Weirdness from Father John Misty and Lana Del Rey

September 25, 2015 Alan Cross 0 Comments

The world of music is full of weirdness. Consider these two stories.

ITEM 1: Father John Misty had recorded a series of Taylor Swift covers and posted them online, calling the tracks “My reinterpretation of the classic Ryan Adams album, 1989.” (In case you missed it, Ryan released his track-by-track cover of the record earlier this week.) But after putting them on SoundCloud, he said he had a dream. I refer you now to his Facebook page:

I had a very strange dream that I abruptly woke up from around 3am early this morning. I was crab-walking around a neighborhood in New Orleans that, though it does not exist, is a recurring location in my dreams. My childhood friend Brian Kawamura was was telling me I still owed the tennis rental place $7000 when the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan was suddenly standing over me, saying over and over, “The only thing crazier than a peasant who believes he is King, is a King who believes he is a King.”

He put one of those birthday Burger King crowns on my head and out of the clouds a sort of “Switched on Bach” version of “Ode To Joy” began to play. A crowd which had formed around me began to sing along, with tears streaming down their faces. The crowd was obviously hypnotized and I assumed if I crept away discreetly no one would notice. The earth became a sort of treadmill, and though the locations (The Great Wall of China, a McDonald’s where I had my 3rd birthday, the town from Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon, Vignola’s restaurant in Rockville, Md.), “Ode To Joy” and the crowd remained all around me.

All of a sudden it was time to soundcheck, which I was late for, and Barack Obama offered to give me a ride on Air Force One. He told me he needed urgent advice regarding some important policy decisions, and we spent the day in Hawaii playing basketball, petting his dogs, golfing and the like when I, gripped with anxiety, told him I really needed to get to soundcheck so we needed to discuss the ruling of the free world. By this time he had turned into an obscene visage of my Father and said, “I have one injunction for you, son: That you enjoy life. It is by this mandate that all is ruled. It is the true tyranny; the equalizing force that binds us all.”

I jumped out of Air Force One and landed on top of this massive pink, sparkly, glowing blob that stretched for miles beyond miles, covering entire cities, and I had to keep gulping down chlorophyll because the thing was emitting insane levels of EMF’s, so my mouth and hands were stained dark green. Down inside the blob I could see thousands of familiar faces and one of them was Lou Reed on a catwalk hand-cuffed to supermodels who had adopted babies handcuffed to them and Lou said, “Delete those tracks, don’t summon the dead, I am not your plaything. The collection of souls is an expensive pastime.” Then I woke up.

And yes, he deleted the tracks.

ITEM 2: On the cover of Lana Del Rey’s new album, Honeymoon, she’s seen in the back seat of a convertible belonging to what looks like one of those “tour of the stars’ homes” companies in Los Angeles.