Did you know that there's a Judah Smith song on Lana Del Rey's new record
Tunnels under Ocean Blvd., David Lynch, and where "Judah Smith Interlude" fits into Lana Del Rey's melodramatic universe.
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My pastor told me “when you leave, all you take is your memories,” and I’m gonna take mine of you with me, Lana Del Rey sings on the opening track to her new album. Her pastor probably didn’t need to tell Del Rey this, since it’s been her thematic obsession since her 2012 debut. But the real revelation here is that Del Rey has a pastor, and we’ve got a pretty good idea of who he is.
When Del Rey revealed her list of collaborators for Did you know that there’s a tunnel under Ocean Blvd, I told myself that “Judah Smith” is a pretty common name and there’s no good reason to think that the Judah Smith in her credits was that Judah Smith. But, as we now know, it is indeed that Judah Smith. And actually, there were quite a few good reasons for me to suspect as much all along.
For those not in the know, Judah Smith is the heir apparent to the Pastor to the Stars mantle in our post-Carl Lentz era. He and his wife are the pastors of Churchome, which has several locations across Washington and California. I’ve “been” to Churchome via their app, which they use to offer their Sunday morning service to the digital masses, complete with chat rooms, online small groups, spaces to pray for each other and lists of local service opportunities in your area. They launched this in 2019 as a way to reimagine church for the digital world to groans and eyerolls from a lot of people, myself included. Then 2020 hit and didn’t I feel silly.
Churchome ended up collecting a few Hillsong celebs who distanced themselves from that whole catastrophe, boosting its profile significantly. Justin Bieber sung Smith’s praises to GQ Magazine, and paparazzi hide in the church bushes to catch folks like Kourtney Kardashian, Selena Gomez and Ciara and Russell Wilson heading in and out.
All this to say, it’s not hard to see how Lana and Smith’s paths may have crossed. How he ended up on her new album is a little tougher to figure out, as is what exactly he’s doing there. Listening to the “Judah Smith Interlude” doesn’t bring any easy answers. What exactly is a squeaky clean guy like Judah doing on an album where Del Rey tells her man to “open me up, tell me you like it, fuck me to death”?
In 2021, David Lynch posted a video of him giving a weather report, something he does quite a bit. He’s giving a deadpan spin on the current temperature and fog level when, suddenly, he says “today, I was thinking about Lana Del Rey and her song ‘Video Games’ from 2011.” And then goes right back into the weather.
Knowing that Del Rey’s music can be an intrusive thought into the mind of David Lynch is sort of a key to understanding her whole thing. The two have a lot in common, as Frank Guan unpacked in this terrific Vulture essay. “Del Rey’s art …similar to Lynch’s, seems to operate in a space where truth abides in the unreal,” Guan writes. “Their interest in ‘authentic’ Americana is mediated by an awareness of the truth that Americans, by an overwhelming margin, prefer Hollywood-minted mythic images to mundane reality.”
This interest has only come into sharper focus since Del Rey’s Norman Fucking Rockwell pivot. Did you know there’s a tunnel… is her best work since that album, and synthesizes its grand balladry with her earlier flirtations with beats and hip-hop. Some songs here — like “The Grants,” “Margaret” and the title track — rank among the prettiest things she’s ever recorded. And all of it finds her continuing to rummage through the wreckage of shattered American dreams, holding the broken pieces up to the sun to see what wonders and horrors are refracted in the sunlight.
Del Rey is a Lynch girl through and through; a doomed beauty with a taste for bad men, a pure spirit pulled under by America’s treacherous currents. Like any Lynch girl, she contains disparate multitudes: innocent and immoral, sweet and scandalous, prowling wolf and sacrificial lamb. I’m a princess, I’m divisive, she sings on “A&W.” Ask me why, why, why I’m like this.
This is why trying to figure out what the hell Del Rey is talking about is almost as futile as figuring out what’s going on in Mulholland Drive. Is she being earnest or sarcastic? When she sings he hit me and it felt like a kiss, is that depiction or endorsement? Her real name is Lizzy Grant, so is “Lana Del Rey” even a real person or just some Tumblr mashup of Jessica Rabbit and Joan Didion? “Never had a persona,” she tweeted in 2019 in response to an NPR piece. “Never needed one. Never will.” Okay then.
The truth is that asking if something is sincere or ironic is pretty irrelevant when it comes to Del Rey’s music, which is one of the many things she picked up from Lynch (and, in fact, one of Lynch’s chief legacies across American pop culture at large). “Sincere or ironic” is not an eithor/or proposition in postmodern pop. She’s real and fake, just like America is real and fake. Or, more accurately, you can’t understand the real America without understanding its fakeness. She creates art in that liminal space where fiction tells a truth that the facts can’t.
Which brings us back to “Judah Smith Interlude,” nearly five minutes of a Smith sermon that sounds like it was surreptitiously recorded from the audience. This interlude follows “A&W,” the album’s standout track, the title of which is both a nod to the nostalgic Americana that makes up her cinematic universe and shorthand for “American whore.”
We fuck on the hotel floor, Del Rey croons on “A&W.” It's not about havin' someone to love me anymore. Then Smith’s sermon kicks in, sounding like a direct response, telling his congregation to ”be a man of love, not a man of lust!”
Smith goes on to pray: “Help me want what I got! Help me love what’s in front of me!” It’s pretty easy to imagine Laura Palmer nodding along from the front pew to something like this, and it sounds like someone (Del Rey herself?) is mm-hmming in affirmation throughout. You could read this sermon as Del Rey putting a reproach to her own self-confessed whoring ways on her own album. Or you can read it as another part of the vintage landscape Del Rey’s created, since what’s more American than a pastor condemning the sins of the flesh? Or you can read it as a bittersweet joke between Del Rey and her fans: “a man of love instead of a man of lust. Can you even imagine?” None of these reads are mutually exclusive.
From there, Smith’s interlude gets a little weird in a way that will be familiar to anyone raised around his kind of thing but very strange to everyone else. He says he woke up that morning and God told him to read Psalms 8. He goes on to wonder why God is mindful of humanity amidst all the splendor of the infinite cosmos — a timeless and very worthwhile line of inquiry — before attempting to answer that question with a little theological word salad that I shit you not includes the phrase “Yo, Elohim!”
“I used to think my preaching was mostly about you,” Smith says in conclusion. “And you’re not gonna like this, but I’m gonna tell you the truth. I’ve discovered my preaching is mostly about me.” It’s not entirely clear who the “you” in question is there but any way you read it, more pastors would do well to understand this.
Del Rey’s relationship with God is an evolving one. Back in 2012, she sang that “me and God, we don’t get along,” but tensions are cooling. “There’s nothing wrong contemplating God,” was her assessment on 2021’s “Chemtrails Over the Country Club.” She’s spent her career trying to chronicle the twilight of America with pop music, and she knows you can’t really talk about any of that without running into God, either as Smith’s magnificent creator, Yeats’ dreadful beast in “The Second Coming” or just a distinctly American fairy tale. Or maybe all of the above, with the truth only emerging within those manifold contradictions.