a relationship blossom and end in the teen time frame of two days.  For a song written by an 18-year-old, it’s perfect, the whole thing, and I watched memorized, the remote in hand, ready to change the channel if my mother came home, not realizing how much this was going to impact me.

Well, until Lana. 11 years ago, Lana Del Rey released Born to Die, a song, album, and music video that actually changed my life and turned me into a Tumblr Girl in college. (The amount of red lipsticks I owned!)

Recently, an old friend reached out to me on Instagram and, through the course of the conversation, she asked me if I had written any essays on Lana Del Rey. Her memory of me as an English major undergrad was very much enmeshed with my love of Lana, and I remembered all those short stories I wrote in my fiction workshop, inspired by songs from the Born to Die album (her best album), of receiving margins notes from other girls in my class on my drafts, little hearts, and smilies because they got the reference.

I remember the first time I saw her in the “Born to Die” video. I was in the concrete-bricked dorm room of a guy I was sort of seeing, sitting on the edge of his twin bead when he opened YouTube.

“Have you heard this chick?” he asked.

And there she was, perched on a throne in a flower crown and red lipstick, a pair of tigers lying at her feet. This video also alternates between Lana singing and a relationship story; the first shot, a shirtless Lana in the arms of a tattooed man, an American flag behind them. There is lots of making out in the car, close-ups of mouths, and lighting of cigarettes in blurry red and yellow light. We get the idea that this is a toxic love in just a few frames. And, of course, the ending shot of her dead in his arms, red blood smeared across her red bra, the fire bellowing in the background. The drama!!

But again, it was the little moments that stood out to me. Lana’s red Converse sneakers, the shot of the road at night illuminated by the car headlights, the way he angrily grabs her chin. It gets my writer's brain working, frenzied.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately as I write my novel. My love of little moments. Of looks between two characters, heavy with meaning. The way the lilac bush is softly swinging in the breeze behind my narrator as she confronts her mother. The way a character puts her hair into a ponytail, a close-up of the little flyaways along her hairline, the beaded bracelets sliding up and down her wrists. Moments that make the narrative feel full and alive, but also don’t take up as much space as the plot. Those are my favorite parts to write. They transport me. Put me in that flow state.

I have a designed playlist for my novel that I play mostly when I’m driving.  I see my novel in snapshots. I create little music videos. This has been the single most beneficial part of my process. I find out so much about my characters by watching them while the music is playing. I see the way the landscape interacts with them, the weighted looks they give each other across a bonfire on a summer night or behind the line during dinner service at the restaurant. What it looks like when they walk away from each other, if they turn back or not.

Sometimes in my writerly struggle, I wonder if I’m doing it wrong or if I’m putting too much emphasis on things that aren’t going to drive the story forward. Sometimes I can’t get the moment right, and I erase the whole thing. But while in my third draft, I’m trying to tell myself not to care about that. To write everything anyway. I just reached 60,000 words, and I’m nowhere near the end. I know I have started in the wrong place and that this draft is one of those overwritten drafts. I’m finally putting the pieces together but moving steadily forward so as not to delete and get stuck. This draft is about plot and momentum and understanding the relationship of the characters.  

But of course, I can’t help but labor on some of these moments inspired by Lana or my daydreaming drives. They are just so damn fun to write. I hope I can pull off how I want this novel to feel, how I see it in the little videos I have created in my head.

Other favorites

“Ride” by Lana Del Rey- this video is honestly too beautiful to describe.

“Robbers” by The 1975 - yes, I immediately bought red pants after seeing this.

“Shades of Cool” by Lana Del Rey- need inspiration for an older man-younger woman dynamic? Here is perfection.

“We Found Love” by Rihanna- the colors, the outfits, that look in the bathtub!

*I’m just realizing now that these all feature toxic/dysfunctional relationships, so I guess now you know where this novel is going!