Lana Del Rey was rudely robbed of an Oscar nomination for her Great Gatsby anthem “Young & Beautiful” earlier this year due to #SABOTAGE and shady Academy dealings, but it seems she’s giving the cinema another go.
This Christmas, Lana will be providing not one, but two new songs for Tim Burton‘s Big Eyes (out December 25). The Ultraviolence goddess sings both the title track (“Big Eyes,” co-written with Daniel Heath) and a song penned with Rick Nowels called “I Can Fly,” which plays during the closing credits.
From The Hollywood Reporter:
“Tim showed her the film and she fell in love with it,” says Larry Karaszewski, a producer on Big Eyes as well as its co-writer. If the film’s tone strikes a tricky balance between comic satire and prototypical “women’s picture,” Del Rey’s contributions are very much in tune with its more dramatic, feminist inclinations. “Women in particular seem to get the movie, and Lana really got the movie,” Karaszewski says. “The whole thing is about a woman who can’t find her voice,” and when the title song — with its “big eyes, big lies” refrain — plays at a critical juncture, “it almost becomes a musical. Lana’s song expresses what Margaret is feeling so perfectly, it’s like a soliloquy of her inner thoughts.”
According to THR, “Big Eyes” felt “too defeated” to be the movie’s final song (prepare for tears), so it was made a “centerpiece number” in the middle of the film instead: “The number begins as an instrumental when Adams spots her paintings being sold in a supermarket, then turns to a vocal piece with a big, pronounced beat as the character returns home determined to develop a new style of painting; it slips back out of the vocal as Christoph Waltz’s character returns and confronts his artistically straying spouse.”
Mercifully, the “more airplay-friendly” “I Can Fly” has nothing to do with R. Kelly‘s inspirational jam, although “it’s as close as a celebrated melancholist like Del Rey is going to come, celebrating Margaret’s escape from a pre-feminist cage with lines like ‘I had a dream that I was fine / I wasn’t crazy, I was divine.'”
Queen of Soundtracks. Queen of Feminism. Queen of Christmas. Lead us through into the winter season and keep our frozen hearts warm, Lana.
