Exciting new names Lana del Rey and Yannick Bovy

The name Lana is so old Hollywood as in Lana Turner that I do not think anybody has the right to be called Lana unless they are really special. Well, it looks like Lana del Rey is turning out to be special and deserving of the name. The former Lizzy Grant of Lake Placid, New York took on the new glamorous identity when she ventured into singing. She next gave herself a ’50s-inspired makeover and then talked about beatnik poet Allen Ginsberg’s influence on her work. And tada! A star is born.

Lana with her new album titled Born To Die is the current darling of the trendy side of the intellectual set. Forget about the vocals. She is no Adele and would never have won a singing contest. What she is all about is the writing and not the Taylor Swift kind. Her songs are poetry from a time when being romantic meant dark, brooding moods and tragic love affairs. She makes me think of old French movies in black and white where the characters make bad choices and are forever doomed to a life of melancholy. Remember how girls once swore never to love again and wear black all their lives after their first affair? That is what Lana has down pat in her first CD.

However, her approach to music is new and daring. Instead of torch ballads which one would have expected because of her image, Lana has pop, R&B and grand emo as the setting for her lyrics. So what the listener gets are dramatic strings coupled with hip-hop beats. Then she lays out her songs the way a director would do a movie. She gets you into a film noir frame of mind with Born To Die, Blue Jeans, Video Games and the beautifully made Off To The Races. Then she gets into a perky beat for Diet Mountain Dew, National Anthem, Dark Paradise and Radio. To close, she reins back the beat for Carmen, Million Dollar Man, Summertime Sadness and the conclusion This is What Makes Us Girls.

And all the time, she has you thinking. Is there really a Diet Mountain Dew? I’ve never seen one. Was there really a time in the past when heartbreak felt delicious? Or suicide? See how the first few lines of Born To Die will make you feel. “Feet don’t follow me now/Take me to the finish line/Oh my heart breaks every step I take/but I am hoping at the gates/They’ll tell me that you are mine.” She makes me want to read the poetry of Rod McKuen again or maybe even Rolando Carbonell’s Beyond Forgetting.

 I have not seen them in the local TV channels but try to catch Lana’s videos, if you can. These are every bit as interesting and darkly attractive as her songs.

Should he hear a bar or two from Yannick Bovy, I can bet that Michael Bublé would be saying, “I’m glad I got there first.” The Belgian crooner is now starting to make waves everywhere because he sounds so good. Well, he sounds so much like Bublé, that he has been tagged as the Flemish Michael Bublé, which might not be a good thing for a new guy in the music business. But I don’t think the guy can help it. It is just the way he is. Hopefully, he can get his hands on a lot of really good original material that will showcase his vocal chops and help him get over the Bublé similarity.

Find out for yourseIf how Yannick sounds by listening to his new album Better Man. Like Bublé’s CDs, he has lots of old songs. All My Loving, I’ve Got You Under My Skin, She Don’t Know It, My Cherie Amour, I Wanna Be Around and Perfect. Then there are the new compositions but all done in the same style. There should be some buzz about Theoretical Love and Hold On, when they hit radio airplay as singles. But my favorite of the batch is the Johnny Mercer standard, I Wanna Be Around. Something refreshing really happens to these oldies when redone by young crooners.